Catalunya TV has just announced some real results, that is, results based on partial vote counts.

Barcelona City Council:

Socialists 35.77%, 16 seats
Convergence 19.49%, 8 seats
PP 15.52%, 7 seats
Republican Left 12.58%, 5 seats
Communists 12.57%, 5 seats

The Socialists got hit hard in Catalonia, with the protest vote going to the smaller leftist parties, the Republican Left and the Commies. The PP actually increased the percentage of its vote. Convergencia lost votes. Looks like in Catalonia, though, the protest vote hurt the Socialists and Convergencia. I suppose that the 15% of Barcelonese who went for the PP are supporters of Aznar and his politics. Nonetheless, Mayor Joan Clos continues at the head of a Popular Front government on the City Council.

Tarragona City Council: A Convergence-PP deal gives the mayoralty to Convergence.
Lérida and Gerona City Councils: Socialist mayors backed by Popular Front coalitions.

The two major parties are beginning to spin. The PP is saying that they're the winners because they were the most voted party in the majority of regions and in the majority of the provincial capitals. The Socialists are saying they're the winners because they got more total votes than the PP did. My spin is, again, Aznar has weathered the storm and the PP didn't lose too much; there was not a general "punishment vote" on account of the war or anything else.

I've gone over to Tele 5 to see what they're saying. Their survey results vary slightly from TVE's. There will be Socialist-regionalist-Communist pacts in Vigo and Sevilla, putting those mayoralties in Socialist hands. Valladolid may go the same way, they're saying now. The Valencia mayoralty goes to the PP. Bilbao is still up in the air.

The general media take--I've been through Catalunya TV as well--is more or less what I was saying, that the Socialists get a marginal win but they didn't hit the PP a killing blow. The Spanish people did not react, as a whole, against the government and in favor of the left, as some were hoping.

Televisión Española is calling the various election races on the basis of surveys taken of people leaving the polls. The polls close in the Canary Islands at 9 PM mainland time and the official preliminary results are scheduled for 10:30. Here's the rundown so far:

Autonomous Regions:

Madrid: PP most voted but could be unseated by Socialist-Communist coalition
Valencia: PP holds absolute majority
Balearics: PP most voted but could lose out to leftist-regionalist coalition
Navarra: PP most voted, likely to get Socialist support vs. Basque nationalists
Murcia: PP holds absolute majority
Castile-La Mancha: Socialists hold absolute majority
Castile-León: PP holds absolute majority
Cantabria: PP most voted, could be unseated by SocioCommunist coalition
Asturias: Socialists gain absolute majority
La Rioja: PP holds absolute majority
Aragon: Socialists most voted, must make coalition
Extremadura: Socialists hold absolute majority
Canaries: Canarian Coalition most voted, will have to form coalition.

Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Andalusia did not hold regional elections.

These results for Aznar's PP aren't what I'd hoped for but aren't too bad. They didn't get their clocks cleaned, though in most places they have declined by a couple of percentage points. It looks like the big loss, though, is the Madrid regional government, which will almost certainly fall into the hands of a Popular Front government. The big hold is on the Valencia region, once strongly Socialist, no longer so.

Major Cities:

Madrid: PP holds absolute majority
Bilbao: Completely up in the air
San Sebastián: Socialists most voted, can form coalition with PP
Vitoria: PP most voted, can form coalition with Socialists
Barcelona: Socialists most voted, current Popular Front council to continue
Valencia: PP holds absolute majority
Sevilla: PP most voted but SocioCommunist coalition would win
Malaga: PP holds absolute majority
La Coruña: Socialists hold absolute majority
Vigo: PP most voted but leftist-nationalist coalition could unseat them
Valladolid: PP holds absolute majority
Burgos: PP most voted but could be unseated by SocioCommunist coalition
Toledo: Socialists most voted, Popular Front coalition unseats PP. Big PP loss
Zaragoza: Socialists most voted, leftist-regionalist coalition wins
Pamplona: PP most voted, wins with Socialist support
Palma: PP most voted, must form coalition with regionalists
Badajoz: PP absolute majority

If these figures hold up, and they are very approximate, I think we can call this election a marginal Socialist win. They've increased their percentage of the vote almost everywhere, and the PP's percentage of the vote has declined, at least slightly, almost everywhere. It also looks like they've taken the Madrid regional government with help from their Communist pals on the United Left. That's an impartant win, and their strong showings in San Sebastián and Zaragoza are also good news for them. But the PP did not get creamed. There was no overwhelming rejection of the Aznar government. These results do not leave them in too awful a position going into the elections for the four regions that didn't vote today and for the general elections next spring.

