The media agreed with me about the dull Catalan debate last night; El Periodico headlined "Debate nulo," more or less "Useless debate." Nobody said anything interesting. The only occurrence of note is that Duran Lleida started out looking very strange, and at halftime he put on a sweater because he was getting chills. They've cancelled his campaigning for today "for medical reasons." He had surgery on February 12 to remove a tumor from one of his lungs, and I'm afraid there's something really wrong with him. It's a shame, because he's a decent guy and a real professional.

Campaign promise update: The PP will raise monthly state retirement pensions by €150 a month. The PSOE will raise them by €200 a month. The Communists will increase the minimum to €900 a month.

Meanwhile, Zap accused Rajoy of stirring up anti-immigrant xenophobia, and Rajoy promised to revive the damn water plan again.

In February 161 people died in traffic accidents in Spain.

Idiots department: The pro-ETA teenage punks in Bilbao torched two ticket-canceling machines in a commuter train station last night, and set up barricades and stoned a city bus this morning. No arrests were made. Meanwhile, last night in Madrid a handful of Fascists had a legal demo, so the squatters and their ilk came out to break it up and got into it with the cops, setting up flaming barricades and tossing bricks at them. No arrests were made. And this afternoon the Fascists had another legal demo in San Sebastian and the ETA punks tried to break it up, stoning a bus, setting up barricades, and fighting with the cops, who charged them and arrested two.

The US State Department has come out with a report identifying Spain as the biggest drug emporium in the world. It's the highway for cocaine entering the EU from Latin America and hashish coming in from Morocco. 3% of Spaniards use cocaine regularly; one in five European coke users is Spanish. Spain has a higher percentage of users of not only cocaine, but also hash and designer drugs, than any other European country. Surprisingly, only three or four of the comments at La Vanguardia are along the lines of "I don't believe anything those lying gringos say, and besides the CIA controls all drug trafficking anyway."

The answer to the problem, of course, is to legalize recreational drugs. Then you could a) tax them b) make sure the product is not adulterated c) allow sales only to adults and d) drive the drug gangs out of business. The United States's War on Drugs is the most wrong-headed policy that our government has.

Great news: Barcelona is going to license 130 small bars to put on live musical shows. About the only thing I don't like about Barcelona's nightlife offerings is the lack of live music, and now there's going to be a lot more. Ridiculous news: The city government is going to subsidize said bars with €600,000 of the taxpayers' money so that they can meet the soundproofing requirements. Just what we need. Government-subsidized bars. Only in Spain.

Sorry about not posting on the Catalan debate. I watched like ten minutes of it and said, hell, this is really boring, screw it.

Strange Maps is a really cool website. They have one up today on the relative prominence of the names of states that appear in country music songs. As you might have guessed, the big two are Tennessee and Texas.

The Iraqis are going to hang Chemical Ali. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. If I were the hangman I'd set the drop for about fifteen feet.

The Prince Harry in Afghanistan story is being played up big here. As a good American, I'm a republican with a small r, though there are many systems of government much more obnoxious than democratic constitutional monarchies. Still, I have to give the guy some credit, since he didn't have to go out there if he didn't want to; he's shown an admirable sense of duty. Now that his presence is known, of course, they're going to have to pull him out, since he's now the Taliban and Al Qaeda's number one target, a magnet for terrorist attacks.

ETA set off a small bomb--three kilos of amonal--last night at Socialist headquarters in the Bilbao suburb of Derio; material damage was done, but fortunately no one got hurt.

The five leading candidates on each party's list for Barcelona (Carmen Chacon of the PSC, Josep Antoni Duran Lleida for CiU, Joan Ridao of ERC, Dolors Nadal of the PP, and Joan Herrera of ICV) are going to debate tonight on TV3 at 10 PM; I'll try to blog at least some of it.

Socialist former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez called Rajoy "a lazy imbecile." I never cease to be amazed by the things Spanish politicians call one another. During the first Zap-Rajoy debate they called one another liars about twenty times, and on the stump they accuse one another of being unpatriotic patsies of terrorists or reactionary anti-democratic Fascists. American politics can get pretty nasty, but Bush and Obama and McCain and Kerry don't talk like that. One reason they don't talk like that is that they accept that their opponent is basically honest and operating in good faith.

Inflation for the year ending in February was 4.4%. La Vanguardia ran a list of economic statistics: Unemployment is 8.6%. The trade deficit is €22.2 billion. 2007 GDP was €1.05 trillion, or about $1.6 trillion; the national debt is €379 billion, or 32.6% of GDP. The 2007 budget surplus was 2.2%.

Meanwhile, Spanish stock market heavyweight Telefonica was the most profitable telecoms operator in the world last year, with total profits above €9 billion.

