**CAF Note: The spinners of limited modified hangouts are out in force. This is the best of the best, useful for giving an overall framework of numerous constituencies within the Washington beltway and their current challenges and discomforts. Kiplingers pronounced on Friday that the major trade agreements may be postponed until after the next Presidential election. Perhaps that means that whoever has been engineering serious mudslinging between the US and the EU will declare victory and quiet down.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how Silicon Valley manages its evolving role in the digital communication and financial systems.**
By Mike Lofgren
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