For new readers, these municipal and regional elections are important even if you do not live in Spain. The Socialists (PSOE) and Communists (IU) have successfully turned the election into a referendum on the conservative, pro-Anglo-American central government, which has done several unpopular things recently, more or less in order of importance: Spain's stance in the War on Terrorism, the government water plan, the controversy over the Galician oil spill, the decree on education reform, and the problems with the construction of the Madrid-Barcelona TGV line. If the PP, the conservative governing People's Party, wins most of the key races, then we'll be able to say that it hasn't been too badly hurt by all these controversies, and it's still the top dog party. If they lose most of them, then we'll know they're up to their necks in dog doo when Catalan regional elections come around this fall and general elections come around in spring 2004.

Municipal elections, in particular, are considered by Spanish political scientists as trend predictors; if these municipals go to the Socialists, it'll be a strong sign that they're likely to take next year's generals. We saw this trend before the PP takeover in 1996 and before the Socialist takeover in 1982, and we saw it way back in 1931 when very poor results obtained by the monarchist parties caused King Alfonso XIII to leave the country, giving place to the Second Republic.

So if you approve of Spain's international policies, you'd better join me in hoping for a good showing by the PP so that the peacenik Socialists don't take over again.

Oh, yeah, they had another pot-banging last night. I was downtown, where the Vangua says that participation was the most noticeable, and I didn't hear too much racket. Today, since anti-war and anti-government signs are supposed to be removed from polling sites (no political messages allowed in polling places), all the lefties have plastered themselves with stickers and buttons proclaiming their leftiness and peacefulness. Of course, wearing whatever you want is your right and you can wear that stuff into the voting room, but some of these folks looked pretty damn silly with stickers all over themselves.

Here's Libertad Digital's rundown on today's key posts up for grabs. I'm not going to bother translating it since I figure if you're one of the three people following our election coverage, you probably already know Spanish, and if you don't, you can figure out the story because of all the numbers.

The only place where abnormalities have been reported is the Basque Country, where things got a bit hairy over the last week or so. The cops count thirty violent actions in the Basque region in the last ten days, more than half of which were assault and battery on sympathizers of other parties handing out their brochures and exercising their right to free expression. Meanwhile, anti-ETA candidates have received an avalanche of death threats; yesterday the pro-ETA "radical youth" (teenage rioters, looters, and vandals) Molotov-cocktailed the house of a policeman in San Sebastián for the thirtieth act of low-grade incompetent crap terrorism the Basques have seen. In the rest of Spain, some pseudo-anarchist shitheads let off a letter-bomb at the Valencia post office and seven people were injured.

Here in Catalonia, which is divided into some fifty "comarcas" (counties), the Socialists are going to take the five counties of the Barcelona metro area: Barcelonés, Baix Llobregat, Vallés Occidental, Vallés Oriental, and Maresme. The Catalan nationalists, Convergence and Union, should win all the other counties, with maybe a fluke Socialist or even Esquerra win or two somewhere. Now, wait, CiU control most of the counties, right? So they should be the strongest party, right? Wrong. More than four million of Catalonia's six million people live in the five counties of the BCN metro area. The Socialists are clearly the biggest party here in Catalonia.

The percentage of voters in municipal elections in Catalonia has been between 55% and 65%; they're saying it looks like voter participation this time is going to be pretty high, at least 60%, which is good news for the Socialists; most people whose interest in politics is marginal tend to go for the Socialists and their paternalistic program and guff about the rights of labor. The higher the turnout, the better they tend to do. This isn't good news for the PP, as they tend to do better with a smaller turnout; PP voters are very loyal, but there just aren't that many in Catalonia, 15% of the vote maximum.