Spain's highways are the most dangerous in Western Europe, with 7 deaths per billion vehicle-kilometers traveled. That's worse than everybody but Hungary and Slovenia, at over 8 deaths / bn. vehicle-km. The rest of the list: Portugal 7; Italy and Czech Republic 6; Belgium and Norway 5; Austria 4; Israel, Finland, Germany, and Ireland 3; France, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Sweden 2. That's right, our roads are three-and-a-half times as dangerous as England's.

Water is becoming an issue, with the long drought and the ban on lawn-watering, car-washing, and pool-refilling. Now they're reporting that the equivalent of 8% of Barcelona's daily water use is wasted through leaks in the system. La Vanguardia is mad at the Montilla administration for not having bothered to do anything about this until they had to contract out for water to be brought in by tanker. Meanwhile, Rajoy has brought up the damn water plan again as a campaign issue. He says if he gets elected there will be enough water for everybody. Yeah, well, if I get elected there will be free beer for everybody.

The damn bus drivers are going out on strike all next week, thereby snarling up the city the week before the general election. The municipal bus company says that meeting the strikers' demands would cost €35 million a year, and the only way they can get those funds is by tapping into tax money or raising ticket prices.

La Vanguardia has given pages three and four of their international section to Alarmist Andy Robinson again. Andy's all worked up over the Arctic ice melting, and charges that the evil oil companies are behind it because it'll be easier to drill for petroleum if there's not any ice. He says, "This new struggle for energy resources is reminiscent of the infamous struggle for Africa in the 19th century." Uh, Andy, the problem with Africa is that there were already people living there who were brought under European control against their will. How many people live on the Arctic pack ice?

Weird verdict from the National Court. 30 Islamists were charged in 2004 with planning to truck-bomb, guess what, the National Court building. They were acquitted on insufficient evidence of conspiring to blow up the Court, but 20 of them were convicted on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization.

There's really very little lethal violence in Spain, despite the high property crime rate. Murders are unusual, and in a country of 45 million people, any murder story is news in every Spanish media outlet. Compare that with the US, where if you live in Kansas City you only hear about your local murder cases. A large percentage of murders in Spain are domestic violence, and that means men killing women most of the time. The media has dubbed it "sexist violence," which I'm not sure I agree with. From what I've read and seen, violent people, the great majority of whom are men, will attack anybody around them who's weaker than they are, whether a man, a woman, or a child.

So we had four domestic murders on the same day yesterday, in Madrid, Valencia, Cadiz, and Valladolid. That's very unusual. In every case, the man involved had a long record of violence.

The type of murder that is increasing in Spain is gang killings, normally in fighting between Latin American gangs. This didn't exist in Spain until about five years ago. Over the weekend a young Venezuelan was stabbed to death in Rubí in a gang fight; every weekend a couple of gang-bangers wind up in the hospital, lucky to still be alive. There are also occasional organized-crime killings, not as many as you would think, what with the Eastern European crime syndicates moving in.

The African boat people continue to arrive: 130 reached Tenerife today. We have no idea of how many boat people die en route, but some estimates say that for every one who arrives, one dies at sea of hunger, thirst, exposure, or drowning.

The European Commission hit Microsoft with an €899 million fine ($1.35 billion: the euro hit $1.50 today), for antitrust violations. Seems they ruled back in 2004 that Microsoft had to share information about how to make other operating systems work together with Microsoft systems, and Microsoft failed to comply. Good. Fine 'em till it hurts enough to make them change their practices. Monopolies interfere with market freedom just as much as excessive regulation does.

The Bank of Spain, meanwhile, issued another warning about an economic slowdown, with household spending, consumer confidence, new car registrations, new employee contracts, and housing starts all way down. It blames "tension in the international financial markets."

Barcelona is the fifth most visited city in Europe, after London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid. The three top tourist nationalities are the British, the Italians, and the Americans; Americans are about tenth in the rankings of tourists in all of Spain. When they come over here, though, it's mostly for cultural tourism, rather than hitting the beaches and the discos, since we have those at home. So the Yanks go to the big cities and not the beach towns, as all the Germans and Dutch do. This is mostly because the Americans who come to Europe are middle-class, well-paid college graduates--traveling to Europe is expensive, and you don't do it unless you know enough to want to see something different from America.

Tourism is what Barcelona lives on, folks. Get used to it, because there's going to be more. I find it interesting that some of the people who bitch about all the tourists, and some of the people who want more airline flights and trade fairs and hotel rooms, are one and the same.

Campaign update: Both sides are still trying to spin the debate, as expected. No new promises so far today.

The Spanish media is still having a national orgasm over Javier Bardem's and Pau Gasol's successes in the United States. Geez, guys, Bardem won best supporting actor and Gasol is the third best player on his team. National pride is nice, but let's not overdo it, OK?

