The big political news, which is actually of little importance, is that Zap lost the first vote to be seated as prime minister because he didn't get an absolute majority; only the PSOE deputies voted for him. So what: they'll take another vote on Friday, and this time it's first-past-the-post, which means Zap has to wait two more days.

Rajoy promised to make nice and cooperate on issues of state such as terrorism, which is considerably more responsible than the PP's attitude during much of Zap's first term.

Zap promised to make an official report of the "balanzas fiscales," the amount of money transferred from Catalonia (and the other regions) to the central government in taxes, and the amount of tax money spent in Catalonia (and other regions) by the central government. This is something that the Catalanists have been demanding for years.

On the one hand, it makes complete sense to me that the maximum possible information about tax collection and government spending should be made public, because the public pays the taxes. So I'm in favor.

On the other hand, this demand has always been based on faulty logic: regions don't pay taxes, individuals do. Since Catalonia is a richer-than-average region, the average Catalan pays more taxes than the average Spaniard. Duh.

As for the argument that not enough tax money is spent in Catalonia, okay, that's fair enough. You can make that case. But if that's what you're arguing for, more pork-barrel spending, then just be honest enough to admit it.

And as for the Catalan infrastructural collapse, how much of that is the fault of not enough central government spending, and how much of it is the fault of incompetence by the regional and municipal governments, and irresponsible behavior by certain political parties?

By the way, in the United States this is not an issue. Some states pay out more than they get back, and some states pay out less. Makes sense, right? Half pay out more, half pay out less. Law of averages and all that. Nobody complains about it.

Zap also came out in favor of a Rhone River-Barcelona aqueduct. Somebody should have been working on this ten years ago.

He also promised:

1) a €400 tax refund
2) more public housing
3) to retrain construction workers
4) to help families pay their mortgages
5) more government R&D spending
6) more infrastructure spending
7) to reform the inheritance tax
8) to raise the minimum wage to €800 a month
9) to raise retirement pensions
10) to spend €1.2 billion helping families with dependents (disabled, senile, retarded, etc.)
11) extend paternity leave from 2 to 4 weeks
12) preschool for all children between ages 0 and 3

1 and 7 are reasonable. 6 is not a bad idea if what's to be built is useful, like transport and utilities, but not if it's more big ugly empty buildings (see: Forum). I'm in favor of 9 and 10, since I favor helping out the weakest among us. 12 seems awfully ambitious. You know all the arguments for and against 8. 3 is a complete boondoggle: all job training money is wasted, at least here in Spain.

They're investigating another possible mad-cow death in Alicante. The authorities say there's no danger of an epidemic, and that the victims must have been infected years ago before the regulations were changed. This is exactly the kind of thing we just have to trust the government on. That's what I like about democracy: I have a lot more trust in a government responsible to us than one responsible to nobody. This is Spain, Western Europe, the institutions are more or less honest. If we were in, say, China, I wouldn't believe a word.

Speaking of covering up the truth: Xavier Sala i Martin, the Columbia econ prof and Barça club executive, declared that some players who have not been playing recently are not injured, as the club had announced, but rather benched. He added that the players in question are those who go out at night. This presumably means Ronaldinho and Deco. I don't think it means Messi, I think he's legitimately hurt, and he's expressed a willingness to clean up his act. Meanwhile, Barça plays Schalke tonight in the second leg of their Champions' League semi-final. If they get eliminated the season's basically over, and that might happen if they play the way they did against Getafe. By the way, I watched the Liverpool-Arsenal game last night, and Barça's not as good as either of those teams.

Another judicial screwup: A judge in Andalusia left a man in jail for a year after he had been acquitted of all charges. Sheer incompetence.

The business bankruptcy rate is up nearly 75% in Spain in the first quarter of 2008 over last year. Half of the bankruptcies are in the construction sector. The Expofincas real-estate agency, €23 million in debt, suspended payments yesterday; it's the first big real-estate company to go to the wall.