Today is a Japanese girl's favorite day: Erection Day! I accompanied Remei to go vote early this afternoon and we checked out two polling places, and everything seemed to be going completely normally. There's been a bit of a stink because most of the polling places are schools, and they've all got their "No to the war" and "No to the water plan" bulletin boards and murals up. The Elections Commission has decided that such expressions of opinion are not permitted in voting places because they have political overtones, and nobody is supposed to be influenced in his vote by electioneering at the voting booths. At the first one we checked, on Calle Sant Salvador, all was in order. If there had been any "illegal" signs up, they'd been taken down. At the second one we checked on Calle Providencia, there were two "no to the war" bulletin boards up in the lobby, along with one anti-water-plan art project. Results won't start coming in until the polls close this evening.

Here's an article from the Daily Telegraph on tomorrow's municipal and regional elections here in Spain. The Telegraph is a little less optimistic about the chances of José María Aznar's People's Party than we are here, but they agree that Aznar and his conservatives are not likely to suffer crippling losses.

Today is the "day of reflection" before tomorrow's elections; campaigning is prohibited. Tomorrow evening we'll be watching TV and filling you in on the results as they come in. The big races we're watching are for the presidencies of the Madrid and Valencia regions, the mayoralty of Madrid, and the mayoralties of Bilbao, San Sebastián, and Vitoria in the Basque country. Again, our predictions are that the PP holds Madrid and Valencia, and that the PP and the Socialists team up in a "democratic alliance" to split the Basque capitals, the PP getting San Sebastián and Vitoria and the Socialists getting Bilbao. There is no question that the Socialist-Popular Front coalition will hold Barcelona's mayoralty. Here in Catalonia, the Socialists will also take Gerona and most of the industrial suburbs around Barcelona, several of which are substantial municipalities (L'Hospitalet, Sabadell, Badalona, Santa Coloma, all of which have at least 150,000 people). The Catalan nationalists, Convergence and Union, will hold the mayoralties of Lérida and Tarragona. The PP is gunning hard in Sevilla but that's a Socialist stronghold and they're not likely to take it.

As long as we're linking to the most prestigious British paper, let's link to the least prestigious. The Sun has a piece on how further integration into the EU will destroy Britain's sovereignty and autonomy. It's written in mostly one-syllable words even you and me can understand. Check it out. (Via FrontPage.)

There's a Fred Barnes article in the Weekly Standard on how we won the war, including some stuff I didn't know. It's rather a puff piece on Tommy Franks, but it's well worth a read. Here's one from last week's Economist on how Saudi Arabia has lost influence in Washington.

Check out this bit of sexually explicit anti-Axis propaganda from the good old days. Don't worry, it's OK, it's for historical research purposes. Also check out this pre-WWII Japanese sex toy catalog. I don't recommend looking at the rest of the website this stuff is from unless you have an extremely strong stomach.

Derb is kind of funny today in the National Review. I know, he's too paleoconservative for my taste, too, but he is usually funny and often makes pretty good sense when not discussing homosexuality.

There's been a major earthquake in Algeria, with more than 500 dead and thousands injured, and they're not done counting. Here's the BBC story. Just what they needed in Algeria. The civil war wrecked the country in the Fifties and it never really stopped. Algeria has nothing resembling a real economy because, well, you never know, when you open up a textile plant, whether your workers are going to get their throats cut or not. This tends to discourage foreign investment.

Algeria is very close to Spain--just look at the map--and I'm surprised that more attention isn't paid over here to Algerian affairs. You see a good bit of stuff about Morocco, with whom Spain has a rather tempestuous relationship; diplomatic relations have been restored--they'd been cut off for a while. You don't get a lot of news from Algeria except for when a bunch of villagers get murdered; that'll get a couple of paragraphs in the International News Briefs in the Vangua.

Earthquakes, of course, are not rare in the Mediterranean. The famous monastery in Ripoll, here in Catalonia, was wrecked, I believe twice but at least once, by a large earthquake during medieval times. There is occasionally a very mild tremor here in Barcelona; I've known people who claim to have felt it. I never have. Supposedly the tremors from this one were felt in southern Spain and the Balearic Islands.

My friend Shannon Stice was in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake; he was living in a crummy apartment at California and Hyde. He slept through the whole thing. The first he heard about it is when our pal, his roommate Erik, called him from LA; Erik had been driving up from LA to SF that day, heard the news on the radio, and very sensibly turned around and returned to LA. As soon as he got home, he called up his roommate, of course; that was the pre-cellphone era. His phone call woke Stice up.