Sports update: Barcelona, on a hot streak, plays slumpìng Valencia tonignt at home in the first leg of the Cup semifinals. Ronaldinho will be on the bench; they're saving him for the League and the Champions.

The Drudge Report story on the Clinton campaign's spreading a photo of Obama in native African dress in Kenya, supposedly to make voters think he's a Muslim, has hit the news big in Spain. Since there's an image involved, a photograph, Spaniards can relate to it much better than they can to just plain old words. Remember, Europeans judge us on images for many reasons; one is that their journalists aren't familiar with American history and culture, and another is that said journalists don't really know English that well.

Zap has a new promise: the state will fund a day-care center for children under three at any workplace where six or more people request it.

There's a new study saying that anti-depressants don't work any better than placebos; I'm pretty sure that they do in my case.

Spain's high-school dropout rate is 30%, second worst in the European Union after Portugal. The Socialist education program places all the kids (some of whom would formerly either have left school at 14 or gone on to vocational schools) in academic high schools. So they're mixing the ones who want to be there with the ones who don't, and that's a recipe for disaster. No wonder nearly a third of them drop out.

Go back to the old elitist way. Let them drop out at 14 if they want to, and reduce the working age to 14 for at least some jobs. Of course, provide vocational-technical schools for the non-academic people who actually want to get some useful skills. And leave the academic high schools to potential university students. Everyone will be much happier.

Average Spanish household expenses rose by 6.3% in 2007 to nearly €4000. Inflation is hitting the voters in the pocketbook, and Rajoy is right to stress it in his campaign.

Second house prices look to be well on their way to crashing and burning in Spain; there are reports that real estate prices are down 30% in Spain's Mediterranean beach towns, and it's still hard to find buyers.

Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the murders of eight Spanish tourists last year in Yemen. Nobody is surprised.

Debate post-mortem: The Spanish press is emphasizing that nobody said anything new and that both sides were on the attack. La Vanguardia's reporter agrees with me: he thinks Rajoy won on points but didn't deliver the necessary knockout. Everybody pretty much agrees on the hot buttons that both tried to push repeatedly: Zap the March 11 bombing, the Iraq war, social spending, and the PP's aggressive anti-Zap campaigning, and Rajoy inflation, housing, immigration, the Catalan statute, and Zap's negotiations with ETA.

More than 13 million people watched the debate; it drew a 59% audience share.

The scientifically-done surveys all gave Zap a solid but not overwhelming victory: Antena 3 had Zap 45%-Rajoy 39%, Tele 5 had Zap 50%-Rajoy 34%, Cuatro had Zap 45%-Rajoy 33%, and La Sexta had Zap 46%-Rajoy 31%. El Pais's survey was the closest, Zap 46%-Rajoy 42%.

El Pais also gave what was for me a surprising gender breakdown: Men said Zap won, 64%-36%, while women gave Zap a much closer 52%-48% victory. That's the opposite of the American pattern, where men are considerably more conservative than women.

One thing to keep in mind is that everybody who said Rajoy won will vote for the PP, while some of the people who said Zap won will vote for the Communists or a regional nationalist party.

The self-selected, non-scientific polls done by the newspaper websites pretty much reflect the political makeup of each paper's readers.

El Mundo has Rajoy 61%-Zap 39%; ABC has Rajoy 52%-Zap 48%; and La Razon has Rajoy 61%-Zap 39%. Meanwhile, El Pais has Zap 57%-Rajoy 36%; La Vanguardia has Zap 62%-Rajoy 35%; and El Periodico has Zap 74%-Rajoy 26%. The figures from the two Catalan papers show how unpopular Rajoy and the PP are in Catalonia.

Prediction: This debate won't affect voter intention too much, since neither candidate scored a knockout blow. I don't think either of them convinced anyone who wasn't already backing him. I'm still guessing that the PP is going to do better than expected in the ballot boxes, but Rajoy is going to need a clear win in the next debate, along with some solid campaigning.

Round Five: The future.

Rajoy: Biggest challenge to Spain is globalization. Housing biggest individual challenge to Spaniards, because house prices have risen so much under Zap. Socialists have done nothing useful, their Ministry of Housing is a joke. Zap says he has built more subsidized housing, but the real challenge is education and research. He shouldn't have mentioned that. He keeps talking up government spending a lot, bragging about subsidies.

Rajoy comes back pounding on inflation and the increase in housing prices. He's turned the debate to what he wants to talk about. Now he's slamming Zap on the lousy state of education, kids who should fail passing and lack of discipline and bad test scores. Zap's gone back to the number of scholarships he's funded. Now he's brought up climate change. Seems emissions went up under the PP. He wants to subsidize alternative energy.

