Arts and Letters Daily links to this Stephen Schwartz article, which was written as a response to the Eric Hobsbawm piece (in the Guardian, of course) on the Spanish Civil War that we commented on a few days ago.

Schwartz justifiably carves up Hobsbawm's ignorance of the subject and his parroting of the Stalinist line in his piece, but he repeats his own set of clichés in praise of the non-Stalinist revolutionary left. These groups, the Socialist PSOE, the anarchist CNT-FAI and semi-Trotskyist POUM, committed as many atrocities as the Communists did, and were no more democratic. Their middle-class allies, Manuel Azaña's Republican Left and Lluís Companys's Esquerra Republicana, were also guilty of collaboration with the assorted revolutionary groups and of a good few atrocities of their own; they were not democrats, but Jacobins, believers in radical change carried out by an intellectual vanguard--that is, themselves.

Of course, Schwartz admits none of this; he and Hobsbawm are both wrong. They merely sympathize with two different factions of revolutionary leftists. Neither understands that in 1936, Spain was sharply divided between Left and Right, that the Right had some pretty good arguments in its favor, and the Left had had a disastrous record since 1931. Nor will either admit that both sides, Right and Left, committed enormous atrocities during the war and deserve equal moral condemnation, or that when forced to choose between Franco, the Communists (who quickly dominated the PSOE and the Jacobins after the July 17 coup failed), or the CNT-POUM, a lot of people chose Franco. Most of those who chose Franco were working and middle-class center to right-wingers who had sympathized with the conservative CEDA, populist Radicals, or right-Catalanist Lliga Catalana before the war. (The Basque PNV originally threw in with the Republicans in 1936, and then pretty much switched sides in 1937.)

Quotes from Schwartz's article:

Hobsbawm embodies a principle on which I and others have long written: the distinction that must be made between the war of 1936-39 as experienced by the Spanish people, and the parallel conflict fantasized by intellectuals of a leftist persuasion mainly (and now retrospectively) situated, to paraphrase Trotsky, in the Bronx of the Young Communist League. The two had and have nothing in common.

That's Schwartz's thesis statement, and it's true enough.

This band of memory-murderers have never come to grips with the fundamental lie of Stalinist propaganda, which holds that the Republicans would have won the war if they had submitted to dictation from Moscow – a claim every educated Spanish individual knows to be absurd.

Schwartz is starting to go off track here. Yes, he's right about the Stalinists, but notice his last phrase there. Actually, there's still a lot of debate among historians between three theses: A) The Republicans would have won the war if they'd submitted to direction from Moscow. B) The Republicans would have won the war if they'd told Moscow to take a hike C) There was no way the Republicans were going to win the war no matter what. Hobsbawm believes A. Schwartz believes B. I tend to go for C. The problem with A is that they pretty much did submit to Moscow after the May 1937 mini-civil war in Barcelona, and the problem with B was that the CNT, POUM, and PSOE-Communist militias never once stopped a Francoist advance. Note Schwartz's extensive use of loaded language and his appeal to the spurious authority of "every educated Spanish individual."

But the Spanish, I am glad to say, know better than Hobsbawm what happened; they understand that the war involved five main forces. On the right, the counter-revolutionary military and, outside the Basque country, traditionalist Catholics, were supported by a tiny fascist movement.

By contrast, three distinct trends appeared on the Republican side:
a) the Catalan Left, Basque nationalists, and other liberal bourgeois trends who wanted to carry out a Jacobin-style modernization;
b) the proletarian upsurge of the CNT, Socialists, and POUM;
c) the Stalinist conspiracy to create a one-party dictatorship.

Schwartz has C down pretty well. As for B, what to some is a proletarian upsurge is a murderous rampage to others. I note that the Republicans killed more people in Catalonia, some 8000, than the Francoists did, and that most of them were victims of the CNT and POUM, killed in the last six months of 1936. (The rest were victims of, mostly, the Communists during the rest of the war.) And as for A, they were weak amateurs easily dominated by the much more ruthless and effective Communists.

He's flat wrong about the Right, though. In the January 1936 election that put the Popular Front in power, more than 4,000,000 people voted for the Right, mostly for the CEDA. Several hundred thousand more voted for what have been called Center parties, including the PNV. (Some 4,700,000 people voted for the Popular Front parties.) Not all of them were traditionalist Catholics, and even if they were, that does not mean they should be dismissed. They were simply people who did not believe that a revolution was a good idea, farmers, shopkeepers, skilled workers, professionals, and a good few manual workers.

The Right challenged the fairness of that election, by the way. ("The second round runoff contests were held at the end of the month under leftist supervision and considerable pressure from the leftist street mob." --Stanley Payne. After the Right won in Granada and Cuenca, the results in those provinces were invalidated by the Left.)

As for the army, the whole problem was that it was not united behind the July 17 coup. If it had been, there would have been virtually no resistance to the coup, and it would likely have gone smoothly with little bloodshed. But the army was divided about half-and-half between Right and Left, though most of the good units (the Legion and the Regulars) were under Rightist control. If the Left hadn't had some of the army. along with some of the Civil Guard and all of the Storm Troopers (the Republic's own police force), they'd have had nothing whatever to resist the coup.

Moscow tried to unite a) with c) to overcome b), but a) and b) had more in common with each other, and the attempt failed. Stalin, however, succeeded in effectively sabotaging the Republican defense; his discreet 1938 message to Hitler indicating Soviet willingness to withdraw support for the Republic was a crucial step.

No. A and C did unite under Moscow's leadership after May 1937, and B was crushed. Also, Stalin didn't sabotage the Republic so much as he used it for his own purposes. He would have been more than happy to see the Communists win in Spain, but he certainly wasn't willing to invest the money and take the necessary risks to do so.

As to the POUM, it is in discussing this phenomenon that Hobsbawm reveals the extent of his obliviousness about the Spanish civil war. He refers with something approaching disdain to “the murder of its leader Andrés Nin [having] caused some international protest.” In reality, as is well-known in Spain today, protests over the brutal murder of Andreu Nin were commoner in Catalonia than outside Spain, and the Catalan Stalinists never overcame the ignominy the crime brought down upon them.

Yes, Nin was brutally murdered by Comintern agents after the POUM was crushed in May 1937. The problem is that he and his Leninist-Trotskyist POUM were a gang of brutal murderers themselves, who had no qualms about shedding innocent blood to make the revolution. Note how Schwartz keeps going on and on about conventional wisdom in Spain and citing it as an authority.

In 1945, a faction of the POUM formed the Moviment Socialista de Catalunya, which helped organize a Stalinist-free Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) that was joined by other prominent POUM members in 1976. The PSC happens to govern Catalonia today. The outstanding historical figure of the post-Franco Catalan Socialists, Pasqual Maragall, served as an extremely popular mayor of Barcelona and president of the Catalan regional Generalitat, and has written and spoken vividly about the relevance of the POUM for modern Catalan politics.

Oh, come on. Today's PSC is run by José Montilla, the exact opposite of a fiery revolutionary. The PSC has absolutely nothing to do with the POUM. Pasqual Maragall a POUMista? It is to laugh. The PSC is a moderate European social democratic party, much like in Germany or Italy.

The Spanish people fought for three years, in a libertarian fashion – not limited to the CNT and POUM militias, but also in the militia formations of the Esquerra, the PSOE, and the Basque Nationalists, alongside the “traditional” Republican military units to which the Stalinists were so attached. As the Spanish today know very well, the militia units generally fought better than the militarized units. In particular, the Stalinist-controlled International Brigades and the militarized Republican soldiery with whom they were coordinated were known for incompetence in battle, desertion, and, in the case of many of the foreigners, their reassignment to special groups ordered by the Russians to kill leftist dissidents, since the Spanish would not carry out such duties.

Schwartz has gone round the bend into his own myth-making. 1) The Spanish people? Including the half of them who supported Franco? 2) The militias were lousy. They never won a battle. 3) The Republican Army and the International Brigades were pretty lousy too, and the only important battle they won was when they stopped Franco at the gates of Madrid in December 1936. They did, however, hold out for two more years after that lone victory. 4) I have never before read that "the Spanish would not carry out such duties" as forming firing squads. Plenty of people on all sides served in firing squads, of course, since probably more people were murdered behind the lines in the Civil War than were killed in combat.

Says Jordi Casabona in today's El Periódico:

Recently several persons have been seen, totally naked, strolling through the streets of Barcelona. One of them is an older man who, besides wearing old-fashioned shoes and socks, has an ostentatiously pierced penis. A couple of Sundays ago, I saw one on Calle Aragón who was only wearing cowboy boots and glasses. He was tall, about 30 years old, and he walked with a mixture of arrogance and dignity.

A few days an American friend who had been staying in our city told me, speechless, that he had seen the man with the old-fashioned shoes and socks and the pierced penis walking calmly down Calle Ferran. Not only could he not conceive that the passers-by practically ignored him, but that he managed to walk 100 meters without a patrol of policemen jumping on him.

I cold not avoid being surprised one more time how in our society there is frequently much more tolerance for individual behavior than for many people's ways of thinking or believing. Just the opposite of what happens in my American friend's society.

Interesting. Mr. Casabona says that American society is more tolerant of dissident thought or belief, while Spanish society is more tolerant of individual behavior. Spain is certainly tolerant of individual behavior; you can do pretty much whatever you want here. It really is more tolerant, in this sense, than the Midwest; in the Midwest most people wouldn't appreciate gentlemen walking around town indecently exposed. Or teenagers smoking hash in the plazas, or neighborhood fiestas that don't close down until 4 AM, or hardcore porno on the newsstands, or all the drag queens fruiting it up around here. (I swear Spanish society is really into cross-dressing, much more so than you might imagine.) I bet in New York or LA nobody would care.