I posted this on the Comments section over at EuroPundits. I thought it was kind of clever and didn't want it to die in the Comments where nobody would read it, so here it is.

Here's a bad analogy. There are five of us in the same ninth grade class who are getting pushed around by Billy the bully. He keeps extorting our lunch money and the like. So we get together and two of us, Johnny Bull and Sammy Yank, propose that we all get together, jump Billy, take him down, and whale on him for a while. Then he'll leave us all alone. Johnny and Sammy calculate that Billy isn't nearly as tough as he lets on, anyway, and they volunteer to lead the charge while the other guys back them up. Now, there are risks; Billy might pop one of us good while we're taking him down. Johnny and Sammy figure this risk is worth it, but little Jacques, little Gerhard, and little Guy are so scared of being the one dude who gets popped by Billy that they chicken out of helping Johnny and Sammy jump Billy, finding various excuses for doing so.

Well, Johnny and Sammy do jump Billy and they win; Billy doesn't even get the chance to pop either of them just because they're so fired up and pissed off and ready to kick Billy's ass good. Gerhard, Jacques, and Guy have now gained the benefits of Johnny and Sammy's ass-kicking on Billy: ie, Billy isn't going to be pushing anyone around anymore, not even them--but they haven't taken the risk of Billy's smacking them one. They therefore feel ashamed; that is, somebody else did something courageous which they chickened out of doing themselves. They don't like to feel ashamed; therefore, they will say that Sammy and Johnny aren't really so tough, that they cheated when they jumped Billy, that they beat up Billy too badly after they got him down, that they just did it because they want to take over Billy's extortion racket, and even that Billy wasn't such a bad guy after all and that Sammy and Johnny were the real bad guys because, after all, they were the ones who started the violence when they jumped Billy.

That's what they call self-justification, a way of relieving the cognitive dissonance caused by Gerhard's, Guy's and Jacques's desire to maintain their good opinions of themselves and their certain knowledge, which they are unwilling to admit consciously, that they didn't have the guts to face Billy.

I just put up a post on EuroPundits--check it out. It's the nastiest America-bashing piece I've seen for a long time, so I just had to translate and fisk it. It's by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, a person who should be read out of polite society starting now for being flat-out evil by nature. From the Vanguardia, of course.

Here's a wackjob piece on why Catalonia ought to be independent by Rubert de Ventós, which someone else has briefly commented upon. It's in Spanish and I'm not going to translate all that crap.

The Jedman waxes poetic:

Saturday, May 17, 2003
I long to be back at the sea. I've always yearned to be near the sea. The sea has always been dear to my heart. I've been in love with the sea as long as I can remember from my early steps as a young man. No other place gives me the peaceful feeling of love and happiness that the sea does. Heaven is being on the boat with nothing but the sea around. I am returning to the sea soon and the sea will be returning to me. The sea is love. The sea is peace. The sea is freedom. The sea is timeless and everlasting. Cable TV is your friend. Big fish scare me. theJEDMAN

Also follow the Jedman's adventures in the swinging single dating world of the Greater Johnson County, Kansas metropolitan area.

Trevor is fact-checking Rafael Ramos's ass and has him trapped in a piece of plagiarism, among other bits of incompetence. What we ought to do is march down to the Vangua's office and demand they let us look through their archives of Ramos and Serra's stories. I bet we find eight million bits of plagiarism and just plain making up stuff. Especially by Ramos.

Check this one out from the BBC. We're torturing Iraqi prisoners with the Barney theme song. Amnesty International is protesting, quite justifiably, I would say. I mean, thumbscrews and electric cables are one thing, but the Barney song, now that's harsh. Also, the Beeb provides us with some examples of Iraqi humor. Give them a break; they've just gotten started. They'll need some time to really get going. The only things they have to make fun of as of now are, like, oppression, fear, and hunger. Soon the Iraqi airwaves will be soaked with Baywatch and Knight Rider and Starsky and Hutch reruns and they'll have a veritable gold mine of stupid stuff to make fun of.

