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Nonetheless, battling enormous institutional constraints, Deng and his colleagues quickly set up new pillars of social, political and economic stability that guided China through the fall of the Soviet Union and into the 21st century.

As Xi prepares his 10-year plan, China has reached the end of the economic supercycle set in motion by Deng. Public criticism of officials and thus of the Party is rampant, and China's military appears much more capable than it actually is, putting China is a potentially dangerous situation.

Reform, with "Chinese characteristics," is not about Westernizing the Chinese model. Rather, it is about reshaping the relationship between the Party, the economy and the people in a way that will maintain the centrality of the Party.

This worked well during China's boom.

He wants to redefine the presidency so that it is not merely the concomitant title for the Party leader but also a post with a real leadership role, similar to the presidencies of other major countries.

The first target is the bloated bureaucracy.

The reforms slated for the economic sector are similar.

The program opened the door for significant Mexican migration based on family reunification. What appears to be a more contemporary version of that program -- a temporary worker permit specifically designed to integrate migrant agricultural workers -- was included in the bill introduced Wednesday.

The generation and protection of intellectual property is a strategic national objective amid rising international competition, and if the proposed law successfully increases high-skilled labor immigration, it will contribute significantly to U.S. competitiveness

For the United States, the big question now is about global competitiveness, and any reform to immigration will seek to address that question.

Political parties were organized state by state, and within state by counties and cities. These parties emerged with two roles.

This change had two unanticipated consequences.

Reformers tried to limit the amount of money that could be contributed, but they ignored two facts.

The American Republic was invented and it is continually being reinvented on the same basic theme. Each reform creates a new form of corruption and a new challenge for governance. In the end, everyone is trapped by reality, but it is taking longer and longer to enter that trap.

Stratfor believes this shift involves nothing less than an attempt to rework not only the way the Communist Party operates but also the foundations of its political legitimacy.

China is not the first country to attempt this. Others, including the United States, achieved it long ago. But China has unique constraints: its size, its political system and imperatives, and its profound regional geographic and social and economic imbalances. These constraints are exacerbated by a final and perhaps greatest limit: time

This means that in the next few years, China faces inexorable and potentially very rapid decline in the two sectors that have underpinned economic growth and social and political stability for the past two or more decades: exports and construction.

"I definitely think we're seeing a shift in the public opinion," he says. "This election was really a game changing event."

Even if the public mood has shifted, Congress is usually way behind. "There's always an innate caution among politicians about doing anything they perceive as controversial," Sterling says. "They're really sensitive to what cops say. They don't want the police unions opposing them, and no politician wants to pick a fight with a police chief. When I was on Capitol Hill, and this was 20-25 years ago, I had lawmakers tell me that it made perfect sense to them to legalize drugs. But they'd always say, 'You can never quote me on that.' None of them wanted to appear soft on crime, even if it was the right thing to do."

The one thing the 2012 results may do at the federal level is begin to convince some politicians that advocating reform is no longer political suicide. "This year’s initiatives in California, Colorado and Washington do indicate a changed public perception about punishment and marijuana in those states," Stewart says. "That should give legislators the freedom, if they choose to exercise it, to ease their tough-on-crime positions and not have to worry about surviving the next election." Sterling agrees. "I think it could give some cover to political leaders who already thought these things but were afraid to say them. My contacts close to the Obama administration say they were really taken aback by the results in those states. They didn't expect the vote to be as lopsided as it was. I think they really don't know what to do right now. But when medical marijuana first passed in California 16 years ago, you saw (Clinton Drug Czar) Barry McCaffrey preparing his counterattack within hours. I haven't heard of anything like that in the works this time around. I think that's a good sign."

The river's dozens of tributaries reach from Xian, in the southern Shaanxi province, to northern Guangdong -- a complex of capillaries without which China likely would never have coalesced into a single political entity.

The Yangtze, even more than the Yellow River, dictates the internal constraints on and strategic imperatives of China's rulers.

Just as the Mississippi splits the United States into east and west, the Yangtze divides China into its two most basic geopolitical units: north and south.

The provinces of central China, which today produce more rice than all of India, would be as barren as Central Asia. Regional commercial and political power bases like the Yangtze River Delta or the Sichuan Basin would never have emerged. The entire flow of Chinese history would be different.

Three regions in particular make up the bulk of the Yangtze River Basin

Today, the Yangtze River is by far the world's busiest inland waterway for freight transport.

Thirty years of export-oriented manufacturing centered in a handful of coastal cities generated huge wealth and created hundreds of millions of jobs. But it also created an economy characterized by deep discrepancies in the geographic allocation of resources and by very little internal cohesion.

But in doing so, it kept wages artificially low and, in turn, systematically undermined the development of a domestic consumer base. This was compounded by the fact that very little of the wealth generated by coastal manufacturing went to the workers.

Though its efforts thus far have yielded notable successes, such as rapid expansion of the country's railway system and soaring economic growth rates among inland provinces, they have not yet addressed a number of pivotal questions. Before it can move forward, Beijing must address the reform of the hukou (or household registration) system and the continued reliance on centrally allocated investment, as opposed to consumption, as a driver of growth.

There is a growing sense of Chinese patriotism that exists beyond the confines of the Communist Party.

It is likely that it will give in to the more established group — the workers and middle classes — since they have shown with their tactics that they have the ability to seriously threaten the French state’s efforts to function by targeting its energy infrastructure. Simply moving forward with a policy that three-quarters of the population rejects is unsustainable. At the point when Paris gives in to one side, however, France may cease to be at conflict with itself and instead come into conflict with Germany.