He's right when he says that the spectrum of opinion in Spain is narrower than in the US, at least among high- and middle-brow circles. Pretty much, over here, you know exactly what most folks who claim to be educated think about every issue. Against the Iraq war, against global warming, against the Church, against big corporations, for bestiality. They all have exactly the same ideas, some sort of vaguely socialist do-gooding pacifist Catalan-but-multicultural green utopian dream.

El Periódico also did a photo-opinion section with five "experts" giving their opinion of the Al Gore movie and traveling snake-oil show. Notice the fact that their perspectives are nearly identical; that is, they all believe in Al's version of the issue. Some are a little more fanatical than others, though.

Josep Garriga, Climate Change Office: "He has done all of us working against climactic change a big favor. (The movie) is aimed at the US audience and those in the federal government who do not believe in (climactic) change. The data he presents are correct, though arguable."

A. Rodríguez Picó, TV meteorologist: "It must be seen, though it is a very American viewpoint. We must extrapolate here in Catalonia because here our society is different. If 2006 was the year of awareness, 2007 must be the year of action. We must change our habits. I sold my car."

Josep Enric Llebot, Autonomous University professor: "It is quite accurate, though sometimes it uses (future) impacts in an exaggerated manner, going to extreme situations. It's a good strategy for convincing people and showing them how we must act as individuals. It is in our hands."

Jose Luis Gallego, environmental journalist: "Climate change is more of an ethical revolution than an ecological one. There is only one truth, which may be uncomfortable for some. The movie and the book are magnificent. The message reaches everyone who has some conscience."

Miguel Á. Rodríguez, researcher: "It has broken down the barriers between scientists and society. The latter is only interested in what celebrities say. At a scientific level, the issue is super-decided. Within 15 years Bush will be criticized more for not signing the Kyoto protocol than Iraq."

So the range of enlightened opinion is:

Mr. Garriga is a true believer. He thinks sin is bad and those who fight it are good.
Mr. Rodríguez Picó wants to mobilize society against sin, and is himself a redeemed ex-sinner.
Mr. Llebot is in favor of lying in order to convince people not to sin.
Mr. Gallego states that there is only one Truth, which can be seen by a non-sinning elect.
Mr. Rodríguez names the Devil himself, the Sinner-in-Chief, who dares to scorn Holy Writ.

We haven't done a blog roundup for at least a week and a half, so here goes.

La Liga Loca has the Spanish football quotes of the week.

Ibex Salad has more on the olive oil market.

Fausta has all the latest Go to Hell Hugo news. It was great to meet Fausta by phone last week. We may do another interview sometime.

Expat Yank goes after a bogus BBC report and a Bush-bashing Boris Johnson piece in the Telegraph.

Davids Medienkritik is being harassed by some pinhead, and gives Der Speigel another well-deserved fisking for its gratuitous anti-Americanism. ¡No Pasarán! has more on the pinhead and his attacks on Medienkritik.

As he does every day, Colin Davies comments from Galicia; today it's about Spanish demos and quack pseudo-medical products.

Chicago Boyz has an excellent post on how the Left has gotten both Vietnam and Iraq wrong.

The Brussels Journal opines on the release of Red Army Fraction terrorists in Germany, and on lessons we could learn from Herotodus.

A Fistful of Euros nominates the Belgians as the unlikely heroes of the row over admitting Serbia to the UN.

Publius Pundit reports on women's rights protestors in Iran--where are the American feminists when you need them?--and on "Neo-Soviet Russia."

Playing Chess with the Dead points out a contradiction in the March 11 conspiracy theory. The author, Graeme, has also been summarizing each day of the trial; here's Monday's report.

Pejman likes the free market.

One of the most notorious works of pornography in English is My Secret Life by "Walter," an anonymous Victorian gentleman. The book was first published in 1888, and the, uh, action takes place between about 1840 and 1870. Walter commits literally thousands of sexual acts through the course of his sexual memoir, some of which are obviously fantasy but others of which ring true. In fact, you can learn a great deal about Victorian society by reading My Secret Life. There's your excuse! It's historical research!

Notes: a) Most of the women Walter has sex with are either professional prostitutes or women he offers money to b) Many of the rest of them are domestic servants c) Walter is a serial sexual harasser, and might well be accused of rape today d) He definitely uses his money and social position to exploit poorer women e) The lower classes seem to have few taboos about sex in Walter's world f) Walter doesn't classify people into hetero and homosexual; he is willing to engage in sex play with men occasionally, but not to participate in anal sex, which he thinks is dirty and shameful. I think today he would identify as hetero rather than bi g) Nobody in Walter's world knows even the most basic information about venereal diseases h) There are no new sexual practices. Walter partakes of just about everything possible. He's not into flagellation, but digs spanking i) Walter's courtship technique, when seducing a woman of more or less his social class, consists of making bawdy comments to her, grabbing her and kissing her by force, and then pulling out his wanger. He claims it works for him. I don't think so. One problem with pornography is that it portrays everyone as sex-obsessed and always ready for it. I really believe that idiot sexual harassers believe that the stuff portrayed in porno is all true, and think if they whip out their whackers women will be ready to service them j) There's a lot of great vocabulary in the book. I have added the verb "to gamahouche" to my personal lexicon. Now, instead of using "Yo' mama wears army boots" as an all-purpose insult, you can say, "Yo' mama gamahouches Rosie O'Donnell."

Not really much exciting news from around here. Rajoy has called another big old right-wing demo for Saturday in Madrid in opposition to the Zap government's decision to grant De Juana Chaos "second degree" prisoner status. I totally disagree with Zap's justification for his decision: that he did not want to create an ETA martyr. Yeah, great, now what you've done is turn a martyr into an ETA hero. I would much prefer him as a martyr.

Meanwhile, Zap has threatened to expose all manner of secret information about past PP negotiations with ETA while Aznar was in power. I'm not sure that's necessary, since Rajoy has said many times: that was then, and this is now, and we have learned something since then. Have you?

At the 3/11 trial, the head cops have been testifying anonymously about how they went about the business of the investigation, helping to sink the ridiculous ETA-PSOE-Bavarian Illuminati conspiracy coverup story that irresponsible elements of the right are pushing.

Comment: I met Jose from Barcepundit last night for a quick beer. We both agree that we are displeased with the PP leadership, and that we particularly cannot understand why the PP is doing so badly in the polls against the Zap administration. The Zap government is so bad, so weak, so incompetent, and Zap himself is so innocent and childish, that any competent political opposition would already have them dead and buried. If you have Barcepundit and Iberian Notes displeased with you, and you are a conservative party in Spain, you are doing something very wrong.

A couple of years ago there was bragging in some parts on the Continent about how the EU's new model of Airbus was going to really show the United States this time. Haven't heard much of that lately, as Airbus is cutting jobs all over. What an awful name, by the way. The whole point of going by air is that it beats the hell out of the bus. Why remind airline passengers of the very form of transport they're trying to avoid?

Airport comment: La Vangua and TV3 are kicking up a snit because 1) Barcelona doesn't have many intercontinental flights 2) Iberia has decided to hub out of Madrid and feed Barcelona traffic through there 3) Barcelona fears being reduced to the home of low-cost flights for cheap tourists like me and the east end of the Madrid-Barcelona air shuttle 4) All Spain's airports are managed by AENA, a state-owned company based in Madrid 5) Therefore, there must be some evil centralist Madrid plot keeping Barcelona down again.

My opinion: Of course each airport in Spain should manage itself, and that management should be in private hands. AENA should instantly be sold off, like all other state-owned companies, including Radiotelevisión Española and the EFE news agency. However, this issue isn't related to any of the airport complaints Barcelona currently has, and it's not like the locals want Barcelona airport management to be in private hands; they want it to be in the hands of the Catalan regional government, which would mean the airport would be run badly by bureaucrats speaking Catalan, instead of being run badly by bureaucrats speaking Spanish.

But the big news is the Liverpool-Barça Champions League match tonight. Liverpool beat Barça 1-2 in the first leg in the Camp Nou, and Barça needs to score two goals tonight at Anfield Road. That is not going to be easy. Liverpool is a good team. Tonight Barça has Eto'o and Messi, though, who they didn't have in the first leg. Barça is just coming off a tough away loss at Sevilla, who took over a two-point lead in first place, and on Saturday they play Real Madrid in what is always the biggest league fixture of the season, even if Barça is struggling and Madrid is sunk.

La Vanguardia gives the match a large front-page color photo, and then five full pages in the sports section. No question what they think the important story is.

Ann Coulter has really put her foot in it this time. Just plain tasteless behavior. You don't call a presidential candidate a "faggot." And the people who clapped shouldn't have. This is going to make conservatives look just great. Now Dem party leader Howard Dean gets a chance to get all puffed up and self-righteous, and call conservatives bigots. Obviously, the Republican Party should say nothing, since Ms. Coulter does not represent it. Methinks it is about time for reasonable elements of the party to distance themselves from her, though, since she's volatile and good at saying the wrong thing. National Review fired her a few years back for intemperate language.