Rajoy's gone back to housing prices. He said the PP ratified the Kyoto protocol and that Zap can't keep emissions down, either. Now he's blaming Zap for forest fires. Zap's come back with more climate change and he's trying to talk up his education policy again, which I wouldn't do. He bashed Rajoy for bashing the PSOE's pet performers. Rajoy's gone after Zap for neglecting the victims of terrorism, and he's gone after him for insulting PP voters. Zap's comeback: You insulted Serrat first, and Javier Bardem is a lefty.

Round Five to Rajoy on points.

Closing statements: Rajoy's is memorized. He's sounding a little Obamaish, "hope, all together, etc." He's for families and employment, as well as freedom and pride in being Spanish. "We can do it if you want us to walk together." Zap's is too. He's mentioned Iraq again, more pensions, higher minimum wage, and he promises equality between men and women and full employment. Peace yes, illegal wars no. Oh, God, he closed out with "Good night and good luck": loses points for that.

Closing statement to Zap, just barely.

Overall evaluation: Rajoy gets the win, but it wasn't anywhere near a knockout, which is what he needed.

Round Four: "Institutional policy": regional nationalisms and the like. Rajoy is starting off on the Spanish nationalist flank, saying that Zap has pitted communities against one another. Attacks the Catalan statute. Says that all Spaniards should have the same rights. Zap says it wasn't us, it was you, who caused the interregional strife. Zap's attacking the old PP water plan for some reason. Now Zap's defending the Catalan statute, which won't play in Toledo.

Rajoy said kids in Catalonia can't study in Spanish, always a vote getter. He's back on the damn water plan, and now he's accusing Zap of dividing the Spaniards again. "You have no idea of what Spain is." He quotes several Socialist leaders on this. Geez. Now Zap's on the water plan again. He's trying to defend the Catalan statute again; if I were him I wouldn't mention that. Rajoy's bashing the statute now. And now he's brought up the Catalan Tripartite alliance and the Pact del Tinell, the anti-PP alliance in Catalonia.

Zap: You're the ones causing discord and strife, saying Spain is breaking up. He's trying to appeal to the Socialist base in Andalusia and Catalonia, talking up those statutes. "We like dialogue and democracy," implying the PP doesn't. Rajoy's comeback: You're the antidemocratic ones, trying to shut us out. Zap: We're pluralist, you're not.

Round Four to Rajoy on points.

Round Three: Crime and terrorism. Rajoy is all over Zap on negotiations with ETA. He says the PP didn't do so while they were in power. Zap brought up 3-11 and said that his government had reduced the number of terrorism deaths. He claims he never used terrorism as a political issue and called Rajoy immoral. He's back on March 11, rubbing in the PP's great error. Now Rajoy's on the defensive and he's angry. He's brushed off 3-11 and is back on ETA, saying Zap is wishy-washy and has let the terrorists blackmail him.

Zap's back on 3-11 again, using very strong words, saying the PP had lied to the people. Rajoy's pounding on ETA and made the mistake of referring to 3-11 himself. He says he could not support Zap's antiterrorist policy and that Zap had repeatedly lied both to him, personally, and to the citizens. Zap's talking numbers, saying he had hired more police, and he keeps bringing up March 11. Zap's attacking Rajoy on foreign policy: "You sent troops to Bush's war." Rajoy: You want them to vote for you over the same things as before, Bush, 3-11, Iraq. Should not have said that. "You, Castro, and Chavez, that's your foreign policy." Zap says now Spain's image is one of peace, solidarity, and cooperation.

Round Three to Zap, who landed a couple of punches.

Round two: Social problems. Rajoy says the problem is the immigrants using public services. More stats. Spain takes more immigrants than anyone but the US. He's slammed Zap for his illegal immigrant amnesty. Zap's comeback: He says he's created more scholarships, has passed a law on gender equality and one subsidizing families with dependents, has raised pensions and the minimum wage, is subsidizing apartments for young people.

Rajoy's not going to give up on immigration, and he's accused Zap about lying on the scholarship thing. Rajoy: Order and control. Zap: You don't care about social problems. The PSOE is the party of individual rights, divorce, etc. He mentioned abortion, not a good move. Rajoy: The PSOE overturned our education law and now the system sucks, and we did increase pensions. Zap's interrupting him, doesn't look good. Now he's blaming the PP for immigration, saying their policies forced him into the amnesty. Rajoy: You failed on immigration and education. He's attacking Zap on the historical memory law and the Alliance of Civilizations. Zap fired back saying Rajoy was heartless.

Round Two to Rajoy on points. He's got Zap on the defensive.

Time for the big debate. How exciting.

