Chiami in Italia questa settimana?  

Ricorda che hanno già levato l’ora legale, mentre qui negli Usa lo faremo questo weekend.

You can’t fight city hall?  This woman did.

An Ohio woman beat a traffic ticket by calling out her town’s bad grammar. Andrea Cammelleri found her truck towed from a spot where “motor vehicle campers” were prohibited, but the citation should have read “Motor vehicles, campers”. Cammelleri told a judge that her truck was not a motor vehicle camper and the ticket was incorrect.  The judge agreed and ordered the town to pay her $1500. “I was told ‘don’t fight city hall’, I’d never win. I did”, she said.

TV Italiana gratis

Come guardare programmi della TV italiana gratis comodamente sulla tua TV negli USA.

Conetti la tua TV all’internet (wi-fi sulla TV o un laptop connesso alla TV con un cavo HDMI).

Vai a www.rai.it.  Diversi programmi degli ultimi 7 giorni sono disponibili accedendo a “rai replay” scegliendo il canale (Rai1, Rai2 ecc.) e il giorno.

Inoltre puoi cercare un programma per nome. Comparirà una lista di puntate dove puoi vedere programmi tenuti nell’archivio.

Ci sono vari programmi tra cui scegliere, per esempio:

Il Tempo e la Storia: “le donne durante il fascismo”, “il piano Marshall”, “Caporetto”, e tanti altri.

Visionari:  Da Vinci, Einstein, Michelangelo, ecc.

Viaggio nell’Italia del giro, che fa un viaggio storico e culturale nelle diverse regioni della penisola.

Fuori binario

Fuori luogo

Questi sono solo alcuni esempi.

E puoi vedere il telegiornale in italiano in qualsiasi momento.

Buon divertimento!

America’s Fragile Constitution

The Founders misread history and established a dysfunctional system of government. A case for a little less reverence.

Since the american Revolution, many new democracies have taken inspiration from the U.S. Constitution. Around much of the world, parliamentary systems became prevalent, but some countries, particularly in Latin America, adopted the presidential model, splitting power between an executive and a legislative branch.

When, in 1985, a Yale political scientist named Juan Linz compared the records of presidential and parliamentary democracies, the results were decisive. Not every parliamentary system endured, but hardly any presidential ones proved stable. “The only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States,” Linz wrote in 1990. This is quite an uncomfortable form of American exceptionalism.

Linz’s findings suggest that presidential systems suffer from a large, potentially fatal flaw. In parliamentary systems, governmental deadlock is relatively rare; when prime ministers can no longer command legislative support, the impasse is generally resolved by new elections. In presidential systems, however, contending parties must eventually strike a deal. Except sometimes, they don’t. Latin America’s presidential democracies have tended to oscillate between authoritarianism and dysfunction.

…. “This is a system that requires a particular set of political norms,” Eric Nelson told me, “and it can be very dangerous and dysfunctional where those norms are not present.” Once those norms have been discarded, the president or either house of Congress can simply go on strike, refusing to fulfill their responsibilities. Nothing can compel them to act.

Until recently, American politicians have generally made the compromises necessary to govern. The trouble is that cultures evolve. As American politics grows increasingly polarized, the goodwill that oiled the system and helped it function smoothly disappears.

For the whole article, see

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/our-fragile-constitution/403237/