Ten Things It's OK To Call John Edwards:

10. A flip-flopping asswipe
9. A hypocritical turdlicker
8. A Cleveland Steamer
7. A pussy
6. A lying piece of shit
5. A Democrat
4. One of those guys who's not going to get into heaven through the eye of a needle
3. Smegma
2. Almost as big an asshole as Jimmy Carter

And at Number One:

1. A lawyer!

I slightly botched the De Juana Chaos story yesterday; I can only plead that the story was still breaking then. De Juana Chaos has been given "second degree" prisoner status. This means that he has been sent to a hospital in the Basque Country, and when he is strong enough to leave hospital, he will be released from prison in order to serve out his sentence under house arrest.

That sentence, remember, is three years for writing threatening letters. De Juana Chaos will probably have to serve about a year of that in the comfortable surroundings of his home. He has called off his hunger strike, since he got what he wanted.

I must point out that the Zap government and the judiciary have behaved legally at all times throughout this mess. According to the legal code in existence when De Juana Chaos did those 25 murders, he couldn't be forced to serve more than thirty, and he had the same rights to time off for good behavior as any other prisoner. He has served his sentence, after those eighteen years he spent in prison are up. Unfortunately, that is the law. Now the question is what about that extra sentence for the threatening letters? Well, he was going to do twelve, and now he's going to do one year, at home. Looks to me like he won.

The PP's weak spot in their record is the fact that they freed a bunch of ETA prisoners when they were in power under similar conditions. Their answers are 1) yes, we were negotiating with them then, and look how they made fools of us. We've learned from that experience, and now you Socialists should, too, and 2) the laws forced us to turn loose the prisoners that we released because they had served their murder sentences, just like De Juana Chaos. But the ones we released didn't have extra charges hanging over them for terroristic threats, unlike De J. C.

La Vanguardia actually has pretty good coverage on the US presidential campaign, with Eusebio Val on page 3 on McCain. He got page 4 for an interview with Newt Gingrich, whom he bills as "an intellectual agitator of the right," which is fair enough.

Quotes: Val: Are you worried that the image of the United States has gotten worse in recent years?
Gingrich: "I am worried that the image of the United States government has gotten worse. I don't think the image of the country has gotten worse. There has been no decline in the number of people who want to come here as immigrants. There has been no decline in the number of people applying for visas. We have recovered the number of student applications. But it is obvious that the US government has failed miserably at explaining our values and beliefs."

Val: You defend the centrality of God in American political life. What do you mean by that? Doesn't that contradict the principle of separation between church and state that the United States was founded on?
Gingrich: "That statement is historically false. The United States was founded on a document that says that our Creator gave us certain inalienable rights. It was the Declaration of Independence. How can you explain where your rights come from, if not from your Creator? The United States, in fact, is a unique civilization that God gives power to you as a person, you are sovereign and you cede power to the government. It's very different from the European model...The French Revolution did not work here. We are not a secular society."

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with Gingrich here. a) There most certainly is a separation between church and state in the US. b) Taking your religious beliefs into account when you vote is not an interference with this separation. c) I'm no expert here, but the Founders were mostly some sort of deist or Unitarian or Quaker or something like that. They did share what we would call Christian ethical ideals, and they believed in some kind of higher power. It's important to remember that the Revolution occured before the Second Great Awakening, when what we consider fundamentalist American Protestant beliefs began. The Founders certainly did not intend for America to be a politically Christian country, but they didn't say anything about how they thought individuals should behave regarding religion. All they said about that was that everyone had the right to practice his own. They also didn't intend for American to be anti-Christian, either, unlike those wacky French Revolutionaries. Nor did they practice ritual sacrifice, again unlike the decapitators.

Xavier Batalla gets page 6 for a piece on Arthur M. Schlesinger, saying that he "died at age 89 without ever having left Camelot," which is pretty accurate. Andy Robinson gets page 9 to inform us that New York is allegedly full of rats, mice, and bedbugs. He claims that the UN building is infested by eels.

Industry minister, former Barcelona mayor, and general foo-foo Joan Clos called on everybody to join in "No Mobile Phone Day" in protest against the decision by the three big operators, Movistar, Vodafone, and Orange, to raise the rate for completing a call to 15 cents in order to compensate for the revenue they will lose because of a new law forbidding them to round up fractions.

1) What did they expect? If you cut down a company's revenues by legal regulation, it will take advantage of another (still legal) source of income in order to get back to the same revenue level. 2) Clos's personal participation in the protest will be to "cut back" his own mobile phone use, since his extremely important and very taxing job forces him to keep it on at all times in case some message with deep significance is coming through urgently. What an example of sacrifice for the youth of today. 3) Where the hell is the anti-trust office? Seems a bit suspicious that the three big companies all raised prices at the same time by the same amount.

Problems with members of the underclass who do not live according to the standards of mainstream society: A 19-year old man married an 11-year-old girl according to the "gypsy rite" in Lleida. Both families involved had agreed to the marriage. So had the patriarchs of the clan. So the social workers found out and the case went to court; the man has been sentenced to 1 year and 9 months in prison for statutory rape, since 13 is the age of consent in Spain. Now wait a minute. The people involved didn't think they'd done anything wrong. The whole clan attended the wedding, held in public. Yes, I know the law is the law, but you'd think they'd let the man off with a warning and a lecture about how people are supposed to behave. Fortunately, the girl and her family have been moved away from the husband. But the family were the ones who agreed to her getting married in the first place! What a complicated mess. You can't allow behavior repugnant to the mainstream and its laws to go on, but at the same time you're dealing with people with a completely different set of ethical standards, and it's hard to judge them by ours. So I guess the compromise is to break up illegal marriages, but don't jail people.

Just in case you folks were starting to think that the US was somehow uniquely violent, check out these headlines from today's La Vanguardia:

Civil Guard Shot to Death in Salou
Maximum Sentence for Rapist Out on Parole
Failed Kidnapping in Vic
Seven Neo-Nazi Youth Arrested
Saleswoman Beaten to Death in Sabadell
Gang of Robbers of More Than 20 Houses Arrested in Baix Llobregat

They're transferring De Juana Chaos to a hospital in Bilbao; he's been conceded less strict prison conditions. Note: He has not been released or paroled. He's still a prisoner. They've just moved him to medium security, which allows him to go to a different prison closer to his family's home. He is expected to continue his hunger strike, and to die from it one of these days pretty soon.

Zap came to Catalonia yesterday. He talked about expanding the Barcelona airport in very vague terms, and added some even vaguer stuff about how the Generalitat, Catalonia's regional government, would participate in airport administration. He did not mention the commuter trains crisis, which erupted again yesterday with three fires, hour-long delays on every line, and more angry passengers blocking the rails at the Paseo de Gracia station in downtown Barcelona. Two of the fires are suspected to be sabotage.

They're at the place in the 3/11 trial where the coal miners, who swapped the dynamite used in the explosions to the Madrid Islamist cell for hashish, get up on the stand and say they are innocent. Nobody believes them. Meanwhile, investigating magistrate Del Olmo has indicted another conspirator, Abdelilah Hriz, who is currently in prison in Morocco. His DNA shows up on a comb found in the Leganés apartment where seven of the bombers blew themselves up a month after the bombings, and on a pair of trousers found at the house in Morata de Tajuña where the terrorists actually put together the bombs.

Sevilla coach Juande Ramos was released from the hospital this morning; he is apparently all right. He says he doesn't remember the goal scored by his striker, Kanouté, which caused the Betis fans to start throwing shit on the field, including the bottle that KOed Ramos. I'll be disgusted if very strict measures are not taken at Betis, including the forfeit of the match in question.

The Spanish press has picked up on the story about Al Gore's using twelve times as much electricity as the average household.

The cops busted a clan of 38 Kosovars who have robbed more than 150 houses all over Spain. They were a well-organized gang, with a network of safe houses, a fleet of cars with phony registrations, lots of useful electronic and construction equipment (including a jackhammer), and a cell structure--they were divided into subgroups whose members did not know the members of the others. Apparently these guys have links to other Kosovar gangs operating in other European countries. Some good work by the cops. Now let's see how long these guys stay in jail.

All right, I've had enough. I love sports. I'm a big sports fan. I've been to see three Barça games this season and had a good time, and I'm happy to pay what it costs to see a game as a special treat every now and then. In Kansas City, I'm always ready to go to a Royals game, and I'd certainly go to a Chiefs game if tickets were available, which they're not. I'm always in for KU (University of Kansas) football, too, and would be in for basketball if I could get tickets, which I can't.

Well, you know, this season things have gotten a bit ugly here in Europe, as usual. Earlier this season a black French cop shot dead a rioter who was part of a lynch mob that was trying to kill him and a Jewish fan at a Paris Saint-Germain game. Then a police officer was killed in rioting between the Catania and Palermo hooligan gangs in Italy a couple of weeks ago, blown up by a homemade explosive.

Tonight I turned on the TV at 9:30 for the second leg of the Zaragoza-Barcelona tie in the quarterfinals of the Spanish Copa del Rey, the national Cup. Zaragoza led Barça 1-0 going into this match after a very strong game in the first leg; they proved they were a tough team that knew how to stay organized. They're in sixth place in the League out of 20 teams, which is proof that they're well above average. The match should be exciting, right?

Well, it was. Barça beat Zaragoza 1-2 to advance to the semifinals, on goals by two of my favorite players, Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta, Barça's homegrown midfield geniuses. The game got a little rough, one of the Zaragoza players got red-carded, but hell, you can be a good sport and get a bit rough as long as everyone shakes hands afterward, right?

Unfortunately, tonight at the Betis-Sevilla tie, held at Betis's Ruiz de Lopera stadium, somebody threw a bottle out of the stands and cold-cocked Sevilla coach Juande Ramos, a well-known and respected man in Spanish football. Ramos was knocked unconscious. The match was immediately suspended, of course.

