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Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama both excelled at Harvard Law School, one as managing editor of the Law Review and the other as President of the Law Review. One raised in suburban Indiana, and going to small Catholic boarding school started 5 years earlier by Chicago and Indiana businessmen like his father, a steel company executive. The other fatherless trying to construct his own identity at a school in Hawaii founded in 1841 to educate the children of white missionaries. Roberts adminstered the oath of office to Obama in January 2009.

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Republican Senators Corker and Blount are confident that a solution can be devised for the sticking points on a deal between the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republicans consider the savings in the Reid plan from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq a "gimmick," but essentially the Reid and Boehner plans say analysts are similiar in the inital cuts in spending. The sticking point for Democrats is on the whole process of the debt ceiling extension having to be redone in early 2012. For Republicans the sticking point is in in tax increases which the Reid plan leaves out in the initial period for debt limit extension into 2013 when a new president takes office. House majority leader Boehner is facing opposition within his party and this restricts his leeway for striking a deal- the Boehner plan passed in the House by a vote of 218 to 210 on July 29, 2011, with 20 Republicans voting no. It was voted down in the Senate that same evening with a vote of 59 to 41, with 6 Republican senators joining all 53 Democratic senators. As it stands now, the weekend before the August 2 deadline, President Obama concedes that there is "rough agreement" about the size of the first round of spending cuts, and the "next step" to rein in borrowing. He went on to say that "if we need to put in place some kind of enforcement mechanism to hold us all accountable for making these reforms, I'll support that too, if it is done in a smart and balanced way." Its the design of this enforcement mechanism that is the main point in the remaining negotiation. The nature of the committee selected from both parties for the next phase of savings, its powers and the trigger in the sense of what it can ensure happening if no decisions are taken by both parties. ...

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The Bernie Sanders 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is compared to the Howard Dean 2004 U.S. presidential campaign. Both are from Vermont- Sanders was Mayor of Burlington, Dean was governor of Vermont. Dean and Sanders draw many white, educated, affluent voters to their campaign rallies. Yet the situation in 2015 is different. Dean's major issue was his opposition to the Iraq war started in 2003. Sanders says his position is more class based, and calls for a revolution to help working class Americans gain upward mobility as wages remain stagnant, and educational opportunity restricted. The Democratic Party today is also different, with more ethnic voters, and 40% female.

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The structure of the deal that is coming up for a vote in Congress on August 1st, a day before the August 2 deadline. A deal put together mainly by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Biden after other deals failed. It gives the government $400 billion immediately and another $500 billion in the fall for raising the debt ceiling. Another 1.2 trillion will be added in 2012. The entire burden for raising it falls on Obama. Obama will be able to get the debt ceiling raised without another long struggle before 2012 elections. On spending cuts- agency spending will be cut by $900 billion over the next 10 years. A new legislative committe will be set up to come up with $1.2 trillion in additional savings by the end of 2012. The mechanism that would force the committe to act or make sure spending cuts were taken if the committee failed, was set up as one in which the trigger is to force automatic across the board cuts. The automatic across the board cuts would be for $1.2 trillion to agency budgets for the next 10 years, and split this half and half between domestic programs and defence. Programs aiding the poor including Medicaid and Social Security would be exempted, but Medicare payments to providers could be touched. No new taxes are part of this deal....

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Hillary Clinton's presidential election strategy appears to be writing off core Republican states such as Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virgina, and focussing on parts of the midwest such as Ohio, Wisconsin, the East and the West. It would be different from the election strategy Hillary Clinton used in 2008 which made an appeal to white working class voters and worked to win votes nationwide, similiar to the two Bill Clinton campaigns which appealed to centrist voters. This may also be because Hillary Clinton is perceived in 2015 as a polarizing candidate by many voters in southern states, with little prospect of winning in these states, making the new strategy a safe fallback option based on Democratic strategies in 2008 and 2012. Jeb Bush's strategy as a candidate with positions that would attract some Hispanic voters, and working class voters, could pose risks to this Clinton election strategy.

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Gerson describes Obama's failure to connect in 2012, compared to the 2008 campaign. What is left is more of the politician from the South Side of Chicago, the idealism of an earlier campaign is gone. What is left is a supposed ruthlessness that is opportunistic at every turn, says Gerson.

