The James Strauss Journal

"...Ever since the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the rule in the United States has generally been that if you are born here, you are a citizen. In recent months, though, congressional Republicans like Steve King have called for an end to birthright citizenship. They've been fixated on people who immigrate illegally (usually, in the telling, from Mexico) to have a so-called "anchor baby" on American soil, allowing a whole clan to claw its way into citizenship.
Put aside for now the way "anchor baby" has become as mean-spirited a meme as "welfare queen" once was. Put aside the consensus among most legal scholars that an end to birthright citizenship would require not an act of Congress but a repeal of Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. Put aside, even, the powerful stories of people like..." More.

"...Normally it is the press that hounds celebrities, politicians and judges, not the other way round. But for the past three months a public inquiry led by Lord Justice Leveson, an appeal-court judge, has pulped the British newspaper industry. A parade of people—some famous, some not—have told of ill-treatment at the hands of reporters and photographers. A normally aggressive press has been cowed. The inquiry began following the revelation that the News of the World, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, had illegally accessed messages left on the mobile phone of a girl who turned out to have been murdered. But it has gone far beyond that narrow outrage. Lord Justice Leveson has heard of a young woman driven to suicide; of people accusing their families of spilling their secrets when in fact their phone messages were being listened to; of a mother (Joanne Rowling, author of the “Harry Potter” books) opening her five-year-old daughter’s school bag to find a note from a journalist inside. It is no surprise that..." More.

"...Harper’s has been reporting on monopoly capitalism almost since the magazine’s founding in 1850, criticizing the system whenever it appeared to be concentrating too much power in the hands of a greedy few, and sometimes spurring change. Our first significant piece on the subject was a two-part essay by Richard T. Ely on railway trusts, which ran in 1886. “I propose to show in these articles,” Ely wrote, “that our abominable no-system of railways has brought the American people to a condition of one-sided dependence upon corporations, which too often renders our nominal freedom illusory.” The following year, Congress passed the..." More.

"...When U.S. President Barack Obama took to the podium during a rare visit to the Pentagon early last month, he announced a new strategy for the country's military posture abroad. The United States would shift from being able to fight two major wars simultaneously to increasing its focus on Asia. But the president also explained that reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal would be key to future defense: "We will continue to get rid of outdated Cold War-era systems," he said, "so that we can invest in the capabilities we need for the future." Policy, meet budget..." More.

Social networking giant Facebook debuted on the stock exchange on Feb. 1with an initial public offering of $5 billion, a small fraction of the up to $100 billion the company is thought to be worth. With over 800 million users, Facebook is (at least in the English-speaking Internet) the undisputed king of social networking. But the ascendance of the site Mark Zuckerberg launched only eight years ago in his Harvard dorm room was not guaranteed. It has vanquished a number of competitors along the way. Some, like Myspace, are fading into obscurity. Others, like Twitter, have settled comfortably into a more specialized role. But some of Facebook's onetime foes have found an unlikely second wind in some unexpected places. Like aging American rock stars who can still pack the house in Kiev or Yokohama, the sites have attempted, with mixed success, to reinvent themselves for their new audience..." More.

"...The U.S. labor market grew in January at its most robust pace since last spring, a sign that the economy's momentum carried into the new year. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 243,000 last month, the Labor Department said Friday, marking the biggest gain since April. The jobless rate fell by two-tenths of a point to 8.3%, the lowest it has been since February 2009. Both figures contradicted expectations of..." More