Posts Tagged ‘coalition’
Berlusconi to resign after losing parliamentary majority – he says
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Tuesday he would resign after suffering a humiliating setback in parliament that showed a party revolt had stripped him of a majority.
Berlusconi confirmed a statement from President Giorgio Napolitano that he would step down as soon as parliament passed urgent budget reforms demanded by European leaders after Italy was sucked into epicenter of the euro zone debt crisis.
The votes in both houses of parliament are likely this month and they would spell the end of a 17-year dominance of Italy by the flamboyant billionaire media magnate…An ill-bred creep is more like it.
Berlusconi’s government won a key budget vote after the opposition abstained on Tuesday but failed to secure a majority, obtaining only 308 votes in the 630-seat lower house, eight short of the 316 needed to be sure of passing legislation.
Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, said Italy ran a real risk of losing access to financial markets after political uncertainty pushed yields on government bonds toward a red line of 7 percent…
Berlusconi has been on the ropes for weeks, beset by a string of sex and legal scandals, political defeats and, most crucially, a loss of confidence on international markets.
But the 75-year-old, who has dominated Italian politics for most of the past two decades, had steadfastly refused to step down until Tuesday’s vote and battled until the last to win over rebels in his PDL party.
The vote showed he had failed to stem the revolt and Berlusconi’s bitterness was revealed by a photographer who caught the words “8 traitors” jotted down on his notepad in parliament after the result was read out by the speaker.
The news that Berlusconi had finally agreed to resign came after European markets closed but the euro jumped against the dollar and U.S. stocks edged up…
There is no agreement among political parties on either a national unity or technocratic government and Napolitano’s consultations may be difficult.
Berlusconi is now following his statements about resignation with “amendment A, section2″ stacks of provisos which must meet his approval before he will actually resign.
Since he can’t be trusted out of sight of fourteen carabinieri with video cameras, I wouldn’t count on Italy being rid of his foolishness any time soon.
What’s with conservatives and sex? Tories invite crusaders in!
“They say you’re selling condoms in here”
A group which is opposed to abortion in all circumstances and favours an abstinence-based approach to sex education has been appointed to advise the government on sexual health. The Life organisation has been invited to join a new sexual health forum set up to replace the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV…
In contrast, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) has been omitted from the forum despite its long-term position on the previous advisory group and 40-year track record in providing pregnancy counselling nationwide.
“We are disappointed and troubled to learn that having initially been invited to the sexual health forum we have been disinvited, particularly now we understand that Life have been offered a seat at the table,” said Ann Furedi, chief executive of BPAS. “We find it puzzling that the Department of Health would want a group that is opposed to abortion and provides no sexual health services on its sexual health forum…”
Not especially different from the catalogue of Republican Party fears about gay sex, young people having sex, old people having sex, contraception, abortion right, women’s rights, choice and above all else – people being free to have sex.
Blake said: “Having made…massive progress, what we have to do is sustain that … and not go back to a time when the young had really poor sexual and relationship education and see a rise in teenage pregnancy rates and sexually transmitted infections as a result…”
Life also became a founding member last week of a new Sex and Relationships Council, which was launched in parliament with the endorsement of the education secretary, Michael Gove.
The council, which includes the Christian-run pro-abstinence group the Silver Ring Thing, says it aims to bring the voice of what it describes as “value-based, parent centred” sex and relationship education (SRE) providers to policy discussions on the future of SRE in schools…
Some secular organisations have been growing increasingly worried that Tory ministers are opening up government to the agendas of faith-based and pro-life groups…
In Richmond, south-west London, the Catholic Children’s Society has taken over the £89,000 contract to provide advice to schoolchildren on matters including contraception and pregnancies. Another Christian-run charity, Care Confidential, is involved in providing crisis pregnancy advice under the auspices of Newham PCT in east London. Care’s education arm, Evaluate, was one of the founding members, alongside Life, of the Sex and Relationships Council.
Sounds to me like the same crap ideology advanced against Planned Parenthood in the United States by reactionaries and religious conservatives. They’ve found a home in what now passes for the Republican Party and are out to press regression of women’s rights back before World War 1.
Which clown got the most votes?
Voters the world over complain about having clowns for politicians, but Brazilians embraced the idea on Sunday by sending a real one to Congress with more votes than any other candidate.
Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva, better known by his clown name Tiririca, received more than 1.3 million votes in Sao Paulo state in Brazil’s presidential and congressional elections. That was more than double the votes of the second-placed candidate in Brazil’s most populous state.
Tiririca caught the attention of disillusioned voters by asking for their support with the humorous slogan: “It can’t get any worse” and a promise to do nothing more in Congress than report back to them on how politicians spend their time…
The clown, whose stage name means “grumpy,” usually appears in public wearing a blond wig, a red hat and a garish outfit. He survived a last-minute attempt by public prosecutors to bar him from running because of evidence that he is illiterate.
Har! I’d vote for him in a New York minute.
