Fresh from… well, fresh from doing something, one presumes, the Italian parliament is ready to vote on a law hamstringing the press even further (the so-called <a href=”http://www.repubblica.it/politica/2010/05/19/news/senato_accelera-4186524/?ref=HRER1-1″>legge bavaglio</a>).
The main provisions of the law relate to the publication of leaks from public prosecutors’ office: in particular, a ban on any information before the initial hearing, [...]
So people have noted that if Elena Kagan becomes a Supreme Court Justice, every member of that Court will have been to either Harvard or Yale.
It could be worse: every member of the Bulgarian Constitutional Cour has been to the same university.
I was inspired by this post at The Monkey Cage to repeat an exercise I’ve previously carried out for Italy: namely, to calculate the expected duration of the new cabinet using some off-the-shelf models. I think it’ll last a full five year term — here’s why.
The LibCon coalition’s first mistake (excepting any original sin) seems to be requiring a supermajority of 55% for motions of no confidence motions of no confidence leading to dissolution. There’s already a protest group.
Andrew Rudalevige explains the significance of 55% very succinctly at the Monkey Cage. (I’m not aware of any other supermajority requirements in [...]
Geektastic discussion at PoliticsHome.
Thank God someone’s bringing this out in the UK — for my classes I’ve had to rely on an Italian copy with outrageously bad English subtitles.
Back in Italy, one can always count on the left to tear itself apart just when some ministers in the Berlusconi government are under fire.
The election result in the UK was astonishingly close the results predicted by the BBC/Sky exit poll, with the Conservatives at 307, somewhat short of a majority.
I don’t know what this means for arcane debates about uniform versus proportional swing; the swings during the night were all over the place. It’s possible that uniform national [...]