So La Vanguardia got an interview with the Hispanic (specifically Dominican-American) author, Junot Díaz, who won this year's Pulitzer for best novel. This guy isn't precisely a poet from the mean streets of the barrio: he's a literature prof at MIT.

Diaz says, "Every time I meet writers from Latin America I laugh, because most of them are white and rich. If they are representatives of our culture, I say, come on. When I travel to Colombia or Venezuela or Cuba most of the people don't look white, but when you meet their writers, every little one of them is bourgeois and extremely white. There is a disconnection between the people and the writers which we have to improve. In any country you name, Peru, Colombia, look for a group of writers from that country, and I'll get together a group of Latins in the United States, and you'll realize that there is much more diversity among Latin writers in the United States than among writers in any other country."

So far so good, right? American society makes it possible for poor Hispanic immigrants to grow up to be writers and professors, something not possible for poor citizens of some Latin American countries.

But Díaz also says, "You can't choose your colonial language. This is a punishment. Mine is English. I learned to read in English. That's why I write in English mixed with Spanish."

Wait a minute. Colonial language? Dude, your parents immigrated from the Dominican and brought you with them when you were nine years old. The American public schools taught you to read and write at the taxpayers' expense. I don't think you can say that English has colonized you if you grew up in New Jersey, especially after you've joined the American upper-middle class, with whom you speak English.

He continues, "I don't know if this prize (will help Latino literature in the US) because you know what the gringos (sic) are like. Although they praise you today, tomorrow they mistreat you like an animal."

Yeah, you know what the spicks are like. Although they feed from your hand today, tomorrow they bite you on that very same hand.

So they busted 41 Internet kiddie porn pervs in another of those mass roundups we keep having in Spain. Question: Does your country have frequent kiddie-porn roundups as Spain does? Does Spain have an unusual amount of these people, or is Spain unusually vigilant in catching them, or do most countries have the same amount of these mass arrests going on?

Real Madrid choked last night in Mallorca but got out with a 1-1 draw, and Barcelona takes on Getafe tonight sans Ronaldinho. The story now is that it's nearly certain that Ronaldinho will be sold to Milan, which makes it even less likely that he's really injured; Milan wouldn't pay €20 million for a player who can't pass their physical. My guess is that Ronaldinho has been kicked off the team and they're trying to keep it quiet to avoid embarrassment for everybody. By the way, there's been some talk that Messi has been undisciplined this last season, going out too much and not watching his diet; at least, there's been enough talk that Messi's dad came out and said that he'd gotten himself back on track and was working hard to recover from his injuries.

Now they're saying that the Barcelona-Valencia high-speed train won't come into service until 2015 at the earliest. You'd think that would be a priority, connecting the country's second and third biggest cities, which aren't all that far apart; besides, the Barcelona-Tarragona stretch is already in operation.

So this week is supposed to be moderately rainy, which probably won't do much to refill the reservoirs, but ought to soak the ground pretty well. Actually, March was comparatively rainy around here; at least the situation didn't get any worse, and the land was able to absorb some water.

More boat people in the Canary Islands, this time 29 Moroccans who made Lanzarote. No international coverage, of course.

El País got interviews with both John McCain and Alan Greenspan.

El País's reporter talked to McCain on board his flight from the Martin Luther King* ceremony to Phoenix; the reporter was most interested in what US-Spain relations would be like under a McCain administration. McCain let loose with some standard boilerplate: "It's time to leave behind our disagreements with Spain. I would like (Zapatero) to visit the United States. I am very interested, not only in normalizing relations with Spain, but also in achieving good, productive relations with the goal of dealing with many issues and challenges we will have to face together."

Regarding Zap's repeated unfriendliness toward the US, McCain said, "We have to understand that there are things that happen during a political campaign, things that are said, decisions that are made in certain political situations, and we must understand that there may be agreements and disagreements. But I believe it is time to leave these things behind and to look forward with the viewpoint that we have many more values and goals that unite us than differences that separate us."

Very diplomatic, Senator McCain. Good job.