Here in New Mexico, for example, we have two candidates for governor: one is a shoot-em-up district attorney running as a right wing Republican who’s going to “clean-up corruption” – though our last Republican governor was the dimwit who outsourced the state labor department to Bangladesh and figured that having prisoners at the state pen make the license plates was too expensive and found other state’s prisoners to do the job for less. The Democrat is about as exciting as a heap of stones. Business and elective office experience which the Republican doesn’t have; but, absolutely nothing but trite phrases to offer.
Maybe I’ll write-in Tiririca?
What happens when you merge with conservatives?
Joined at the hip?
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Support for Liberal Democrats has plunged to just 12 per cent – half the level the party secured in the General Election – according to a poll.
The YouGov survey for the Sunday Times also recorded a steep nosedive in the popularity of the party’s leader Nick Clegg since he became Deputy Prime Minister by taking the Lib Dems into coalition Government with the Conservatives.
Mr Clegg’s personal satisfaction rating was eight points, compared to the spectacular 72 points he achieved in the wake of the first televised leaders’ debate during the election campaign.
The Lib Dems rating was half the 24 per cent the party won in the election and the lowest since October 2007, when Sir Menzies Campbell was forced out as leader…
The poll came after Mr Clegg admitted in a TV documentary that he changed his mind about the need for spending cuts before the election without making his shift public, and after questions were raised over whether he misled Mr Cameron about the offers Labour had made him on electoral reform.
Signs of unrest have also emerged within his party over the coalition’s position on issues like immigration, schools and university tuition fees.
Merge your policies with crap policies – it sticks.
UK coalition lasted less than a month before first scandal
The new coalition government was plunged into its first crisis as the Liberal Democrat cabinet minister charged with cutting the £156 billion deficit resigned following revelations about his expenses.
David Laws, appointed chief secretary to the Treasury less than three weeks ago, stood down saying that he no longer believed his position was tenable after it was revealed that he had claimed more than £40,000 to live in his partner’s house. Commons rules introduced in 2006 barred such claims by MPs.
His decision marked a sudden and dramatic end to the brief honeymoon enjoyed by David Cameron’s and Nick Clegg’s new government. It also brought to an end one of the briefest cabinet careers in recent history…
The chancellor, George Osborne, expressed sadness at Laws’s resignation. It was “as if he had been put on earth” to do the job of Treasury chief secretary…
Uh, who was running that lift?
The die had been cast when the Daily Telegraph made the revelations on Friday night about Laws’s expenses claims, paid to his partner, James Lundie.
Laws had said he deeply regretted the situation. “My motivation throughout has not been to maximise profit but to simply protect our privacy and my wish not to reveal my sexuality,” he said…
Laws’s resignation is a massive blow to the coalition, which has made cutting the deficit its priority in office. A former investment banker with JP Morgan, Laws was seen as the man to bridge the divide between Tory and Liberal Democrat visions of how to bring the nation’s finance into better shape. His resignation will complicate already hurried preparations for the government’s emergency budget on 22 June.
Laws also came under pressure to resign from gay equality campaigners. Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, writing in today’s Observer, says: “Pious political parties (that is, all of them) whisper privately that there are more gay MPs than the public imagines. But how can anyone ‘represent’ a community of interest if they’re entirely unable ever to admit that they belong to it? Some of us hope for a Britain where one day Westminster is grownup enough to select and promote politicians from all sorts of backgrounds.”
Gay Rights campaigners are perfectly correct. The parallel in the U.S. with statements from Civil Rights activists condemning Black members of Congress like William Jefferson who stashed ill-gotten thousand$ in his freezer.
No one who trumpets a stand for ethics should waste their breath – and voters’ time – forgiving the sleaze of their political peers.
Ask a Family Values’ Republican. Oh.
Germany’s Chancellor Merkel acknowledges “bitter defeat”
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has admitted her coalition suffered a “bitter defeat” in regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). The chancellor acknowledged her new government, in power since October, had “many avoidable disagreements” that had hurt its chances of re-election in NRW…
The NRW result means Mrs Merkel’s coalition no longer has a majority in the upper house of parliament. This will make it more difficult for her government to get legislation passed…
“There’s no talking around it – we suffered a bitter defeat,” she said.
“As regards the work of the federal government, I will only say this: In the first months, we did not provide any momentum to the government in NRW. On the contrary, we were a factor holding them back, and there were many avoidable disagreements.”
She warned that big tax cuts – favoured by the FDP and promised by the new coalition – would not now be possible.
“The… coalition in Berlin must now set its priorities clearly,” she said. “That means, from my point of view, firstly that tax cuts cannot be implemented for the foreseeable future – discussions about the euro, about [loan] guarantees and a lot of other things show us that…”
It is not immediately clear what type of alliance or coalition will emerge in NRW.
Conservatives throughout the western world seem stuck into an ideology that requires tax-cut payoffs to their corporate masters before any other priority in society. And then they wonder why voters reject them and their policies.
The American electorate still hasn’t gotten back their share of the Treasury Bush gave away to his Enron-class buddies. State-by-state, conservative hacks, Democrat or Republican, try to use the first flush of any electoral victory to reward country club compatriots. And screw taxpayers in general.
Gordon Brown will resign as Labour leader to enable coalition
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he would step down this year, sacrificing himself to give his Labor Party a chance of forming a government with the smaller Liberal Democrats.