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Galston says Hillary Clinton is right to say as she did at Roosevelt Island in her opening campaign speech, that "growth and fairness go together, for lasting prosperity, you can't have one without the other." Economic growth was at 4% for 5 of 8 years of the Clinton presidency, but in the 15 years since the economy has managed 3% only twice in the George Bush presidency, and fallen below 2.5% in the last 5 years. The high growth rate following World War II was a result of the increase in the workforce and productivity. The workforce increased by 2% annually between 1950 and 2000. Since then as female participation peaked and the baby boomers reached retirement age the workforce has increased by 0.7%, and is slowing to 0.5% annual growth for the next decade. Growth in productivity of 1.9% between 1991 and 2007, slowed to 0.4% after 2010. Galston tells the next president to go all out to increase the labor force- adopt family friendly policies similiar to Europe so more women can work, get more immigrants into the labor force, more elderly should be encouraged to work given the better health, reduce the college dropout rate to reduce incarceration and bring more young people into the labor force, get more people who qualify for disability but could work part time into the labor force, and emphasize the importance of increasing the labor force participation rate a policy being followed by the Federal Reserve's Janet Yellen....

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The resignation of Ahmed Shafiq, a former Air Force official who was close to Mubarak, from the prime minister's position. He will be replaced by Essam Sharaf, a former transport minister. Protest leaders had suggested Sharaf's name to the military running the country. ElBaradei former head of the IAEA and Amr Moussa of the Arab League had pushed for Shafiq's resignation. Sharaf is an engineer who studied for his Ph.D. at Purdue University in the U.S. In Egypt the changes demanded by the protests for democracy are still unmet. The emergency laws are still in place, the large internal security services have not been disbanded. One example of this was the arrest just last week of one protestor and sentencing by a military court within 3 days to 5 years in prison.

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Fomer Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says America needs to take up a vigorous foreign policy in his book "Worthy Fights." Both Panetta and Hillary Clinton, and Gen. Dempsey of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Petraeus of the CIA, supported U.S. taking a strong stand in Syria by supporting Syrian opposition forces in the summer of 2011 and were overruled by president Obama and his election advisers because of the approaching 2012 election. Here Mark Landler provides more insights into Hillary Clinton's deeply held belief shared with Panetta that the U.S. had to take strong action where necessary to deter foes, to get into the ring to use Panetta's expression. The U.S. support for action in Libya to support Britain and France comes from the efforts of Clinton, and any lack of followup one of president Obama's errors in foreign policy. In April 2016 president Obama said that he considered his failure to followup in Libya to help the new Libyan government his biggest mistake in his presidency. Here Mark Landler looks at Hillary Clinton's entire career as showing a conviction and belief on the need for action where necessary in the U.S. global engagement. Compared to the bluster of the candidates Trump, Cruz and Sanders, with little experience to back this up in their careers in real estate, law or the Senate , Landler says Clinton is the last remaining hawk. Here he describes Hillary Clinton's contact and empathy for the troops from her trip to the American base in Tuzla, Bosnia, in March 1996. In fact many have forgotten that Yugoslavia is what it is today after the Milosevic years and the ethnic wars with Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, members of the EU and Serbia negotiating to enter EU, because of the bombing campaign taken by Bill Clinton through NATO in 1999 to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and peacemaking following the Bosnian War using diplomat Holbrooke to negotiate the 1995 Dayton Accords. Here Landler describes the meetings with Gen. Keane who pushed for the troop surge that worked in Iraq under president George W. Bush. Clinton supported Keane's proposal made in April 2015, for a no-fly-zone in Syria that would help opposition forces till a settlement could be negotiated. Keane pointed out to Clinton that there was a flaw in Obama's policies- that negotiation would work only if the no-fly-zone was used to support opposition forces. By the end of 2015 Hillary Clinton publicly adopted this position. During a period when Americans are weary of foreign entanglements but understand the need to provide leadership where needed, Hillary Clinton, provides a balance between the pendulum swinging too sharply in one direction in the Bush years and in another direction in the Obama years, says Landler. A view also articulated by Leon Panetta, who was chief of staff for President Clinton during the Bosnian conflict and the Dayton Accords, where the U.S. showed strength of purpose in war and also in negotiating the peace without major entanglements....