Rajoy is taller than Zap. He's also got a phony smile that he's not very good at; he really isn't a handsome man. He's gone with the red tie and the blue suit, while Zap's gone with the blue tie and the gray suit.

The moderator is droning on and on in that ineffably Spanish way of using lots of large words to say nothing. Here we go, finally. Rajoy started off his opening statement; it's memorized. He's going straignt on the attack: the economy, housing, immigration, and took a whack at Zap's antiterrorist record, saying he'd negotiated with ETA on his own.

Zap's opening up now, claiming that he's done a hell of a job, so good that Spain's economy is bigger than Italy's, which it isn't. He slammed the PP's job in the opposition, saying Rajoy had attacked him personally and had used terrorism for political reasons.

Topic number one: the economy and jobs. Rajoy's quoting stats--boring. Now he's hammering on inflation and unemployment, which have increased under the Zap regime. It's a good argument. Zap's comeback: Growth and job creation are up, and the economic slowdown isn't his fault, but he's on the defensive. He used the words "redistribute wealth," not a good sign. Now he's taken credit for the budget surplus, which is fair enough.

Zap slammed him for using ETA politically again. Rajoy had a chart he used badly. He's got more stats, which aren't going to go over well. Now he's on the trade deficit. Zap's attacking the PP's record during its time in office, not a great idea, and he's got his own charts. He let loose a good low blow, blaming the PP for the alleged "price roundup" during the transition to the euro, which didn't happen.

Rajoy's now slamming the PSOE's record under Gonzalez, when unemployment was 22%. And he is leaning very hard on inflation. Zap's response: It's the fault of the world economy. He's attacked the PP's liberalization of the labor market way back when. Now he's talking about his four hundred euro tax, and saying Bush did the same thing; Rajoy's come back saying he never thought Zap would praise Bush. Inflation, inflation, inflation. Zap's talking about growth, growth, growth.

First round to Rajoy on points.

So tonight's the first big Zap-Rajoy debate, and Iberian Notes will be liveblogging it from its comfortable sofa while trying to keep various cats from sitting on its keyboard. I'm betting on Rajoy.

The big front-page story in every Spanish paper is that Mr. Limousine Communist, Javier Bardem, won the best supporting actor at the Academy Awards. Just another sign of Spain's superiority-inferiority complex regarding the US: Bardem never shuts up about how much he hates America, but he's thrilled to get American recognition. And the same with the Spanish papers, which are vicariously enjoying Bardem's success as if it were theirs, too.

By the way, he pussed out and failed to call Bush a mass murderer during his acceptance speech.

Get this. They had to close down the maternity ward at the Josep Trueta hospital in Girona because of a respiratory virus going around that has affected at least three newborns. The National Health, which I had always had a good opinion of, has suffered an alarming drop in quality.

Speaking of incompetence, they had two sinkholes open up in the middle of a street in the Zona Franca, where they're tunnelling out the future metro line 9, and traffic's going to be screwed up there for the rest of the week. Good thing nobody was killed. Somebody has been doing an incredibly lame-ass job on research into Barcelona's subsoil, since they've had multiple cave-ins on the metro expansion, the commuter train system, and the AVE.

Spain is again Europe's most visited country, leading the EU 27 in total overnight stays in hotels. Tourism is our bread and butter, people, whether we like it or not. Spain is never going to be anybody's R&D headquarters, or the home of quality manufacturing, or a hotbed of globalized trade. It's Europe's Florida, and Florida is doing quite well, thank you.

So the Guardia Civil busted nine more Internet kiddie porn perverts. Jesus. Which sewer do all these sickos crawl out of?

On Saturday the ETA tried to assassinate some police officers; they planted a bomb with five kilos of cloratite at a TV transmitter near Bilbao, and called the cops. The bomb was set to explode when first touched, and fortunately they used a robot to approach it rather than a person, so nobody got killed.

Latest campaign promise: Economics minister Pedro Solbes says the government will take care of getting people's mortgages extended so their monthly payments will be lower, at no charge to anybody but the taxpayers.

Some guy got pulled over by the cops in Santander on Saturday night; he tried to get away, and nearly ran over the arresting officers, who pulled a gun and made him stop. He tested positive for methamphetamines, amphetamines, ecstasy, cocaine, and cannabis. That's a lot of drugs. I can't believe the guy could even sit still, much less drive straight. They sentenced him to eight months in jail, which will be suspended, of course. In America they'd lock his ass up for a good long time.

Over the weekend more than 140 illegal immigrants in two cayucos washed up on the Canary Islands, as the boat people continue their exodus from West Africa.

