by the Night Writer

Along with planning for our trip I’m also trying to get up to speed on the news and politics in Spain before we go over there. The New York Times maintains an on-line news page on the country that is a handy reference. Allow me to excerpt three of the top stories for your consideration; I’ve bold-faced some words for emphasis, but this post is just snapshots, not analyses. I don’t have the time or the historical context to attempt an analyses at this point, but I do have enough intellect and curiosity to file these under, “Things that make you go, ‘Hmmmm.'”

The first article summarizes the March, 2008 electoral victory of the Socialist Party and PM José Luis Zapatero, which was first elected in 2004:

Spain’s governing Socialists triumphed in elections held in March 2008, giving Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero a fresh mandate to pursue his agenda of sweeping social, cultural and political liberalization.

Despite a bitterly fought campaign, the outcome seemed to endorse some of Mr. Zapatero’s boldest decisions, including the withdrawal of Spain’s troops from Iraq, the granting of more autonomy to Spain’s rebellious regions, simplified divorce and the legalization of homosexual marriage.

(Read more of the excerpt.)

Mr. Zapatero’s Socialist party defeated the conservative Popular Party in a rematch of the bitter contest four years ago between Mr. Zapatero and Mariano Rajoy, the head of the Popular Party. It was then that Mr. Zapatero was unexpectedly swept into power after Spaniards delivered a message of disapproval and anger to the conservative government.

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Among the bold decisions includes a head-on conflict with the Catholic Church on abortion.

Spain Steps Into Battle With Itself on Abortion
By VICTORIA BURNETT
MADRID — One day last month, Sister María Victoria Vindel gave her 15-year-old students a shockingly graphic lecture on reproductive health: PowerPoint slides of dismembered and disfigured fetuses interspersed with biblical quotations and pictures of a grinning José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister.

“They laugh while many innocent children will die,” one of the captions read. The presentation ended with the message, “No to abortion, yes to life!”

Sister Vindel’s class at Purísima Concepción y Santa María Micaela, a parochial school in Logroño in northern Spain, is the most controversial episode yet in an increasingly contentious debate about Mr. Zapatero’s plans to ease Spain’s restrictive abortion law.

The class was described by the mother of a student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of possible repercussions for her child, and by Inmaculada Ortega, a Socialist lawmaker who spoke to several students and their parents.

The school, where Sister Vindel is headmistress, refused to comment on the slide show, which appeared to be downloaded from the Internet. The regional government, run by the opposition Popular Party, sent inspectors to the school, a Catholic institution that is financed partly by the state and partly by the parents. The government called the presentation “inappropriate” and said that it could constitute “moral aggression.”

Since he became prime minister in 2004, Mr. Zapatero has pushed an ambitious series of reforms, prying the social fabric of Spain from the centuries-old grip of the Roman Catholic Church. The Socialist government has legalized gay marriage, eased divorce law and expanded the rights of transsexuals.

(Read more of the excerpt.)

Now Mr. Zapatero has ventured onto even more incendiary social terrain, the divide over abortion; and if he was looking for a battle, he found one. As Spain celebrated Holy Week, the clergy rolled out a vigorous protest from pulpits, billboards and the hooded ranks of traditional Easter processions.

Abortion is technically a crime in Spain, though a law introduced in 1985, 10 years after Franco’s death, permits abortions under certain circumstances. In practice, however, abortions are widely available because doctors cite a mental health exception.

The current law allows terminations in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy only in cases of rape and in the first 22 weeks in cases of congenital disorder. However, a woman can abort at any time if her mental or physical health is at risk — an exception cited in about 97 percent of abortions in Spain, according to Empar Pineda, spokeswoman for the Spanish Association of Accredited Abortion Clinics.

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I’m not up on my history of the Catholic Church’s prior relationship with the Socialists or Zapatero, but in Central and South America the Church has been known to support and endorse Socialist uprisings and candidates. I wonder if it has been happy with the resulting social conditions? Something to look into.

Leaving aside the spiritual, it appears that Zapatero may also have some issues with the temporal:

Spain’s Falling Prices Fuel Deflation Fears in Europe
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

VALENCIA, Spain — Faced with plunging orders, merchants across this recession-wracked country are starting to do something that many of them have never done: cut retail prices.

Prices dipped everywhere, from restaurants and fashion retailers to pharmacies and supermarkets in March. Hoping to increase sales, Fernando Maestre reduced prices by a third on the video intercoms his company makes for homes and apartment buildings. But that has not helped, so, along with many other Spanish employers, he is continuing to fire workers.