El País points out 1) that Zap is the only democratic prime minister who has not visited the US and 2) McCain hates the Castro regime like poison; he's never forgiven them because when he was a prisoner in Hanoi, they disguised one of their psychiatrists as a Spanish peace activist, and McCain agreed to speak with him. The Cuban shrink went back to Cuba and wrote an article in Granma portraying McCain as a murderous psychopath.

Greenspan said 1) the US economy is flexible enough, though the financial sector doesn't look good, that it won't be seriously affected by a credit crunch 2) the most serious problem is reduced business income due to the plateauing of consumer spending, though this is not caused by tight credit 3) the US is not currently in recession, and there's about a fifty-fifty chance that a recession will happen 4) we're at a crossroads and must choose between growth and inflation, and the priority should be keeping inflation down 5) we must keep protectionism at a minimum

6) Spain is vulnerable because of its real-estate bubble, Italy is problematic but always has been, and France and Germany look to be in good shape 7) Countries that open up their markets like the UK and Ireland are going to be much better shape than countries that resort to protectionism 8) Saddam's petroleum riches made him dangerous; if he hadn't had the oil money, he wouldn't have been able to cause so much trouble 9) He's for McCain 10) He fears the Democrats' protectionist rhetoric.

Yearly inflation in Spain hit 4.6% in March, the highest rate since 1997. Oil and food prices are to blame. The ECB's goal was a maximum of 2% inflation in 2008. Looks like that ain't gonna happen.

Get this. Clickair, Iberia's low-cost airline, forgot that we changed to daylight savings time last weekend, so a bunch of passengers missed their flights. Unfortunately, this kind of complete screwup (called a "chapuza" in Spanish) is all too common over here. One of the best things about Spain is that it's a low-stress, laid-back country, but sometimes we can get a little too laid-back around here.

Meanwhile, Clickair and Vueling, another low-cost airline, are planning a merger in order to reduce costs and competition; this will mean even fewer flights out of El Prat, since duplicates will obviously be eliminated. I think the antitrust authorities ought to look into this. This fad of adding an -ing on the end of a Spanish word to make it look more international or something (Vueling, Bicing, etc.) has got to stop now.

Alarmist Andy Robinson gets the first two pages of La Vanguardia's international section to wax nostalgic for the good old USSR. Says Andy:

Draconian drug prohibition and absolute permissiveness for all business and financial activities. This is a good summary of the global agenda of the United States and the G-7 in the '80s and '90s, accelerated after the fall of the Soviet Union...Simultaneously, the Anglo-American model of financial liberalization, deregulating enormous capital flows, was exported, while teams of economists from Chicago landed in the former USSR and its satellites...Prohibitionism has helped the gangsters almost as much as laissez-faire...Because of all this, "it is not crazy to think that instead of prohibiting drugs and permitting the free circulation of capital, we should do just the opposite," said criminologist Michael Woodiwiss of the University of Bristop. "Strict regulations over the financial markets should be applied." The Americans should know this: "During Prohibition of alcohol and financial permissiveness, crime was endemic." What put an end to it was not Elliot (sic) Ness, but the regulation of the market, the creation of the FBI, and in general the social policies of Roosevelt's New Deal.

1) Iberian Notes completely agrees with Andy that the prohibition of drugs is the biggest mistake the American government is currently making. 2) Andy doesn't seem to understand that US foreign policy is not coherent over time; it depends greatly on who the president is, and so the US does not have a global agenda. Much less the G-7, made up of seven different elected governments including France and Italy. That lot can't agree on what's for dinner, much less a big secret global plan to let the Jewish-American financial powers that be run rampant.

3) He doesn't seem to understand, either, that today's Russian mafia is yesterday's KGB, and that the old USSR was an incredibly corrupt place. The Americans prohibit people from buying intoxicating drugs; the USSR prohibited people from buying most of the things they needed or wanted. Which form of prohibition is going to create a bigger black market? 4) Laissez-faire is a straw man. No government has ever pursued a complete laissez-faire policy; all governments have regulated the market ever since governments have existed. The question is not whether to regulate, but how much.