Mr. Ramos is OK, fortunately.

This is too much. I know we fans say this all the time, that we are sick of these violent scumbags mixing in with us, but maybe it is time for the clubs to kick the violent scumbag supporters' hooligan squads, like the Boixos Nois, out of the stadiums.

Maybe FC Barcelona, since we're all peace and love and understanding and contribute to Unicef and all, should be the very first club to kick the hooligan squad out. Ban the Boixos Nois from the stadium. Then let's see if the other clubs follow our example.

I'm less interested in football than I was earlier today. I don't know if I can explain it, but you know, it just doesn't seem worth it if people are getting hurt.

Fausta has a link to our podcast and her comments on it, so check it out if you haven't already. I thought it went very well; the only thing I didn't get a chance to mention was the humanitarian tragedy of the boat people, probably several thousand in 2006, who die at sea while trying to reach the Canary Islands from Africa. I'm not blaming Spain for this; Spain's coast guard and navy do what they can to pick up these folks, but they can't save them all. It's the whole world's problem, not just ours.

I don't get it. El Periódico devoted its first eight pages to the Academy Awards today, and La Vanguardia published a special sixteen-page insert. I thought we all agreed that Hollywood was shallow Yankee capitalist opiate for the people.

My personal comment on both the Academy Awards and the Grammys: It's quite obvious that prizes are being awarded--for instance, to Al Gore, Melissa Etheridge, Jimmy Carter, and the Dixie Chicks--as a reward for the politics of the recipient. This, of course, devalues the things even more, since they are just PR ceremonies held to garner media attention anyway.

The Basque Nationalists (PNV) and Communists (IU) are demanding that mass-murdering terrorist Iñaki de Juana Chaos be released from prison. Shows you something about where they stand on the issue of antiterrorism, I think.

Day 6 of the March 11 trial: The brains behind the plot, Rabei Osman "the Egyptian", along with four small fry, Bouharat, Slimane, and the Moussaten brothers testified, and denied all responsibility. Mohamed Moussaten claimed that he had confessed previously because he had been tortured. Note to those who believe everything they hear out of Guantanamo Bay: Torture claims are just as bogus there as they are here.

Esquerra Republicana has a proposal that I actually agree with. They want to prohibit killing the bull in bullfighting, along with the pìcadores and the banderilleros; that is, do it Portuguese style. Come on, people, that ought to be good enough, watching the torero do his passes and show his courage as he faces the bull. In fact, it takes a lot more guts to stand in front of a bull who hasn't already been stuck full of holes, I think. I don't want to completely ban bullfighting, I understand that it is an integral part of Spanish culture, but we don't have to kill the bull to have bullfights.

Twelve domestic murders so far this year in Spain. Two yesterday. A strangulation in Pontevedra and a burning alive in Badalona, a suburb of Barcelona.

La Vanguardia reports that when the commuter trains snarl up, as they have been doing repeatedly so far in 2007, more people drive to work and Barcelona city traffic goes straight to hell. There is some sort of grassroots mass movement going on, with people boarding trains without paying for tickets in protest against lousy train service.

Remei and I went to the Barcelona-Athletic Bilbao game on Sunday night, and a good time was had by all since Barça won 3-o. Everyone played well, Ronaldinho was back in form, and Eto'o started the game and scored an excellent goal on a pass from R. Barcelona opened up a two-point lead on Sevilla, and extended its lead on Real Madrid and Valencia as well. The next test is Zaragoza in the Copa del Rey; Barça will have to beat Zaragoza by two in order to make the quarterfinals. Remei had never been to a game at the Camp Nou before, and she was very impressed by the show.

Check out this article by Lang Whitaker in Sports Illustrated comparing FC Barcelona to the New York Yankees.

Quote: This morning, Barcelona remains in first place, after a 3-0 win Sunday night, capped by typically sparkling play from Ronaldinho and a goal from Eto'o in his return to the starting lineup. The Yankees will soon return to the diamond to battle the Red Sox. Gallons of ink will be used on both teams, trying to explain why we should care about either of them. The words within the stories will not matter that much, as it will be a combination of bold letters and color photos on the back page that will move product.

And whether it's in Spanish or English, it's the commerce that matters, after all.

In just a few minutes Fausta is going to interview Jose Guardia of Barcepundit and yours truly; we're going to do a podcast on what's going on in Spain, especially the March 11 trial, and you'll get a chance to call in! We start at 6 PM Barcelona time, which would be 5 London time and 12 noon New York time, so don't miss it. Of course, it will be archived, so you'll be able to listen to it any time you want even if you can't tune in live.

The Wall Street Journal has two must-read pieces up. One is by Bret Stephens; he explains several important differences between Anglo-American common law and Continental European civil law, focusing on the role of the investigating magistrate, a position that does not exist in the Anglo-American system. Juan del Olmo was the Spanish investigating magistrate in the March 11 bombing, and Baltasar Garzón is Spain's most famous investigating magistrate. Spanish law is almost exactly the same as French; Stephens's article focuses on a French magistrate named Jean-Louis Bruguiere.

Quote: Consider the powers granted to Mr. Bruguiere and his colleagues. Warrantless wiretaps? Not a problem under French law, as long as the Interior Ministry approves. Court-issued search warrants based on probable cause? Not needed to conduct a search. Hearsay evidence? Admissible in court. Habeas corpus? Suspects can be held and questioned by authorities for up to 96 hours without judicial supervision or the notification of third parties. Profiling? French officials commonly boast of having a "spy in every mosque." A wall of separation between intelligence and law enforcement agencies? France's domestic and foreign intelligence bureaus work hand-in-glove. Bail? Authorities can detain suspects in "investigative" detentions for up to a year. Mr. Bruguiere once held 138 suspects on terrorism-related charges. The courts eventually cleared 51 of the suspects--some of whom had spent four years in preventive detention--at their 1998 trial.

In the U.S., Mr. Bruguiere's activities would amount to one long and tangled violation of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution.

Nick Cohen, meanwhile, accuses the British left of allying with reactionary Islamism; since the enemy of the enemy is my friend, the left and the Islamists have formed a strange partnership against the Western civilization both despise so much.

Over at Front Page, Aaron Hanscom reports on the March 11 trial. Definitely check this one out.

Everybody in Barcelona is talking about a completely senseless murder that happened yesterday. Some guy, who is apparently a mental patient / homeless bum / drug addict, pushed another man onto the subway tracks at Navas station on the red line, and the train ran over him. They have no idea why; the two did not know one another. Other passengers chased the murderer down and held him on the ground until the cops showed up.

The other thing everyone's talking about is the awful Barcelona commuter train system; there was another massive delay yesterday on two of the suburban train lines. That makes about twelve major screwups on the Renfe commuter trains this year so far. This time a bunch of passengers got pissed off and blocked the train tracks at Martorell, thereby holding things up even more, of course. That's what happens when the government runs the trains or any other industry that should be in private hands.

In Italy, Romano Prodi and his lefties have cut a deal with the Christian Democrats to form a new government. The price: Italian troops stay in Afghanistan. The lefty bill granting rights and privileges to unmarried couples (homo and hetero) gets shot down. The high-speed train from Turin to Lyon will be built. There will be more unspecified economic liberalization. According to La Vanguardia, the Church is the big winner. I will never understand Italian politics.

Headline in La Vanguardia: "US soldier, rapist and murderer in Iraq, may go free in ten years." The story, of course, is that five American soldiers raped and murdered an Iraqi girl in March 2006. Now, of course, whenever you get 135,000 men in one place, a few are going to be bad eggs; the US army hanged some 25 US soldiers in England during World War II for murder or rape, for example.

I think the real story is that justice is being done publicly and swiftly. The soldier who was court-martialed and convicted was sentenced to 100 years in prison; he will be eligible for parole in ten years. This particular rapist talked; he testified against the other four soldiers involved, and got more lenient treatment. A second rapist has been court-martialed and sentenced to ninety years. Rapists three and four are awaiting their court martials, and rapist number five, who was also the shooter, will be tried before a US civilian court in Kentucky and may well get the death penalty.

The ironic part here is, of course, the fact that in Spain nobody serves more than thirty years in prison, by law, no matter how many people he kills. And La Vangua is scandalized that this US rapist may get out in ten, which I doubt will happen. They call this rape-murder "one of the most atrocious episodes of the Iraq war." Atrocious it most certainly is, but it rather pales in comparison with the terrorist bombings that kill dozens of people in Baghdad markets every week.

The right--the PP and AVT--is holding yet another demo in Madrid today, supposedly to protest against the reduction of the prison sentence of ETA terrorist Iñaki De Juana Chaos. More symbolic politics that won't do a damn bit of good. Street demos are supposed to be the province of infantile populists on the left, not of serious political organizations that have a real plan to govern the country.

Get this. Families of convicted ETA prisoners get government subsidies in order to go visit the prisoners in jail. Socialist deputy Jesús Loza said, "We are not the only ones who suffer. The (imprisoned) murderers and their mothers suffer, too." Tears are dripping down my cheeks as I type.

TV newsreader Ramon Pellicer will be the new host of the TV3 evening news. Quote: "I would love to report the story of (socialist) Segolene Royal's victory in the French election." Yep, TV3 news is sure neutral and objective. There's a letter to the editor today pointing out that of the 60 minutes devoted to each TV3 newscast, more than 20 go to sports, and most of that to the Barça.