Quite a night in the Spanish football first division. Barça beat the crap out of Levante, 5-1, on goals by Xavi, Messi, and a hat-trick by Eto'o. Ronaldinho looked pretty good; he might be on the way back. Iniesta had another excellent game, and Bojan made a nice goal-scoring pass. Yeah, Levante sucks, they're buried in last place and by far the worst team in the league, but Barcelona showed what it can do. Zambrotta was the only Barça player who wasn't in top shape; he'd better play better than this or I vote we get rid of him.

And they narrowed Real Madrid's lead to two points with thirteen games to go, so suddenly it's a horse race and Barça controls its own destiny, since they still have to play Real Madrid at the Bernabeu with those three points up for grabs.

Madrid choked big-time at home. They didn't play well, creating only four opportunities in the whole game, and they lost to Getafe 0-1, especially embarrassing since Getafe is a low-rent team from suburban Madrid. The American equivalent would be New York losing to Jersey City.

And even more embarrassing: Madrid "scored a goal," but the linesman had blown offsides, so it didn't count; only Raul and Guti noticed for Real, while all the others jumped all over one another to celebrate. Unfortunately for Madrid, the Getafe goalie, Pato Abbondanzieri or however you spell his name, was quick on the uptake, placed the ball, booted it down the field, and it was a five-on-two fast break for Getafe. And they converted it, and it was goodnight, Nurse.

Several Cuban dissidents were freed by the Communist dictatorship last week after many years and much suffering in prison. Four of them were exiled to Spain; this piece of news got a mention in the Spanish papers on Thursday.

However, the Spanish press--and I checked La Vanguardia, El Periodico, El Mundo, El Pais, and Publico--didn't bother reporting on the dissidents' press conference, which was held right here in Barcelona.

The Daily Telegraph did. Check out the photograph of the man showing the bone that Castro's torturers broke, and then denied him medical treatment for. What a disgrace.

Oh, yeah, Raul got elected president. Unanimously. Of course, he was the only candidate.

Interior minister Perez Rubalcaba announced today that he believes that ETA will attempt a bombing sometime before the March 9 election. He has put the security forces on maximum anti-terrorist alert level, and is not ruling out the possibility of an Islamist terror attack, either.

I will point out that the last time we had a general election in Spain Al Qaeda blew up three trains and killed 191 people three days before; the citizenry reacted by voting out the tough-on-Islamism PP and installing Zap, who instantly did what the terrorists wanted and withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq; Al Qaeda learned that massive terrorist attacks work in Spain; and we know that Zap's gesture did not give Spain an insurance policy against further Islamic attacks.

The European Commission predicts that Spain's GDP will increase by 2.7% this year, while inflation will be 3.7%, meaning we're facing a slight real decline in household income. Eurozone countries are expected to grow at a 1.8% rate, and the EU as a whole by 2%. Consumer confidence in Spain is down, household spending has plateaued, and savings are up. The real estate market is way down, and the construction sector has greatly slowed, meaning higher unemployment. Good sign: Capital goods investment was 8.6% in the fourth quarter of 2007. Also, with less household spending, the trade deficit will get smaller, as much of Spain's imports are consumer goods.

More complaining about Barcelona's El Prat airport: Iberia has made an offer for its competitor Spanair, which is owned by SAS. If the sale goes through, Iberia will control about 50% of all passenger traffic, and 70% of domestic passenger traffic, at El Prat. La Vanguardia says, "If Iberia buys Spanair, the subordination of El Prat to Madrid Barajas, where the ex-monopoly has centralized its intercontinental flights, will be almost absolute, since the ex-monopoly has made it clear on many occasions that its priority is to strengthen Madrid's infrastructure."

People, it's the market. There will only be more flights in and out of Barcelona if Barcelona can provide more passengers for them. If not, then not. Enough whining about Madrid being favored.

Catalan premier Montilla says that if the Iberia purchase goes through, he'll challenge it on antitrust grounds. Fair enough, that's what the competition tribunal is there for, but they're going to lose because Iberia isn't stopping (and can't stop) any other airline from introducing passenger routes to compete with it.

The Spanish election campaign officially begins tonight at midnight, though of course everyone's been campaigning for months. The PSOE's slogan, along with a picture of Rajoy, Zaplana, and Acebes dressed up like the mobsters in Reservoir Dogs, is "If you don't go (to vote), they'll come back." This means that they're running a purely negative campaign, that they believe the PP is most vulnerable over the March 11 bombing and the Iraq war and so they're going to run against that again, and that they think that Socialist turnout will be low, so they're focusing on bringing out their own grass roots instead of trying to win votes in the center.

CiU's running a negative campaign, too, with the slogan, "They'll respect Catalonia (if we win)." Their newspaper ads have fuzzy photos of Zap along with a bunch of his quotations promising things he didn't do, which I suppose means that Zap is not sufficiently respectful. What I'd like to know is how exactly CiU plans to force everyone to "respect Catalonia," whatever that means.