They've been playing this song on the radio:

I drink the Shiner and the Pearl, sing the Waylon and the Merle
We pick a little "Ramblin' Man"
Pounding out the rhythm in this five-piece honky-tonk band

I couldn't resist a minor modification:

I drink the Shiner and the Pearl, eat the possum and the squirrel
On Sundays we have barbecued skunk
We couldn't stand to eat that if we wasn't shiftless and drunk

"Squirrel", of course, is pronounced "squirl", to rhyme with the four basic ingredients of an oil patch Friday night: you find some girl, drink some Pearl, listen to Merle, and, eventually, hurl.

Here's a damn good recap of the reasons why American foreign policy is successful by Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic. Check it out. (Via FrontPage.)

Everyone, by now, knows all about the wave of terrorist attacks that has hit Riyadh, Casablanca, and Israel over the past few days. The Spanish press has immediately jumped, en masse, to the conclusion that the War on Terrorism has been a failure so far. Wrong. We know the terrorists aren't completely beaten. They've been badly hurt by the defeats of their supporters, the Taliban and Saddam, and by the international police offensive against the various terrorist gangs. But we haven't got all of them yet, or anywhere near all of them.

The United States and Great Britain never promised that overthrowing Saddam would bring an instant end to terrorist attacks. Far from it. I bet you could find five on-the-record quotes from Powell or Rummy or Fleischer or Bush himself saying precisely the opposite, that we've weakened terrorism but have by no means completely defeated it yet.

Several people have made the point, which I heartily concur with, that there's a major difference in scale between this latest wave of attacks and what happened on September 11, 2001. On September 11, within United States territory, they hijacked four planes and crashed them all, three of them into buildings full of people. It was the greatest terrorist blow that has ever been struck, requiring years of planning, twenty fanatical volunteers, and huge quantities of money and the ability to move it around and exchange it for weapons and other needs. Three thousand people were killed.

Now the best they can do are badly carried-out attacks within Arab territory that kill a couple, three dozen people. Tragic. A damned shame. We will get the people who did this. In fact, we already got most of them. But the terrorists' reach is no longer what it was. And we can thank Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair for that, and we can thank Mr. Aznar for throwing Spain firmly behind Britain and America.

Over here they're playing up the fact that the restaurant that was attacked in Casablanca was called the Casa de España; it has no connection with the Spanish government. Two of the dead were Spanish. Now, it is perfectly obvious that particular restaurant was chosen as the attack site because of its connection with Spain--gee, a Spanish restaurant named after Spain, they choose it to blow up, don't you think they're sending a message? The Aznar government is disingenuously trying to spin the story the other way. Ana Palacio stuck her foot in her mouth again while attempting to "disvinculate" the Casablanca bombing and Spain's pro-Alliance position.

What they ought to do is tell the truth. "Yes, we stuck our necks out against terrorism and on the side of the Alliance. We're proud we did it. Of course this makes us a target, and our security forces are doing everything they can to prevent further terrorist acts. We may not be able to stop them all. There may be more. But that's the price you pay when you make the tough decisions and don't take the easy way out. Spain stood up for honor and decency, against the terrorists and the dictators, in favor of the democratic countries. What do we Spaniards want the world to think about us? That we're courageous people who stand up for what is right or a bunch of cowards slinking around kissing terrorist ass? Are we like the Poles or like the French?"

I'd vote for any leader who talked like that. I bet a lot of Spanish people, and even a few Catalans, would, too.

Meanwhile, Bob Graham has been shooting off his mouth about how we've let Al Qaeda off the hook by devoting our energies to taking out Saddam. That is extremely shortsighted of Graham. The fight against international terrorism continues; it's just not getting much press because the invasion of Iraq is a much sexier story. Recently, for example, they turned loose the biggest antiterrorist operation in Afghanistan since Tora Bora. Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt also blasted Bush for the same thing.

This is great. There are nine candidates for the Democratic nomination, not counting Al Gore. Dean, Kucinich, Moseley-Braun, and Sharpton are running from the far left. Gep is running as a labor liberal. Graham, John Edwards, and John Kerry are running as Bill Clinton clones; Graham may be trying to trend left in the buildup to the primary season, to become the "realistic" candidate embraced by the mainline Dems, rather to the left of most Americans, when they finally figure out that Kooch and Red Howie Dean and Brother Al and Expense-Account Carol and the Gepper are all unelectable as President. Your typical mainline Dem would really prefer one of these five candidates, but he'll have to throw his vote to the electable guy who's farthest left. That's who Big Bad Bob, the Graham Cracker, wants to be.