Censorship on Spanish TV, and this after years of bashing Americans for our nonexistent censorship! State-owned TV1 did an interview with loudmouth sports journalist José María García, who criticized a bunch of famous people, from ex-Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez to PP leader Mariano Rajoy to Socialist Interior minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba. They then refused to air the whole interview, since García allegedly "insulted people"; they cut out all the interesting parts and reduced it from two hours to 45 minutes. It's not like Spanish TV doesn't insult people all the time anyway, especially on those cheesy celebrity trash shows where they call each other prostitutes and drug addicts all the time.

Go watch this video called "A World Without America" by 18 Doughty Street. Brilliant. It's currently Number One on YouTube.

Denis Boyles at National Review compares European anti-Americans with the US Democratic party, a comparison we have made here several times. He links to our friends at Eursoc and their take on the fall of the Prodi government in Italy. Eursoc, by the way, has a very nice-looking redesign.

Also at National Review, Clifford May attacks the anti-American spin of nearly all European reporting on Iraq.

Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal takes apart the British nanny state.

Don't miss this wonderful cat video.

Old Marxist Eric Hobsbawm spews misinformation on the Spanish Civil War in the Guardian. Quote: "The wrong side won." No, no, Mr. Hobsbawm, both sides were undemocratic ideology-crazed brutal killers. Your side was even worse than Franco's here in Catalonia, where the Republicans in three years outmurdered the Francoists in forty, and that's not counting the number of anarchists shot by the Communists and vice versa in Catalonia's own little inter-Left civil war. The only thing Hobsbawm says that is true is that the Left won the propaganda war--hell, the Left is still fighting the propaganda war, as the mere existence of Hobsbawm's article demonstrates.

Daniel Johnson in the Weekly Standard blames Europe's weak-willed wobbling on Iran's nuclear program on European scorn for Israel.

Mark Steyn has no respect for America's allies in name only.

You will want to read this article by Edward Jay Epstein in the Wall Street Journal on Spanish investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzón and the Spanish connection to the September 11, 2001 bombings.

The big news today is that a female Spanish soldier, Idoia Rodríguez, was killed yesterday by a mine in Afghanistan. Two other soldiers were injured, not seriously. Private Rodríguez is the first Spanish woman soldier to be killed in action. We appreciate and are grateful for the sacrifice that the Spanish troops in Afghanistan are making and that the Spanish troops in Iraq made before Zap pulled them out. 82 Spanish troops have died in Afghanistan, most of them (62) in the May 2003 crash of a plane taking a group of them back home.

Here in Spain there isn't much talk about supporting the troops; I think a great many Spaniards, especially on the left, are rather scornful and disdainful of the military. It's not hard to understand why: the army was one of the foundations of the Franco regime. However, like the police, the Spanish army has changed a great deal in 30 years. These guys aren't oppressors or imperialists; they're used almost exclusively on peacekeeping missions. Scorning the military today shows a lack of ability to adjust to the present.

Romano Prodi's leftist government in Italy fell yesterday when the Communists (part of his coalition) abstained during a vote on the Italian mission in Afghanistan. I have no idea what's going to happen next. Italian politics make no sense whatsoever to me. The guess around here is that Prodi will try to form a new government, probably with a broader coalition and therefore weaker.

France's very own semi-Fascist, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who finished second in the last French presidential election, called the 9/11 bombings in New York "an incident," and added that the 3000 people who died that day "is what happens in a month in Iraq, and much less than in the bombings of Marseilles and Dresden during the Second World War." Of course, Le Pen would have preferred a Nazi victory. Certain elements in France are still complaining about the civilians who got killed in the fighting in Normandy in 1944. They can all kiss my ass.

The 3/11 trial continues. One of the infrastructure guys, Rachid Aglif, testified yesterday that he had cut the deal to trade several kilos of hashish for the dynamite used in the bombings at the McDonald's in Madrid suburb Carabanchel. He was very persnickety in his insistence that he didn't actually eat there. Four more of the infrastructure guys also testified, and confessed their involvement while trying to downplay it. They are all Moroccan small fry, more small-time criminals than Islamist ideologues.

We're number one! Gràcia leads all Barcelona neighborhoods in the number of squats we have, 53 out of the city's total of 293. In the first month and a half of 2007, the cops closed down 30 of them. Great work, guys.

Corporativism at work: The Barcelona bakers' guild is complaining that some places that sell bread are not part of the guild. There are serious restrictions in Spain on who can sell what; you can't just open up a store and sell pharmaceuticals, newspapers, lottery tickets, or cigarettes, because the number of points of sale is limited. If I want to open a newsstand--well, I can't. I have to buy a license from somebody who's already got one. Or if I've just graduated from pharmacy school and want to run my own pharmacy--same thing. And then Europeans wonder why their economic growth rates are slow compared to the US.

La Vanguardia interviews a local economist who says that Spaniards are the third slowest country in Europe in paying off their debts. He says many small businesses in Spain go under because their clients never pay them, and claims that only 23% of such debts go to court, where fewer than half of those are resolved, and only 35% of the money owed in the cases resolved is ever paid back. In the construction industry, clients take an average of 225 days to pay their bills. An industry that exists in Spain, and nowhere else I have ever seen, is costumed debt collectors. That is, if some guy owes you money and doesn't pay, you hire one of these companies and they send someone dressed up as a bullfighter or a bagpipe player to follow the debtor around wherever he goes and embarrass him in public. Quotation: "You can't expect judicial security in a country where those who govern are anti-system."

Get this. Since November 2005, one José María Vera Arjona has been arrested 55 times in Barcelona city alone for robbery, mugging, pickpocketing, etc. Vera Arjona just passes through the turnstile: he robs someone, they arrest him, throw him in jail, and then turn him loose. He leads the list of the top ten arrestees in the city. Seven of them are Bosnian women who have been arrested between 26 and 45 times each during that period. They operate exclusively on the tourist bus, the Bus Túristic, and rob only tourists.

The city of Barcelona has a major problem with crimes against tourists, as we have said many times, and it is extremely irresponsible in not warning all visitors explicitly upon arrival of the dangers they face. You are more likely to be pickpocketed or snatch-and-grabbed as a tourist in Barcelona than not.

The only significant police operations against those criminals who prey on tourists have been one in which the cops managed to jail five Romanian gypsy parents who trained their kids to steal, and another in which they arrested 15 members of a gang who slit car tires in order to rob the car occupants when they pulled over due to the flat. Half of this bunch is still in jail, but the other half is walking the streets.

Podcast update: Fausta will be doing a podcast, an interview with me and Jose from Barcepundit, next Monday at noon Barcelona time / 6 PM New York time. So tune in.

This is just totally retarded. By the way, it's not a joke.

Quick blog roundup:

Kaleboel denounces pirated software in Spain.

Ibex Salad has everything you ever wanted to know about the olive oil market.

Fausta has your Go to Hell Hugo update. By the way, Jose of Barcepundit and I will be appearing live on Fausta's podcast next Monday at noon. We're going to be talking about the 9/11 trial, immigration, and probably the Zap government too. I'll give y'all more information when I get it.

Speaking of Barcepundit, he's got three excellent links up to a writer named Robert Latona, including comments on Zap and 3/11.

A Fistful of Euros gets us all ready for Eurovision again.

Davids Medienkritik catches Der Spìegel being snarky about US democratic practices.

Expat Yank blasts New Labour "pay-as-you-use" dogma.

Eursoc fills us in on those fringe French candidates who just might torpedo a major candidacy again this year.

Playing Chess with the Dead blasts the PP and especially its conspiracy-theory wing. He's right. The PSOE deserves a good blasting, too, though, for the way it has also used the dead of 3/11 politically.

Pejman doesn't buy the theory that the US is swinging leftward.

Pave France denounces anti-Semitism in, you guessed it, France.

Notes from Spain celebrates ham.

Meryl Yourish exposes more typical Reuters bias.

¡No Pasarán! points out the lack of logic behind the Red-Green alliance.

Beautiful Horizons reminds everyone, especially Continental Europeans screaming that the sky is falling, that the Cold War was a lot worse.

Colin Davies has more on 3/11 and all other things Spanish or Galician.

The 3/11 trial continues. The defendants are still taking the stand and denying everything. Nobody believes them.

Bad news for the Catalan statute of autonomy: Judge Perez Tremps, recused from the Constitutional Court, will not resign and allow Zap to appoint a new judge to replace him. Therefore, the Court will stay divided 6-5 between conservatives and leftists, and everyone is predicting that the six conservatives will throw out the statute.

I assume everyone has seen the photos of the baby born after only 22 weeks of gestation. The legal limit for abortion on demand in the UK and the Netherlands is 24 weeks, and I don't think there is any kind of limit in the US. Iberian Notes is pragmatic about abortion. We don't like it, but banning it would cause too much social turmoil. Our position is that aborting viable babies is murder, though, and we would ban abortion after 12 weeks except in the most extreme circumstances.

I certainly do think the Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in the US, is a judicial excursion into legislative territory and should be overturned. Overturning Roe v. Wade would not ban abortion in the US; it would throw the decision on abortion back to the individual states, rather like the death penalty. You'd have places like Oregon, Minnesota, and Massachussetts where it was legal, places like Utah and South Carolina where it was banned, and probably most of the states somewhere in the middle, with restrictions.

Oh, by the way, the referendum legalizing abortion in Portugal passed by something like 55-45, but fewer than 50% of the voters turned out, so the referendum is not binding. However, Portugal is expected to legalize abortion with restrictions fairly soon.

