The Liberal Democrat Party and the Conservative Party come at things very differently when it comes to Europe. When it comes to political reform, we have a much greater tradition in the Liberal Democrats of social justice and fairness than the Conservatives do.

Liberal Democrats in government will not follow the last Labour government by sounding the retreat on the protection of civil liberties in the United Kingdom. It continues to be essential that our civil liberties are safeguarded, and that the state is not given the powers to snoop on its citizens at will.

The caricature of what George Osborne is doing on the fiscal side is absurd. If you read some of the commentary, particularly from the left, you would think he was turning the clock back to the 1930s.

What we should be doing in the EU as a whole is more economic integration in the single market, rather than less.

I think it's important for people to believe their elections are on the up and up and they aren't being tampered with by anyone, and in this particular instance there's a large body of evidence that at a minimum Russia tried to tamper with our election.

We are angry about paying the highest income taxes and property taxes in the nation and getting less and less for it. We are angry about our incompetent, dysfunctional government that pays no attention to the desires of the people. We are angry about the cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interests and self-dealing that is Albany.

We all hoped in 2001 that we could put in place an Afghan government under President Karzai that would be able to control the country, make sure al-Qaeda didn't come back, and make sure the Taliban wasn't resurging. It didn't work out.

Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home.