5) Andy doesn't know dick-squat about American history. The alcohol business was merely one of many that organized crime was involved in, the FBI didn't get into the struggle against organized crime until the '50s and it wasn't very effective until the late '70s, and the social policies of the New Deal had absolutely nothing to do with the Mafia. Duh.

In contrast to the usual wishful-thinking wet dream periodically published in the Spanish press about the decline of the "American Empire," to be replaced by Europe or China or even the Arab states, Joaquim Coello, billed as an engineer, writes in El Periodico:

The decline of the United States is not inevitable. It will be proven again that the principles of democracy, freedom, and equality of the citizens have power and strength, and despite their faults, they are superior to any other political system. The superiority of the United States's political structure, based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, will be demonstrated one more time.

I've never seen anything like this in the Spanish press before.

Barça choked again big-time Saturday night, losing 3-2 to Betis after going ahead 0-2 on goals by Bojan and Eto'o. They played well in the first half and just horribly in the second, and as soon as Betis scored its first goal, everybody in the bar groaned because we knew the game was over and Barça was going to blow it again. Iniesta and Bojan were by far the best Barça players.

I think we need to stop speculating about who's going to be sold during the off-season, and start wondering who's going to stay. I'd keep Iniesta, Xavi, Messi, Bojan, Eto'o, Valdés, Jorquera, Giovani dos Santos, Touré, and Milito, and get rid of the rest of them, including Puyol, who is washed-up.

La Vanguardia has an article on what they call the Bologna process (what the goddamn university non-students were "striking" over), which is supposed to help make European universities competitive with American ones. According to La Vangua, of the 535 best universities in the world, 308 are in the US, 50 in the UK, 26 in Canada, 20 in Germany, 19 in Japan, and 1 in Spain, which is the University of Barcelona medical school.

Massive cognitive dissonance for Yankee-bashers: Americans are supposed to be ignorant, unintellectual, and uncultured. Yet the US has all the top universities and the most Nobel Prize winners, for whatever that's worth, and it attracts thousands of students from all over the world.

La Vangua claims that the US spends 3% of its gross national product on research and development, while the EU spends 1.2%, and that 5% of Americans between ages 30 and 50 are enrolled in university or post-graduate studies, while only 2% of EU citizens are. Therefore, the Bologna plan will devote more public spending to raising these percentages. The problem is that the majority of US R&D spending comes from the private sector, and that the 5% of Americans continuing their educations are doing so in order to reach personal, not public, goals.

Many Spaniards I've talked to are very critical of the Spanish university system; I've heard people say that it's based on memorization and regurgitation, that it discourages individual initiative, that it doesn't teach students how to think, that professors are distant and uninterested in students as individuals, that it's too bureaucratic and regimented, and that there is a lot of nepotism and patronage involved in choosing instructors. A personal observation of mine is that many Spaniards resort to invoking authority as evidence to back up their arguments--so-and-so said this so it must be true. I think they learned this at the university.

Poverty in Catalonia: 19% of Catalans live below the poverty line, which is a yearly income of €8276 (about $12,100) per person, up from 17.2% last year. Comparison with the US: About 12% of Americans live below the federal poverty line, which is $10,400 for an individual living alone and $21,200 for a family of four. In-kind benefits, such as food stamps, school lunches, and public housing, do not count as income in the US for purposes of measuring poverty. 46% of poor households in the US own their own home, 30% have two or more cars, 63% have cable or satellite TV, and 91% have a color television.

Here in B-ville, the city government is all excited about the tacky souvenir shops that surround touristy places like the Sagrada Familia and the Ramblas. Indignation waxes, especially at the flamenco-dancing dolls and the big Mexican sombreros. I have to admit I'm surprised at how popular the Mexican hats are among the Dusseldorfers, Rotterdammers, and Liverpudlians. If you buy one and walk around town all the locals think you're a complete idiot, but I figure everybody who reads this blog already knows that.

Personally, I never buy stuff at souvenir shops; I always get something at the museum gift shop. I especially like little reproductions of animal statues; my favorite is the Egyptian cat-god from the British Museum. Here in Barcelona, the City History Museum's shop on Calle Llibreteria has nice stuff worth at least looking at. They sell little silver reproductions of a Visigothic (early medieval) horse that was found during an archaeological dig, which are a bit pricey but worth it.