Big stink in the wine industry: The Zap government has been trying to pass a law raising the drinking age for beer and wine to 18; right now it's 16, but nobody pays any attention, and teenagers routinely purchase hard alcohol anyway. The wine producers are up in arms, and they seem to have won, since the bill has been withdrawn. Wine is a major industry in Spain, employing thousands of people and earning billions of euros, and they put intense pressure on the PSOE and minister Elena Salgado to stop the bill.

You might be asking, "Who cares? Teenagers don't drink wine anyway." Well, they do in Spain. They buy cheap red wine, mix it with Coke, call it a "calimocho," and drink the stuff by the gallon. Yecch. Seems to me like a waste of perfectly good Coke, since cheap red Spanish wine is fit only to be turned into ethanol or mixed with lots of orange juice and lemon soda to make sangria. Which the kids also drink. 64% of Spanish teenagers between 14 and 18 say they drink alcohol regularly on weekends, and nearly a million admit to having been drunk at least once in the last month.

If they want to cut back on juvenile drinking, what I'd do is ban drinking in the streets and enforce it. What lots of teenagers do, buying lots of cheap booze and chugging it down in the local plaza while making noise and committing vandalism and pissing in doorways, is called "the botellón," and a lot of people don't like it. Well? Bust the little bastards. Don't jail them, of course, but hand out hefty fines, say €200, that the kids' parents would have to cough up. That ought to put an end to the botellón, or at least add to local government's coffers to pay for cleaning up the mess these kids make.

La Vanguardia claims that the West is using the carrot and stick approach to negotiating with Iran, with the US providing the stick and Europe the carrots. I don't buy it for a second; I don't think the West is nearly that well-organized, and I'm not so sure Europe is all that frightened of a nuclear Iran. In fact, a common argument around here is, "Well, the US has atomic bombs, so why shouldn't Iran and North Korea have them?" Moronic moral equivalence, of course.

By the way, I've been working on a long piece on this subject and on the Korean War. I should be done in a couple of days.

Remember De Juana Chaos? He's apparently still on his hunger strike despite the reduction of his sentence for making terroristic threats to three years, of which he will serve one. I hope he dies, of course, mass-murdering terrorist scum.

The EU has decided to reduce greenhouse gases by 20% in 2020. Yeah, right, I'll believe that when I see it. The problem, of course, is that they have no idea of how they're going to do it. No details whatsoever have been decided on. Also, there's division within the EU, as Finland, Poland, and Hungary are all complaining already.

The average price of a night in a hotel room in Barcelona is €110, €6 more than last year. That seems highly excessive. Stay in a pension when you come here.

The National Museum of Art of Catalonia, which is well worth a visit, will be exhibiting eight well-known Picassos on loan for the next year. I can't stand Picasso. What a pretentious git. And the guy I really don't understand is Joan Miró. None of his paintings make the slightest sense, and they all have titles like "Bird Shitting on Masturbating Woman." For Spanish 20th century artists, give me Sorolla, Nonell, Casas, and Rusiñol.

Worst Barcelona artists ever: Tàpies and Subirachs. These guys are not only pretentious, their stuff is flat-out ugly, and it defaces the streets of the city. Some artistic terrorist commando needs to blow up the concrete atrocity in the Plaza Catalunya, the pile of old furniture in a glass box on the Paseo Picasso, and the World War I trench barbed wire on top of that Domenech and Montaner building on Calle Aragon, not to mention the new portico of the Sagrada Familia.

Champions' League action tonight: Barcelona vs. Liverpool. The Brits are all over town, drinking overpriced beer at the sidewalk cafes on the Rambla or just getting tanked in the middle of the Plaza Real. Messi will start for Barcelona. Should be a good game. Barça needs a win to get back on track after last weekend's convincing 2-1 loss at Valencia, which could well have been 4-0. Real Madrid beat Bayern Munich last night at the Bernabeu, 3-2, in a poorly played but action-packed game. Former Barça player Van Bommel scored for Bayern in the 88th minute and flipped off the crowd.

Soccer purists, which Spain is full of, have loudly decried the sale of Liverpool to a pair of North American sports-team owners. Gee, it's not like Spain doesn't have its very own del Nidos and Ruiz de Loperas and Jesus Gils and other out-and-out criminals running its soccer teams. What happened was that Liverpool was heavily in debt and couldn't afford to build a new stadium or bid for top players, and the new Yank and Canuck owners have bailed them out big-time.

People. Sports is a business. It has been ever since it was professionalized. Get over this silly weepìng about its being corrupted now.

Latest news from B-ville: Some guy tried to hijack a plane from Mauritania to the Canary Islands a couple of days ago; this was apparently not related to terrorism, just some not real smart illegal immigrant. The passengers and crew overpowered the guy; after 9/11, nobody's going to sit still while some criminals might be going to crash your plane into a football stadium.

Barça defender Lilian Thuram has stuck his nose into the upcoming French election. He says Nicolas Sarkozy has a "racial" vision of France, and has been devoting most of his free time denouncing Sarko. Yeah, he's got the right of freedom of speech, and he hasn't used an official team press conference to spout off, unlike Oleguer. Still, I would rather sports stars, like movie and rock stars, keep their mouths shut about politics rather than using their position to support ideas many of them, from Thuram and Oleguer to Barbra Streisand and Sean Penn, don't know a damn thing about.

Andalusia votes today on the referendum for its own statute of autonomy, but the process hasn't caught the attention of the public or the media since both major parties generally agree on the text. The statute will pass easily, and turnout will be low. See how easy it is to do things when there aren't a bunch of nationalists involved?

On the 3/11 trial: Even La Vanguardia has pointed out, "Threads link the radical Islamist groups in Spain to almost all the terrorist actions carried out in the name of Al Qaeda in the last ten years: from the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (August 1988, more than 200 dead) to 9/11, the murder of the film director Theo Van Gogh, Casablanca, or the deployment of men to fight against the Americans in Iraq."

Even La Vangua says: THESE ARE ALL THE SAME PEOPLE. If we are going to fight terror, we have to do it on every front, and the main front right now is Iraq. Those who want the US to pull out are irresponsible.

Those interested in following the 3/11 trial should check out a blog called Playing Chess with the Dead, written by a gentleman with whom I suspect I agree about only one thing: the conspiracy theory blaming the PSOE / ETA / rogue cops / CESID / the Masons for the bombings is ridiculous.

Notes from Spain, in a rare current-events comment, has more.

From the "If This Had Happened in Cleveland" department: Some psycho in a small town in Toledo beat his mom, wife, and son to death and seriously injured his two daughters before committing suicide by jumping out the window. No hypotheses about the hidden violence bubbling up behind the peaceful façade of Spanish society, though. Meanwhile, get this, the managing director of the Lleida soccer team got his throat cut with a broken wineglass in a brawl at a bar at four in the morning a couple of nights ago.

The number of reported crimes in Catalonia has increased by 17% in three years. La Vangua says, "The fear of being the victim of a crime has been more present lately." It also says that 70% of Spaniards associate crime with immigrants.

There's a ship loaded with 6000 tons of fertilizer in trouble off the Galician coast; the government says it's no big deal. If it turns out to be a big deal, watch the PP go after the PSOE in exactly the way the PSOE went after the PP after the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige. How can you blame the sinking of a ship on a political party? Well, they do it in Spain.

Rijkaard announced that he's staying at least through next season, thereby quashing a lot of the rumors and instability around the Barça. People are still mad at Eto'o; I guess they'll forget about this tempest after he scores a few goals. He's really not ready to play yet, and will sit out tonight's game in Valencia. This should be a good one. If Barcelona can pull out a win, they'll open up a several-point lead on everyone else--especially since second-place Sevilla plays fifth-place Atlético Madrid, and a weak Real Madrid drew at home last night against Betis.

Colin Davies is on a roll.

Puerta del Sol announces the birth of Madripedia. There is already a Cordobapedia.

Kaleboel comments on language immersion, as practiced in Catalan schools.

Not that much news from these parts. The 3/11 trial is off for the weekend; on Friday Youssef Belhadj, Hassan el Haski, and Jamal Zougam all denied having anything to do with the bombings. Nobody believed them. El Haski is also accused of being one of the planners of the Casablanca bombings in May 2003.

News from the French Basque country: Chef Alain Ducasse announced that he is closing down his hotel and restaurant in the town of Bidarray because of the harassment he has received from pro-ETA sectors, including death threats and a bomb last June. Gee, that's great, some world-famous guy comes to our town and brings jobs--Ducasse's empire employs 1200 people--and gets us publicity. So let's run him out of town!

Two women died last week during plastic surgery at the Hospital Evangelico right here around the corner in Gracia. Different surgeons operated on them, and inspectors are trying to figure out what's going on. They've shut down the hospital operating rooms just to be safe.

The Generalitat says it's going to train 15,000 English teachers. Yeah, right. I'm not sure there are 15,000 English speakers in Catalonia, not counting us immigrants.

Starting April 14 they're going to keep the subway open all Saturday night here in Barcelona. Good. That ought to reduce drunk driving a good bit, and make it easier to get a taxi, which is virtually impossible after about 1 AM. This is very convenient for me because I live right between the green line, which runs Fontana-Catalunya-Liceu, and the yellow line, which runs Joanic-Urquinaona-Jaume I. Direct connections from Gracia to downtown, which are the two most interesting parts of the city.

In case you were wondering, Britney Spears shaved her head. That should make her 100% hairless, rather like a Chihuahua.