For the large group market, the CBO found that rates would either stay the same or decline slightly. For the small group market, rates would essentially stay the same as well. The individual market is a more complicated story

Covering millions of people who are now uninsured would cost billions more per year.

Critics say the Democratic plans would lead to health care rationing.

The public option is an insurance plan run by the government that individuals can choose over private insurance.

It's good to keep in mind that when it comes to health care reform, no one has a crystal ball.

To be clear, the United States is not looking for a pretext to intervene militarily in Syria. On the contrary, the United States will make every effort possible to avoid another military campaign in the Islamic world this year.

Egypt's consuming political transition will leave opportunities for flare-ups in the Sinai Peninsula and in Gaza, but we do not expect a significant breach between Israel and Egypt this year.

 These actions, which helped to keep the eurozone afloat in 2012, will remain effective in 2013, making it very likely that the eurozone will survive another year. But these tools do not solve three fundamental aspects of the European crisis. 

In 2012, Russia began shifting away from its aggressive stance on energy -- particularly its high prices -- to strike long-term deals that will maintain Russia's market share with its primary strategic customers, such as Germany, Italy and Turkey. Russia will continue this strategy in 2013 as it continues to build new infrastructure to directly link its supplies to Europe.

The most important issue facing Mexico in 2013 will be energy policy.

TPM spoke with activists working on both issues and they identified several reasons marijuana legalization may have a less bumpy road along the way to earning nationwide support.

“The argument for legalization has really been sort of couched in medical usage. You still have to sell marriage. Not everyone knows a gay person or a gay person who wants to marry their same-sex partner. Everyone knows someone who smokes weed,” the consultant said.

In theory, support for pot legalization could stall at the current 50/50 split. But one key trend, the same driving the seemingly inexorable rise of support for gay marriage, makes that outcome highly unlikely. Young people overwhelmingly support legalization. And diehard opposition is heavily concentrated among older voters.

“What I would really pinpoint as the source of this last four year nudge up where we jumped up 10 points is the economy,” Altieri said. “People always knew we shouldn’t be giving such harsh punishments to those arrested for marijuana offenses and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put them in jail. It became much more imperative when we had the financial crisis and then we’re seeing the debt ceiling.”

Washington and Colorado’s legalization law also set the stage for a pivotal moment where Attorney General Eric Holder will decide whether to intervene in those states and arrest those involved in the (still federally illegal) marijuana trade.

Not surprisingly, China's coastal ports dwarf inland ports in terms of both overall throughput and throughput growth. But more telling is that of the major Yangtze ports for which the National Bureau of Statistics provides freight traffic data, only three (at Chongqing, Yueyang and Wuhu) showed significant growth in throughput between 2007 and 2011.

Rather, it is that the needs of the economy -- growth with stability, and energy security despite energy demands that far outstrip domestic resources -- are themselves inconsistent and contradictory.

From the Roman Empire to Nazi Germany, all the attempts to unify Europe meant war and conquest. It took World War II to convince the Europeans that the future of the Continent depended on overcoming age-old antagonisms and building a lasting political settlement to boost trade and prevent another war.

The European Economic Community, the institutional heart of the emerging continental unity, had three main objectives.

Six decades later, many of these goals have been achieved.

The Commission, the Parliament and the Court of Justice today have powers that notably exceed those designed in the 1950s. More impressively, the European Union currently has 28 members, 17 of whom share the same currency. In 1945, with Europe in ashes and occupied by foreign powers, it was unimaginable to think that six decades later France and Germany would share the leadership of a continental alliance stretching from Portugal to Finland and Cyprus.

Despite its remarkable evolution, the European Union is still a contract. And contracts could be modified or even canceled if they stop being beneficial for their signatories.

Because of the pervasiveness of the nation-state, the future of the European Union will not be in the hands of the EU institutions, but in those of the same actors of 1951: France and Germany. Since the beginning of the economic crisis, Paris and Berlin have reiterated their commitment to the European Union, but as the economic downturn moves to the core of Europe, the differences between them become more obvious.

Huntington, who died in 2008, asserts that America has little to teach a tumultuous world in transition because Americans are compromised by their own "happy history."

How do you know if a society has effective institutions? Huntington writes that one way is to see how good their militaries are. Because societies that have made war well -- Sparta, Rome, Great Britain, America -- have also been well-governed. For effective war-making requires deep organizations, which, in turn, requires trust and predictability.

The main drama of the Middle East and China over the past half-century, remember, has been urbanization, which has affected religion, morals and much else. State autocrats have simply been unable to keep up with dynamic social change.

Huntington thus helps a little to explain why monarchs such as those in Morocco, Jordan and Oman have been more humane than dictators such as those in Libya, Syria and Iraq.

Only once order is established can popular pressure be constructively asserted to make such order less coercive and more institutionally subtle.

Taken together, this body of research underlines just how inevitable some degree of disappointment is, in electoral politics as in our personal lives. There’s ample research in the psychology literature that shows just how incorrigibly optimistic and trusting human beings can be, and how vulnerable, as a result, they are to campaign rhetoric like Obama’s in 2008. ”Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” Vice President Joe Biden likes to say, quoting Boston’s former mayor Kevin White, ”compare me to the alternative.” Even when they think they’re doing just that, though, people tend to romanticize the road not taken.