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There are similarities in the Republican and Democratic party platforms in 2016. One area of agreement is in the reinstatement of Glass Steagall Act. That legislation made in the Depression period to separate commercial banking from investment banking was changed  when president Clinton made changes in a deal with Senators Phil Gramm and Jim Leach in 1999. The too big to fail problems of banks and the problems of investment banks during the 2008 financial crisis are attributed to the lack of Glass Steagall protections for financial stability and safety. The result is that in the post 2016 environment banks can expect a tougher regulatory environment. Another are is in trade where both parties are expected to take tougher positions to protect U.S. interests. The Republican platform calls for "better negotiated trade agreemets that put America first."

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Krugman points out that about 13 million Americans without insurance gained health insurance under the Obama plan. He says if it is turned back 8 million whites without a college degree in that 13 million will lose health insurance. Of these eight million about two out of three voted for Trump, so that 5 million Trump supporters could now lose health insurance even though they are older and have more health conditions. Krugman says this aspect of the election campaign was not covered well in the misinformation and social media information of the 2016 campaign, and the lack of media focus on the important issues in the election. On manufacturing jobs he says most of the jobs lost are not returning, and only token jobs such as at a Carrier plant in the news will take their place.

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Hauslohner describes the situation in Egypt after the ouster of president Morsi by the military in July 2013- the old order from the Mubarak regime is back. Gen. Sissi is deputy prime minister and controls the government and the military plays a critical role as before the elections.

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Rubin questions the idea that lowering the deficit by reducing tax expenditures, deductions and loopholes at the same time as lowering rates would work. It would not raise enough revenues if many of the deductions that help the middle class were not considered doable and crossed off the list. He disagrees with Republicans about increasing taxes to Clinton era levels as creating disincentives for work and business by citing the economic record of growth in jobs and GDP during the Clinton period. On the proposal to use limiting deductions and loopholes for the the rich as away to provide a more equitable distribution of the tax burden he says this would still require increasing taxes on the middle class to achieve deficit reduction.

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Under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order of 2012, a group of immigrants brought to the country as children can have temporary status to stay and work in the U.S. In 2012 this was restricted to children brought in under the age of 16, with a maximum age of 30. The program was called "Dreamers." Under president Obama's executive order this will be changed to children brought in under the age of 18, with no maximum age. The number of immigrants goes up from 1.2 million in 2012 to 1.9 million with this particular change in 2014. A new group of parents of children who are citizens or legal residents residing in the U.S. for more than 5 years adds another 3.3 million to this number, with an additional 100,000 for parents of Dreamers. The total 1.9 million children and 3.4 million parents would be 5.3 million given new status to stay and work in the U.S. The 5.3 million will not be eligible for subsidies and for the Affordable Healthcare Act assistance. All will be required to pass security checks. This leaves about 6 million, including farm workers and other undocumented or illegal immigrants not touched by the new executive order. President Obama is expected to make the announcement of the executive order on Nov. 20, 2014, in Nevada, a state with a large Hispanic population. On the question of legal authority for the executive order, Prof. Stephen Yale-Loehr, an expert on immigration law at Cornell says the U.S. president does have broad authority to decide which group should get a reprieve from deportations. The decision to exclude benefits of government subsidies and subsidized healthcare was made to appeal to increased support of the American public for the executive order. ...

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The director of research at one of two cybersecurity companies that monitors disinformation used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to analyze and give reports on the Russian disinformation activities 2014-2017, shares her conclusions. Information from Facebook, Google and Twitter was turned over to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, which in turn handed it over to the two cybersecurity companies for analysis and reports. The Russian disinformation activities have continued in 2018, according to DeResta. The domestic propagandists and actors have taken these methods and used it to target sub groups, expanding the scope of these activities. The advertising related segmentation provided by these companies gives a ready made tool to easily target subgroups in the U.S. population. The viral activity arising from this means the message is carried over to other groups. As a result many groups are affected, affecting how democracy works through vigorous, yet intelligent debate. Explicit bias happens in election campaigns yet this is not spread through anonymous sources that are not identified and whose interests are known, as in disinformation efforts in a medium that spreads information quickly and without any depth whatsoever. For some minority subgroups the effects as ubiquitous, says the report. This report concludes that it is the responsibility of government, private organizations and individuals, and the tech companies combined to tackle this, as tech companies do not have the resources to deal with it. Its not enough to adjust how you sell advertising as tech companies are doing, says the report. The whole ecosystem of information is being compromised in multiple and still not fully understood ways, making it essential that a comprehensive solution with multiple combined efforts address it effectively. ...