The New Yorker has a good piece on quotations, and the first paragraph focuses on spurious quotes--that is, Patrick Henry really didn't say "Give me liberty or give me death."

I can think of a couple of semi-spurious quotes: one is that nobody coined "He's a son-of-a-bitch but he's our son-of-a-bitch," until the 1960s; somebody, maybe Lyndon Johnson, used it to refer to Ngo Dinh Diem, but he probably didn't use it first. Latin American folklore says that quote was used in the early 20th century in reference to the first Somoza, but I've never seen any proof.

Another is "America for the Americans," which does not appear in the Monroe Doctrine, and was actually used as a Nativist anti-immigrant slogan in the 1840s or so. It has nothing to do with Latin America, either; the immigrants in question were Irish and Germans.

One from Spain is Unamuno's "You will win, but you will not convince" speech in Salamanca in 1936; he was extemporizing without notes and nobody was ready for him to say anything of note, so reports of the speech were all written down later. There is no recording. So we really don't know exactly what he said, though whatever Unamuno did say caused quite a tumult in the auditorium. Unamuno died just weeks later, so he wasn't there to ask later. By the way, everybody seems to think that in the Civil War Unamuno was pro-Republic; he was actually pro-National, though with reservations.

Another one from the Civil War is that no one knows exactly what was said during the famous phone call made by Colonel Moscardó's son, under duress as he was a Republican prisoner, to the colonel, who was leading the National resistance at the Alcazar in Toledo. It's generally agreed that the phone call was made, that the son told Moscardó that he was going to be shot, and Moscardó told the son to die bravely. But the exact words spoken are unknown.

Franco Aleman at Barcepundit links to this excellent piece from the Australian on anti-Americanism. Quote:

While Russian President Vladimir Putin was railing against US power at an international security conference in Munich on Saturday, a respectable case can be made that, as hegemonies go, the US is the most benevolent history has ever seen. Not perfect by any means, but certainly deserving of better treatment than the acid reflux and bile of Western elites. America is big, rich and makes mistakes. But for the past 50 years at least, it has been the ultimate guarantor of the Western way of life. Surely it deserves a more balanced press from its critics.

Denis Boyles from National Review has more on the subject. Check it out.

Colin Davies has excellent commentary on Spain and especially Galicia every day; he's one of the most regular and consistent bloggers out there. He's on my daily reading list.

Guirilandia has a think-piece on that endangered species, the macho ibérico. He's the opposite of regular and consistent, since he'll sometimes go a couple of weeks without posting, but he's always original.

Talk about regular and consistent: La Liga Loca brings us all the Spanish football news. Since it's Friday, it's time for the weekend preview. I posted this in his comments section:

I don't think they necessarily have to get rid of either Ronaldinho or Eto'o. Every sports team is full of big egos and I think these guys will figure out how to get along--especially if they win another League, as looks likely, and/or the Champions, which is at least a possiblity.If you get rid of one, though, it's Eto'o. You already have Saviola to replace him, not to mention Gudjohnsen, who is OK, and goal-scorers are available on the market for a lot less than magicians like Ronaldinho. There's only one Ronaldinho, and Barça has him tied up for years.

There are a few other arguments: a) Ronaldinho knows how to behave himself in public and wash the dirty laundry at home b) Ronaldinho seems to be much more popular among the players, and with the coaches, than Eto'o c) Ronaldinho sells a lot more jerseys, fills more seats in the US and Japan, and gets the Barça a lot more publicity than Eto'o d) Ronaldinho doesn't break nearly as easily as Eto'o; he's both bigger and stronger, and has no history of injuries.

Also, if I were Rikjaard, I'd stay at Barcelona. He'll have to put up with the same amount of crap if he goes to Milan, and he has the chance to be the greatest Barça coach of all time. If Frank stays four more years and wins a couple more leagues and maybe a Champions, he'll be legendary.

With everybody and his dog running for President, including Akaky, Iberian Notes is going to get into it early. We're for Rudy Giuliani. We like almost everything about him, especially his record. He was tremendous as New York district attorney and then mayor. This guy sent Mafia bosses to jail, cleaned up the city, and was right there when the bombs hit. He's liberal on social issues and tough on crime and terrorism. And he can beat Hillary.

That, of course, is the Number One question we Republicans need to ask ourselves when we vote in the primaries and caucuses a year from now. Can this candidate beat Hillary? Barring disaster, she's the Democratic candidate, and Republicans need to be planning to beat her now. So we need to grab the center and leave her out on the left, and liberal tough guy Rudy is just the person to do that. We would be complete idiots to choose some right-wing Sam Brownback primitive social conservative as our candidate, since we on the moderate right have already got the right-wingers anyway--who else are they going to vote for?

And I would love to see Lieberman as the VP candidate, but this time for the Republicans. If somehow Rudy doesn't come out as our man for Prez, let's draft Joe.

Tom from the Bad Rash doesn't agree with us. He says,

Much as it annoys Americans who loathe foreigners commentng on their politics, thebadrash.com is 'backing' Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States.

Actually, Iberian Notes loves it when foreigners take an interest in American politics, since it helps all of us be better-informed. We only object to biased or ignorant commentary. Tom's position is more than fair enough. He's for Obama, we're for Giuliani, may the best candidate win, and we'll see what happens at the polls.

Continued blog roundup:

Europhobia comments on the lack of diversity in the Europarliament.

Guirilandia makes fun of the Barcelona ajuntament.

La Liga Loca has the quotes of the week.

Pave France blasts Chiraq over Iran.

Eamonn Fitzgerald has a whack at the New York Review of Books over North Korea.

Publius Pundit takes Vladimir Putin apart.

Sal deTraglia runs a great Spain lifestyle blog, including some food porn.

Roncesvalles questions the enforcement of Germany's anti-swastika law.

The Euroserf blasts EU economic bullying. Short, sweet, and correct.

News from the 3/11 trial: Rabei Osman El Sayed, alias "Mohammed the Egyptian," the first of the defendants on the stand, denied any involvement in the bombings and refused to speak any further, but after a recess has apparently agreed to testify. He is currently serving a ten-year sentence in Italy for belonging to a terrorist organization; he was part of the infrastructure sending jihadis to Iraq from there. The Italian police bugged his apartment and caught him on tape bragging that the 3/11 bombings were his idea.

Gustavo de Aristegui, a reasonable man and one of the PP moderates, this morning limited himself to saying that he hoped that "the truth would come out" at the trial. He claimed that too much is still unknown about what happened, which I suppose he is sort of right about, but any operation this big is impossible to completely unravel. To continue with the metaphor, there are still a lot of loose ends, but we know the basics about the bombings: who did it, why, and how.

The Samuel Eto'o conflagration has been put out. Everybody had a nice talk, Eto'o claimed to have been misinterpreted, Puyol convinced him to behave himself, Ronaldinho hugged him for the cameras, and Rijkaard didn't punish him for first refusing to play and then shooting off his mouth. Let's hope that a big blowup like this is what the team needed in order to get its shit together for the rest of the year. Barcelona has about an 80% chance of winning the league championship, I think, and as good a chance as anyone to win the Champions' League, which would make it the first club to repeat as champions in this format.

To show how important the Barça is, TV3 has devoted the past two days to the Eto'o story, much more time than the 3/11 trial. The afternoon talk show has wrung at least three hours out of it. And La Vanguardia has given front-page color photos to the story, both yesterday and today. In La Vangua, Barcelona's most serious newspaper, the 3/11 trial got one page yesterday and two pages today, along with a banner front-page headline. The Eto'o story got three pages yesterday (including an anguished opinion piece titled "It'll never be the same again"), and three more pages today.

I have an article up at Pajamas Media on the beginning of the trial of the 3/11 bombers. Check it out.

We haven't had a blog roundup for a week or so. Here goes.

Mark in Mexico is doing some great local reporting from Oaxaca. Fascinating stuff.

Citizen Smash debunks the false "no spitting on Vietnam vets" urban legend.

La Liga Loca has the dope on Samuel Eto'o's verbal incontinence.

Fausta is your one-stop shop for Go to Hell Hugo news.

Expat Yank blasts a moronic UN report.

Brussels Journal profiles the Flemishaloony Vlamms Belang.

Colin Davies has thoughts on Spanish prison sentences.

Davids Medienkritik slaps the Austrians around for selling arms to Iran.

¡No Pasarán! links to another excellent Josef Joffe article.

Pejman agrees that Giuliani looks like the best Republican candidate right now.

Akaky is running, too.

Notes from Spain runs down the top ten Spanish celebrities. Don't miss this one.

The Spanish Supreme Court reduced De Juana Chaos's sentence for writing threatening letters to judges to three years, which means he gets out in one. You may remember that Spanish regulations allow De Juana Chaos to leave prison after serving 18 years of a 3000-year sentence for 25 murders; no matter how long a prison sentence in Spain is, the maximum time served is 30 years, from which De Juana Chaos got twelve off for good behavior or whatever. No news on whether he will continue his hunger strike. What a travesty. This guy killed five times as many people as Jack the Ripper.

This is the best cat video ever.

The Guardian has a piece up by Peter (not Paul) Preston on ETA, and if I understand him right--the article could have used some editing--he's saying that the Spanish government needs to make concessions to ETA in order to win ETA's trust, which in turn will permit real peace negotiations. Quote: "Talk doesn't always do it. Talking to terror means delivering, too." No, the Spanish government needs to hunt down those bastards and shoot or jail them all. Anyway, the usual gang of idiots joins in the comments, and it's quite entertaining for a few minutes.