The Lib Dems are already being courted by the Conservatives, who did best in an election last week. But Brown said in a statement in front of his official residence at 10 Downing Street that the Lib Dems now wanted to talk to Labor too.
The center-right Conservatives, led by David Cameron, won most seats in parliament but fell short of a majority.
Labor, in power since 1997, came second and the Liberal Democrats, led by Nick Clegg, a distant third. It is the first time since 1974 that a British election has put no party in overall control.
Brown’s announcement could make it easier for Labor to lure the Lib Dems away from the Conservatives, since Clegg had signaled strongly during the election campaign that he did not wish to keep the unpopular Brown, 59, in office.
“Mr Clegg has just informed me that while he intends to continue his dialogue that he has begun with the Conservatives, he now wishes also to take forward formal discussions with the Labor Party,” Brown said, adding that he would facilitate that.
“I have no desire to stay in my position longer than is needed,” Brown said.
If he truly meant that – he would have resigned a year ago.
Icelanders punish Conservatives at the polls
Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
It is a tale of light and dark — of a small but rugged country far from anywhere that has suffered as severely as any in the developed world at the hands of buccaneering free-marketeers, but which is now slowly digging itself out from the financial wreckage.
An important milestone was reached on Saturday, when the country’s voters went to the polls to elect a new government, three months after riotous street protests over the country’s banking collapse forced the country’s conservative-led administration from office.
With about a third of the final vote counted late Saturday, it seemed that the country’s leftist caretaking government would be formally voted into power, with the Social Democrats projected to gain 22 seats and their partners, the Left-Greens, appearing to gain 13 seats in the 63-seat Parliament. The conservative Independent Party, ousted after a wave of demonstrations in January, was projected to gain just 14 seats with less than 23 percent of the vote, down considerably from its total in 2007. Final results are to be announced later today.
The conservatives were one of the first governments anywhere to lose office because of the global financial crisis, and it seemed clear Saturday that voters in this country of 320,000 were imposing a further reckoning.
The Independent Party has been blamed for a perceived complicity in the banks’ accumulating unsustainable, multibillion debts, and their partnership with a group of freewheeling Icelandic entrepreneurs known as the “New Vikings…”
About the only thing the New Vikings didn’t do in their attempt to imitate American neocons – was declare war on the Faroe Islands.
I truly love Iceland, though it’s been many years since I’ve visited. The rugged and wild landscape is part and parcel of the national ethos of independence. Part of what brought them to boot the U.S. Air Force off the island-nation after decades.
I’ve Posted before about their new Prime Minister and the economic problems they had to overcome.
Hope they make it through to the other side, soon.
Tel Aviv rally opposes Gaza invasion
Daylife/AFP/Getty Images
Amid cries of “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies!” and banners reading, “Enough!” thousands of Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest against the country’s war on Gaza.
Organisers, a coalition of groups such as Gush Shalom, the Hadash party and the Coalition of Women for Peace, were encouraged by the turnout.
“We have experience from the last war, in Lebanon, and this time the public outcry is much quicker and much bigger,” said veteran Gush Shalom campaigner Uri Avnery.
“It is a cynical war, for political reasons and people are very much aware of that.”
Palestinian-Israelis who demonstrated alongside Jewish co-nationalists waved the Palestinian flag, as police attempt to ban such a practice before the protest was overruled by the Israeli high court…
Some demonstrators were critical of the Hamas government in Gaza, but argued for a sense of balance.
“It is pathetic that Hamas provoked Israel,” said Ada Bilu, 46, from Jerusalem.
“But there is no proportion and no equality in the power relations, of what Israelis can do and what Palestinians can do. Gaza is a terrible place to live and Israel has a lot more responsibility for that than it would like to take.”
As Obama sits back and relies on his “one president at a time” mantra – the world realizes he’s unwilling to lead on a question critical to more of the world than American voters.
Does Gordon Brown plan to make Britain the 51st United State
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
Britain’s Gordon Brown will use his New Year address to call for a “coalition for change” with U.S. President-elect Barack Obama in a speech intended as a rallying call to Britons.
Brown, who frequently uses the comparison of the Second World war to describe the current global financial crisis, will tell Britons they have the strength of resolve to tackle a recession.
“Today the issues may be different, more complex, more global. And yet the qualities we need to meet them the British people have demonstrated in abundance before,” Brown says in excerpts of the speech released by his office.
Brown identifies the economy, climate change, and security as the main challenges facing the world in 2009 and pledges to work with the United States to tackle them, positioning the U.S. alliance beyond a traditional focus on military cooperation.
For some reason, Brown seems to think that Tony Blair’s constant position – kneeling before George W. Bush – worked well enough to keep Labour in power. I think Gordon Brown is duller and dumber than anyone suspected.
Now, he presumes – perhaps correctly – that Barack Obama’s leadership will drag the Wonderful World of Western Capitalism into revival. By kissing butt loudly and frequently, he may get some crumbs spilled from the White House breakfast table.
Nothing unique or special about the British economy or culture, I guess. Anymore.