Gore can beat Graham and Kerry and Edwards, among the electable candidates, if he decides to run; he'd pick up the mainstream Dem vote as the leftiest and most electable of these four guys. Can any of these four guys beat Bush, barring massive disaster or a deep economic slump? I don't think so. Any of them would run a decent race as the Dem candidate and win in most of the blue states, but they'd all get beaten by Bush.

The only Dem candidate I'm afraid of is Lieberman (the damn Vanguardia guy keeps spelling his name with a double N, I had to go look it up to be sure I was right about the single N). Lieberman will win most of the blue states, just like any Dem candidate would, but he's moderate enough to run well in the industrial Midwest, Florida, the more progressive Western states (CO, AZ, NM, maybe even MT) and the border states. None of the rest of those guys will win anything but California, New York, and your Marylands and Minnesotas and Massachussetses. If Lieberman wins the nomination those places where he can challenge Bush will be the battlefield, since Bush sweeps the South, Texas, the Plains, and the less progressive West, and will also put up a fight in everywhere I mentioned, plus the Northwest and even the Northeast. Maybe even California. Bush won't go down easily, and Lieberman is the only Dem candidate who has a chance of beating him.

Why am I so afraid of Lieberman? I might end up voting for him.

Anyway, the Socialists, of course, have jumped all over the Casablanca bombing and are accusing Aznar of getting Spanish citizens murdered. Aznar is hitting back by promising to crack down on illegal immigration, which is populist as hell. Felipe González is striking the most cowardly note, accusing Aznar of irresponsibly making the terrorists mad. Other cowards include the Communists, Convergence and Union, and the Pene Uve. Zap is trying to make George Bush the villain and is running against him almost as much as he's running against Aznar himself.

Gotta hand one thing to Zap and his SocioCommunists--they're running as a Popular Front, basically, except in the Basque Country, where the Socialists are anti-ETA and the Commies are waffling--is that they've managed to convert these elections, which are for all the municipalities in Spain and for thirteen of the seventeen autonomous regions, into almost a referendum on the Aznar government. Of course local and regional issues are going to influence the voters, but the Socialists have managed to capitalize on a strong anti-Aznar feeling on the left and center-left, just as visceral as the Democrats' hate of Bush. They're going to get people out to vote against Aznar in these elections, no question about it.

I will make several predictions, more specific than the last lot, which I figure will be borne out. The three most powerful positions that are actually in play, the Valencia region, the Madrid region, and Madrid city, will be held by the PP. The PP will win at least three of the eight Andalusian capital cities as well as both of those in Extremadura. The Popular Front, with a Communist mayor, wins in Córdoba. The Socialists repeat in their strongholds of Extremadura's and Castile-La Mancha's regional governments--Socialist home base Andalusia, as well as Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque country, are the four "historical communities" that are holding their regional elections on different dates. Three-way tossup in the Canaries, the PP, the Socialists, and the Canarian Coalition. The Socialists take Aragon. The PP takes the Balearics and Navarra. The PP takes San Sebastian and Vitoria with the support of the Socialists; the Socialists take Bilbao with PP support. The Socialists take most of the Galician cities in alliance with the Galician wacko nationalists, and the Socialists take Asturias and its cities, Oviedo and Gijón. The PP takes its home ground, Castile-Leon, Cantabria, and La Rioja. The Socialists repeat in Barcelona and Gerona, and Convergence repeats in Lérida and Tarragona.

Thus saith Iberian Notes. Hey, we called the 2002 Congressional elections right on the nose and were one of the few and the proud to speculate (didn't have the guts to actually put our money where our mouth was) that Le Pen would outpoll Jospin in the last French elections. Also, the very moment CNN predicted Gore had taken Florida, I said we were gonna be up all night and that this one was going to the wire. All my liberal friends were yelling that it was going to be a Gore sweep. How wrong they were. However, I'd also predicted a clear Bush victory, not a close one and certainly not such a squeaker. Also, all our soccer predictions have gone dreadfully wrong except for all the times we predicted the Barça would lose.