My favorite Australian historian, Keith Windschuttle, has an book review article up at the New Criterion, saying that the 20th century was the century of the English-speaking peoples.

Key quotes: "The English-speaking peoples are temperamentally less inclined towards fanaticism, high-flown rhetoric, and Bonapartism than any others in history. They have respected what is tangible and, in politics at least, suspected what is not...Anglo-American capitalism, when allied to the right to own secure property and the rule of law, unleashed the energy and ingenuity of mankind. It formed the basis of the English-speaking peoples’ present global hegemony...Like the Romans, the English-speaking peoples would be envied and hated by others. They would sometimes find, Roberts argues, that the greatest danger to their continued imperium came not from their declared enemies without, but from vociferous critics within. One of the constants of their common culture’s freedom of expression has been its propensity to harbor a degree of internal censure that among many other peoples would probably prove fatal."

Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps has an article at the Wall Street Journal arguing that Continental Europe's culture makes it a weak economic competitor.

Key quote: "Perhaps many would be willing to take it for granted that the spirit of stimulation, problem-solving, mastery and discovery has impacts on a country's dynamism and thus on its economic performance...The weakness of these values on the Continent is not the only impediment to a revival of dynamism there. There is the solidarist aim of protecting the "social partners"--communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions--from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the "stakeholders"--those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners. There is an intellectual current elevating community and society over individual engagement and personal growth, which springs from antimaterialist and egalitarian strains in Western culture. There is also the "scientism" that holds that state-directed research is the key to higher productivity. Equally, there is the tradition of hierarchical organization in Continental countries. Lastly, there is a strain of anti-commercialism."

Barcelona is a pretty tough sports town. There's basically one important thing, the Barça, and everything else is very secondary. There are two newspapers, Sport and El Mundo Deportivo, completely devoted to the Barça, and they fill pages and pages with Barça news every day. The lead story on TV3 sports news is nearly always the Barça, even if the only news is that Sylvinho is still injured and Motta has the flu. If things are going well, they love you, but beware when things are not. Players who do not perform well are mercilessly hooted, as Bogarde and Zenden and Reiziger can tell you.

So it's with more than a little surprise that I notice a growing tide of resentment in the Spanish media at the current unfriendly reception Pau Gasol, virtually Catalonia's only non-football hero (he played on the Barça basketball team, so he has worn the holy red and blue too) is receiving in Memphis.

Now, let's review why:

1) Gasol demanded to be traded. Yeah, that makes the fans love you. Imagine if Barça's best player demanded a trade after sitting out half the season. They'd crucify him.
2) He got the coach fired.
3) He can't get along with team president Jerry West.
4) He got hurt while playing for the Spanish team and missed half the season for Memphis while earning $13 million a year.
5) Memphis fans perceive that Gasol doesn't always give 100% and doesn't play defense. He doesn't play the low post, and takes too many outside jumpers.
6) They built the team around Gasol, and they haven't won a playoff game yet. Perception around the NBA seems to be that he's good, but he should be the second- or third-best player on your team, because if you don't have anybody better than him, you're going nowhere.
7) To quote: "Scoring a lot of points for a shitty team doesn't make you a good player."

So a Memphis radio talk-show host named Chris Vernon wrote a ditty called, "Ode to Pau, or Who Wants a Crying Spaniard?" By Barcelona standards it's pretty mild, since the lyrics merely make fun of Gasol's play and attitude, don't attack him as a human being, include no swear-words, and don't mention his mother.

Quotes: "He's great in the first half," "When he runs up the court it'll make you laugh," "His wondrous defense looks like it's stuck in the mud," and "Me gusta baloncesto, no me gusta Pau."

Check out some of the comments Vernon got on his blog:

You're a fucking ignorant retard. Also, you don't know shit about basketball. Stupid americans think their basketball is the best around the world. Oh, no, wait, you forgot, you lost the world basketball tournament. who won? spain? with what player? Gasol? Face it, people are just pissed because they know that they're loosing their best player. Who'd want to stay in a team with people who don't want to win and cant play basketball... who wants fucking crying americans that don't know about basketball. Get a proper job, freak, somewhere where you don't have to talk shit about other people.

Vernon, your C.I. is very near to the average level in USA, 0.Make an effort and you´ll reach it soon!The song is pathetic, a real shit. Maybe you´ll have to try other things to make money, like being politic. In thant country of non-brained people I´m sure you´ll be soon president!

Yes, we are africans and fond of Al Qaeda, and we will crash a plane against Graceland.

You ungrateful freak! Your are blinded by your stupidity!! Yankee go home!

The world had very bad luck, osama bin laden had had to destroy your fucking head, no the twin towersfuck you, little bastard

Maybe you need to be visited there in Memphys....don't leave your wife alone

Say thanks to spain cause today u are civilizated people thanks 2 us. And we have to say thanks 2 US cause thanks to them, all the world is in war. And of course, that wars are because they have a great sense of humor right? yes, i think that when people celebrates american people murders, is because they have a great sense of humor.

hijo de puta!!!! Te meterte con PAU es meterte con todoso los españoles. Eres un fuck america, fucking bush and all that. You are very stupid like your funking mother.what happen with PAU?? ies the best player that you ever seen in memphis. You like to be nigger but you are a fucking white men.Yesterday your mother suck my assand i'ts so great and free.your mother is a fucking bech

Hurra for the charlies that kick the american ashes.Hurra for the japanesses that attacked pearl-harborAMERICAN DEAD FERTILIZER FOR MY GARDEN

Notice anything these responses have in common?

There's a lot more in Spanish, which I didn't bother translating. In case you want to read the whole thing, here's Vernon's January archive which includes several posts on the subject.

News from Portugal: They're holding a referendum today on legalizing abortion; they need a 50% turnout for the referendum to be valid, and it looks like it'll be in the high 50s. All the surveys point to a Yes vote. Currently abortion is completely banned in Poland, Ireland, Malta, and Portugal; most other EU countries have some restrictions, though in the UK and Netherlands it's abortion on demand up to 24 weeks. It's estimated that some 20,000-40,000 illegal abortions are performed every year in Portugal; also, thousands of Portuguese women abort every year in Spain, where a loophole in the restrictions is easily exploited. There are two abortion clinics in Badajoz, five kilometers from the Portuguese border, that do 80% of their business in Portuguese women.

The trial of the 29 accused for the March 11, 2004 bombings in Madrid begins on Thursday. There is absolutely no question that the accused are linked up with both Al Qaeda and the terrorists currently operating in Iraq. Several of those going on trial are known to have recruited jihadis for Iraq, including Basel Ghayoun and Hassan el Haski. Daoud Ouhnane, who fled and for whom a warrant is out, was one of the actual bombers; he is believed to be in Iraq right now. Another of the March 11 bombers, Mohamed Afalah, suicide-bombed an Italian convoy in Iraq in 2005, killing 19 Italian troops. So why aren't the Spaniards screaming for the defeat of the terrorists in Iraq who are not only fighting the country's legitimate government, but also the armed forces of Spanish allies Italy, the US, and and UK, and who committed the murder of 191 people in Spain's capital not even three years ago? Let me repeat: THE SAME PEOPLE are behind both the Iraqi "insurgency" and the Madrid bombings. They are so clearly the enemy of all of Western civilization that you really have to be pretty damn dense not to see it. And, Spain, Western civilization includes us too.

Interesting little stink: Oleguer got dumped by his shoe company, Kelme, for his pro-De Juana Chaos statements made at an official FC Barcelona press conference and his article in a pro-ETA newspaper. Of course, the company has the perfect right to hire and fire whoever it wants to represent it. I will say one thing in Oleguer's favor: he's not a hypocrite. He's a total idiotarian, but he at least does not live the glittery football-star lifestyle.

Seems that the perceived crime wave in Spain is at least partly for real. In 2006, there were 8566 home invasions in Spain, 5.6% more than in 2005. I keep hearing people talking about how they want to get a gun. In Spain, there are basically two ways to get hold of a firearm. The first is if you have a hunting license. I figure that the biggest game around here is the jabalí, the wild pig, and that it would take a deer rifle to take one of those things down. That ought to do you for home protection. The second, get this, is to take up pistol target shooting. Right now you have to be a member of a club and have a license, but you're allowed to take your target pistol home with you. The guy in Lleida who shot the two criminals (who broke into his house and tied up his son) is a licensed target shooter, and he hit those two right between the eyes with his target pistol. Pretty good shooting.

Racial tension continues in Badalona, where the neighborhood of La Salut wants to expel the Romanian gypsies who have taken up residence there. It doesn't seem to be mere racism, since the Pakistanis and Chinese and Moroccans who live there all want to kick the gypsies out, too.

There's still no agreement about what to do with the cargo ship Marine I, which is drifting off the West African coast with nearly 400 illegal immigrants aboard, mostly Pakistanis. Supposedly it will reach the Mauritanian port of Nouadibuh today, but who knows what will happen to the people on board.

No official cause of Erika Ortiz's death has yet been announced.

The Anna Nicole Smith media feeding frenzy has just begun. I predict it will be as big as the OJ trial, which you may remember was the next-to-last frivolous media frenzy before 9/11. This will be the first post-9/11 return to the good old days before most of us had heard of Osama bin Laden. I remember seeing the Anna Nicole TV show a couple of years ago and deciding that the woman was nuts and heading for a breakdown. I do not remember her as any sort of pop-culture icon, as some over-heated commentators are already bloviating about.

Let's hope that this trial puts to rest the absurd conspiracy theory that blames the Zap government for the bombings.