I'm going to take a fairly wild guess here: I think the PP is going to do better than expected. Zap's not very popular, he hasn't really changed things very much, they're running a negative campaign, turnout is going to be low, and the Catalans are really pissed off at the Socialists. The PP's biggest problem is Rajoy's negatives, which are very high.

By the way, thanks to Gates of Vienna for linking to us; they have a piece over there on the Spanish election.

They did another international educational study, this time called Perls, analyzing ten-year-olds' reading comprehension. Russia and Hong Kong scored at the top, over 560 points; Italy, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Flanders, and Denmark scored between about 544 and 552; the US scored 540, and England 538, followed by Scotland and France in the 520s, then Poland, then Spain at 514. The average of the 39 countries surveyed was 510; Wallonia and Norway both scored below 500, with Morocco and South Africa way down there in the low 300s.

The percentage of students with a "low or very low" level of reading comprehension was: 7% in Hong Kong, 8% in the Netherlands, 13% in Germany, 18% in the United States, 22% in England, 24% in France, 28% in Spain, 33% in Norway, and an appalling 91% in Morocco.

The United States scored considerably better than I'd expected; the English, French, and Spanish have one more reason now to stop thinking we're all stupid. I imagine these results are a product of the great improvement in school choice and the proliferation of standardized tests. Yeah, I know the teachers "teach to the test," but at least they're teaching something, and teaching to the test doesn't work if the kids don't already know how to read.

Speaking of thinking we're all stupid, check out this rather patronizing quote from La Vanguardia on Pau Gasol's reception in Los Angeles:

Surprise. At almost ten thousand kilometers away from Barcelona, and despite the stereotypes about the geographical ignorance of the Americans, they know us. "At the front door of the arena," explained Mata (a Catalan in LA who showed up with a Catalan flag), "the security guard asked me, 'Is that a Basque or a Catalan flag?'"

Oh, yeah, you remember the "United States Threatens Earth" headline in Publico a few days ago? Turns out they blew up the satellite as planned, with no problems. By the way, despite the alarmism of professional alarmists, no one has ever been injured, much less killed, by space junk falling to earth, and they figure it's a million-to-one chance: that you're much more likely to be struck by lightning than hit by space junk.

The high-speed train (AVE) between Barcelona and Madrid entered service this morning. Remains to be seen whether this will help or hurt Zap in the election. La Vanguardia has a piece complaining about the years-long delay of the AVE (they have a point, though the blame rests equally on the central government, the Generalitat, and the municipalities) and on the fact that the system is centered in Madrid (what do they expect? Madrid is, like, in the center). La Vangua demands AVE routes from Barcelona to the French border, and from Barcelona to Valencia. It claims that the French don't want to extend their line to the Spanish border because they fear that Barcelona would take over too much business and influence from southern French cities like Montpellier and Toulouse. I doubt it. I think they have other priorities within France.

A bunch of student wannabe radical Cataloonies disrupted a speech by PP candidate Dolors Nadal at the Pompeu Fabra university here in Barcelona, screaming "Fascists get out!". Says Pilar Rahola:

Let's make this clear. Francoism made everyone who confronted it appear to be good. However, in the basket there were apples that were as rotten as Francoism itself, and the fact that they were persecuted does not make them freedom fighters. The Stalinists, for example, who had repressed and murdered their political adversaries, became epic victims through the Francoist repression. But, nevertheless, they were victimizers too. The same thing is true with the extremists in the Catalanist struggle. They were persecuted by the dictatorship, but they were not all democrats. Today, looking at these young barbarians, I remember the most fundamental thing: no people, no cause, no flag is immune to Fascist temptations. Denying this is a form of justifying it.

The Zap-Rajoy debates are set for February 25 and March 3. Zap should never have agreed to this. Rajoy can clean him up in a one-on-one debate, and that should result in an electoral bounce for the PP that the PSOE won't have enough time to fight back against.

There is speculation going around, probably started by the PP, saying that the PSOE and CiU will cut a deal after the election, in which CiU will join a coalition government in Madrid in exchange for the Socialists' dumping Montilla as Catalan premier, to be replaced by Artur Mas. Montilla has strongly denied it.

The Mataró police chief lost his license for eight months for drunk driving. What I want to know is why he's still the Mataró police chief.

Good news for folks interested in Catalonia: They've put the whole Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana on the Internet for free. It also includes a Catalan dictionary. The website runs really slowly, though. As far as I can tell, you can only search, you can't browse. Another problem: It was last updated in 1989. Still, if you're looking for information about Catalan or Spanish history, literature, politics, and the like, this is a welcome addition.