The goddamn bus drivers voted to go on strike indefinitely beginning on April 15 if the city government doesn't give them what they want. So far more than 200 buses have been sabotaged by the strikers.

Latino gang fight in L'Hospitalet. Gunshots fired. One hospitalized, stabbed in arm and leg. Three arrested. Gang involved: Dominicans calling themselves the "Black Panthers," in English. This is getting a bit out of hand.

Value-added tax (IVA) receipts are down 8% since January 1 due to the halt in the construction sector. This is going to play hell with the budget.

Ronaldinho has burned his bridges: his manager (and brother) threatened to sign him up with Real Madrid, and claimed he could legally break Dinho's contract for a €16 million buyout, far less than the €125 million buyout clause in his contract. So don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Luis Fernandez, Dinho's coach at Paris-St. Germain, just came out with a book accusing him of being a selfish player and breaking all the team rules, especially those related to eating properly and staying home at night.

We spent the four-day Easter weekend out in Vallfogona, where we did what we usually do: go walking/hiking/trudging with the dog and sit around the fire. It's cold in that old stone house. (By the way, an architecture student is going to do his project on our house, I suppose as an example of architectural folkways. He paid his first visit over the weekend, and his first comment was, "You don't have to worry about this place falling down," since the walls are two feet thick.)

One thing I notice every spring is the first day that the leaves on the trees are thick enough to obscure the bare branches: it's today in Barcelona, and the weather couldn't be prettier, with the sun out and the sky brilliant blue because a cold front from the northwest blew all the pollution away.

The cold front brought a pretty good snowfall up in the Pyrenees, six or eight inches, which is unusual this late in March. It won't alleviate the drought much, though, since it'll only provide enough water to supply Catalonia for a week. Still, every little bit helps, and normal rainfall is predicted for this spring.

The biggest news over the weekend was that ETA set off a car bomb in Calahorra, La Rioja. They called in a warning first, so the area was evacuated and nobody got hurt. It was a big bomb, sixty or seventy kilos of explosives, and it blew the crap out of the street where it exploded.

The PSOE has made its post-election, pre-seating of the Congress plans pretty clear: they're trying to reach an agreement with the PNV and CiU to form a centrist coalition. No more Catalan Tripartite in Madrid, no more power for the Commies and ERC. Good. I much prefer it when Zap has to bargain with parties that are more conservative than he is rather than parties that are farther left than he is.

Zap is still talking about reshuffling the cabinet. Apparently Moratinos stays on at Foreign Affairs, and despite asking to be moved, Rubalcaba stays on at Interior. Alonso moves from Defense to PSOE leader in the Congress, Jauregui becomes party secretary general, De la Vega stays on as the Cabinet's spokeswoman, Miguel Sebastian gets a new Research and Development ministry, and Carmen Chacon gets a new Social Affairs ministry. At least so go the rumors.

Pepelu Carod-Rovira says he's stepping down as president of Esquerra Republicana, which we were all expecting sometime pretty soon; he won't rule out running as the party's chief candidate during the next regional elections, though. First they have a party convention in June to get through, featuring a Carod-Puigcercos power struggle. I hope the party splits and both fractions crash and burn.

63 people were killed on the Spanish highways over Semana Santa, 40% fewer than last year, but still far too many. Our roads are three and a half times more dangerous than those in the UK. So far 460 people have been killed in traffic accidents in Spain this year.

Get this. The average Spanish wedding costs €20,800, more than $30,000, and one-third of Spanish couples go into debt to pay for it. Seems like somebody's got his priorities misplaced.

Economics minister Pedro Solbes has again reduced his prediction for Spain's 2008 GDP growth to 2.6%, while the savings bank association says it will be 2.5%. Long-term predictions for 2009 are hovering around a mere 2%. It seems that a rule of Spanish economics is that if growth is less than 3%, unemployment increases, and everyone is expecting a steep rise in the number of jobless. This will reduce Social Security payments in, and increase unemployment insurance payments out, putting Zap's balanced budget in danger. (No matter how much I love slamming Zap, at least he hasn't unleashed government spending and endangered economic stability.)

Average apartment rent in Barcelona: €1040 a month. Not many people can afford that. Gracia, by the way, is the most expensive neighborhood in town per square meter rented, since everything here is miniature-sized, little toy streets and buildings. You have to buy tiny appliances to fit them in your tiny apartment. Americans don't believe it when I tell them that the bar where I watch the Barça games is maybe 400 square feet, and we can fit about 35 people in there. 400 square feet is an average-sized bedroom in Kansas City.

There are 1,130,000 Muslims living in Spain, about 2.5% of the population; for comparative purposes, that's about the percentage of Jews in America. Fears of Eurabia in Spain are a paranoid fallacy.

Barça stomped a weak Valladolid on Sunday, and Real Madrid lost to no-longer slumping Valencia, leaving Barça four points back with nine games to go. Nobody seems to want to win the League. Ronaldinho was benched again, and Barça fans are united on the need to get rid of him over the summer. Bojan, who is still only 17, scored two goals. I still think Villarreal and Sevilla are playing the best football in the league. Racing Santander is this year's surprise team, currently sitting in fifth place and qualifying for the UEFA Cup next year.

It's Semana Santa (which PC touchy-feely education types have renamed "Spring Vacation") and so there's no news since everybody's on vacation already, even though the official Catalan four-day weekend doesn't begin until tomorrow.

Turns out one of the people killed in the gas explosion was the crazy woman who set it off.

They found two containers filled with ten kilos of explosives and a timer in a rural area in Ciudad Real: it was apparently an ETA drop-off for a traveling cell to pick up that fell through. The cops suspect it's just been lying there since 2006.

TV3's top story this morning, and La Vanguardia's second international story on pages 4 and 5, was the Communist-organized anti-war demonstration in Washington. I checked CNN and Fox News, and had to search for the story; it wasn't on their websites' front page. Interesting how much weight the Catalan media puts on such a minor story. The article doesn't mention how many demonstrators there were, but a few thousand at most showed up, so it was no big deal at all.

So how does La Vanguardia's Eusebio Val report the minuscule turnout? "Despite wide opposition to the war among the citizens, the people who act out these feelings of protest in the street are always few. The accelerated lifestyle and the great distances in American cities are not favorable to these demonstrations on a working day...The immense majority of the Americans who reject the war prefer to express it in private and with certain resignation."

If we don't get some rain around here sometime soon, water stocks will be virtually zero by the end of the summer, and there will have to be rationing and cutoffs. Tankers will begin coming in from Marseille and Tarragona in May, and old wells on the Barcelona plain are being opened up. Barcelona citizens use only 110 liters of water a day, while New Yorkers use 500; if people weren't already pretty frugal with water (because it's expensive), we'd have run out a long time ago. La Vanguardia says that the future lies in desalinizing plants, but the problem is that the process requires a good deal of energy.

In case you hadn't already figured it out, all those "authentic" Dalí and Miró lithographs being sold on Ebay are fake. The FBI and the Mossos busted an art forgery gang based in Barcelona and Chicago; eight persons were arrested here. By the way, I think Dalí is clever but not an artist of the first category, and I don't get Miró's stuff at all. I wouldn't walk across the street to see a Miró. I think other Catalan and Spanish painters like Sorolla, Casas, Nonell, Rusiñol, Fortuny, Utrillo, and Gris, along with architects like Domenech i Muntaner, are much more interesting.

The goddamn bus drivers are on strike again today.

Barça plays at Valencia tonight in the second leg of the Copa del Rey semifinal; in the first leg Valencia earned a 1-1 draw in the Camp Nou, so they win in case the second leg goes 0-0. Ronaldinho is on the shit list big-time; he's being kept out of this game as well. Other players high on the shit list are Deco and Marquez. If Valencia gets eliminated coach Ronald Koeman will likely be fired.