They rounded up 26 more Internet kiddie-porn pervs here in Spain. It seems like they round up another bunch of these guys every week. Is Spain that full of pedophiles? It can't be any worse here than in other Western countries, but you never hear about this stuff happening in other places. Maybe the Spanish cops put a higher priority on child pornography than other countries do.

The big news over here this morning is that Fidel Castro has decided not to "run for reelection," and so a new president of Cuba named Raul will succeed him on Sunday. I'm not sure what difference this makes, since Raul isn't going to change any of Fidel's methods. Raul's not going to begin a transition to democracy, and if anybody in Cuba thinks differently they're going to find themselves in jail. He's had two years to consolidate himself in power, and there are no signs of any liberalization.

This leads to the slightly paranoid question of whether Fidel is still actually alive, or if he's been either dead or a vegetable the last couple of years. We haven't seen anything of him but videotapes, remember. I doubt that such a cover-up could actually be kept under wraps; somebody would blab. They might be able to carry off such a coverup with only ten or so people in the know, except that one of those ten people would be Hugo Chavez and there's no way he'd ever keep quiet about anything.

Spain's reaction has been what you'd expect: they hope for democratic progress and some sort of transition, but as long as Zap is in power they're not actually going to do anything about it.

Let's hope the extremist fringe among the Miami Cubans doesn't try anything dumb.

Quick campaign promise update: Zap's promise to teach everybody English will require hiring 20,000 native speakers for the public schools, so this is good for us folks in the ESL business. He's also going to send thousands of Spanish teachers to England and Ireland for courses, so that's good news for you ESL folks up north. Assuming, of course, that Zap actually 1) gets elected and 2) keeps his promise.

Meanwhile, Rajoy has promised to increase state spending on sports, which is a bunch of crap if he's talking about spectator sports, which should be 100% private sector. If he means building swimming pools and gyms and soccer fields, and encouraging amateur leagues, so that ordinary citizens can actually play sports, then that's another thing.

Spain, as one might expect, is against the Kosovar declaration of independence, in opposition to the other large EU countries and the US. Spain has lined up with such world powers as Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Spanish foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos said, "The Spanish government will not recognize this unilateral declaration because we consider that it does not respect international law." He added, "We have always defended international law. We did it when we decided to withdraw our troops from Iraq, and we will do it now when the question is secession from a state."

The Cataloonies, of course, are in favor of anything resembling secession, because that is exactly what they want to do here. TV3's coverage is very pro-Kosovar, and if you can read Catalan, check out all the comments on their website, nearly all of which are pro-secession. (There are a couple of whackjob Serbian fanatics among the commenters.)

Interestingly, nobody has mentioned the American flags being flown by the Kosovar pro-secession demonstrators. But Joan Puigcercós, ERC's`pathologically Cataloony hitman, called President Bush's recognition of Kosovo "a lesson in democracy for Spain." Quite a change; that's the first time I've ever seen such a rabid Cataloony say anything pro-American, much less pro-Bush.

Somebody leaked an internal security report to El Pais, who happily printed it on their front page, since it declares that the Spanish police have basically crushed ETA and thereby makes Zap look good since he's in charge. I imagine the report is 100% correct, but I also imagine that the link was purposely timed by pro-Zap elements within the interior ministry for a mere three weeks before the elections.

Says the report: ETA is so weakened that it has had to abandon the cell system. Formerly there were recruiting, logistical, material, shelter, training, and operational cells, but now the leadership only trusts a small group of fanatics, who are responsible for all these tasks. ETA is no longer capable of finding shelter for its terrorists after they pull a job, and so they are easily traced by the police. The organization has little or no structure left in France. The hard-core leaders in charge are facing a loss of support, and use the threat of violence to keep lesser members and sympathizers in line. There are some 560 ETA members in prison in Spain.

La Vanguardia ran an election survey yesterday showing the PSOE with a small but significant lead, contradicting the most recent CIS survey showing a dead heat. According to La Vangua, the PSOE would get 43.1% of the vote and 165 seats to the PP's 39.1% and 152 seats. CiU would get 10 seats, the PNV 6, ERC 5, the Communists 5, and others 7. 176 seats are needed for a majority; according to these figures, a PSOE-CiU coalition would need only one more vote, which they can probably get from the Canaries Coalition or one of the other tiny parties. Or the Commies.

Zap promised that within ten years all Spanish young people will know English. Hell, they don't even know proper Spanish.

Sports update: Barcelona won last night, 1-2, in Zaragoza, on a goal by Henry and a questionable penalty converted by Ronaldinho. Madrid got beat by Betis, so Barcelona is only five points back with fourteen games to play. No other teams are in contention for the League title, and Barça is still alive in both the Spanish Cup and the Champions' League. On Wednesday they play Celtic in Glasgow.