The nation’s jobless rate, already a painful 15.5 percent, could soon reach 20 percent, a troubling number for a major industrialized country. (Ya think? Later on the article also includes this stat: The jobless rate for those under 25 is at a Depression-like level of 31.8 percent, the highest among the 27 nations of the European Union. NW)

With the combination of rising unemployment and falling prices, economists fear Spain may be in the early grip of deflation, a hallmark of both the Great Depression and Japan’s lost decade of the 1990s, and a major concern since the financial crisis went global last year.

Deflation can result in a downward spiral that can be difficult to reverse. As unemployment rises sharply and consumers cut spending, companies cut prices. But if sales do not pick up, then revenue can decline further, forcing more cuts in workers or wages. Mr. Maestre is already contemplating additional job and wage cuts for his 250 employees.

Nowhere is this cycle more evident than in Spain. Last month, it became the first of the 16 nations that use the euro to record a negative inflation rate. The drop, though just 0.1 percent, had not happened since the government began tracking inflation in 1961, and Spanish officials have said prices could keep dropping through the summer.

Some of the decline came as volatile food prices sank; the cost of fish fell 6.2 percent, and sugar was down 5.7 percent. But even prices in normally stable sectors like drugs and medical treatments fell 0.7 percent in March, and there were slight declines in footwear, clothing and prices for household electronics.

“Alarm bells are going off,” said Lorenzo Amor, president of the Association of Autonomous Workers, which represents small businesses and self-employed people. “Economies can recover from deceleration, but it’s harder to recover from a deflationary situation. This could be a catastrophe for the Spanish economy.”

I’m sure we’ll try our best to stimulate that economy!

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by the Night Writer

I was eating my Pop Tarts and reading a story in the Strib this morning when a thought popped into my head about the similarity between a violent, capital crime and violence against capital.

In the story a 17-year-old accused murderer has had charges against him dismissed because the witnesses are afraid to testify against him; one even left the state. Both the accused killer, Ramadan Abdi Shiekh Osman, and the victim, Ahmed Nur Ali, are members of the Somali community; Ali was an Augsburg student volunteering at the community center where the murder took place.

Now witness intimidation and the old self-preservation instinct are nothing new and certainly not unique to a particular ethnic group; it is the foundation of mob rule in any era or community. There’s nothing especially unique about this particular story, either: justice is denied, the rule of law is flouted and a likely killer walks the streets. All of this because witnesses have learned a painful lesson and don’t believe that law enforcement can protect them from reprisals and have therefore made themselves scarce or recanted their testimony. What may ultimately happen to the community as a result?

Now a neighborhood thug and the bankruptcies of Chrysler and GM — where the senior investors lost their legal standing for recovery by executive fiat — may look as if they are worlds apart, but I started to think about the “lessons” learned by the neighborhood witnesses, and if investors weren’t learning the same lessons. That is, you have to depend on your own instincts and resources if you can’t depend on the rule of law to look after you and preserve your community (or capital) when the prevailing gang gets to decide right and wrong and reward its friends and abuse its enemies. In the local community you clam up, lie low and even move away to avoid reprisals or becoming a target. In the investor community the equivalent is nearly the same: funds dry up, investors lie low and capital — being a lot more portable than an oppressed family — moves to a better neighborhood with less risk of confiscation.

And the community gets ugly, fast.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”
— Robert A. Heinlein

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by the Night Writer

David Foster at Chicago Boyz noted this disturbing news:

Obama has nominated Cass Sunstein, who he knows from the University of Chicago, to be “regulatory czar.” Apparently, Sunstein has proposed that web sites be required to link to opposing opinions. He has argued that the Internet is anti-democratic because users can choose to view only those opinions that they want to see, and has gone so far as to say:

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” he wrote. “Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom’s name.

The forced-linking proposal makes about as much sense as requiring that when you buy a political book at a bookstore, the store must also require you to buy books of contrary views. (And anyhow, how to you force the person to read the book or follow the link? Will there be a test? Penalties for failing to pass? Withdrawal of book-buying or web-browsing “privileges?”) Sunstein’s proposal is almost certainly unconstitutional–moreover, it is philosophically primitive. There are not one or two dissenting views from any opinion: there are thousands of them, incorporating widely differing conceptual frameworks. Who, in Sunstein’s world, would decide which views, as expressed by which authors, would be required to be linked? Probably either a government agency or a “service” run by a politically-well-connected corporation. A better way to suppress innovative thought would be difficult to imagine.

Fortunately, Sunsteim has backed away from this position and admitted its constitutional hurdles. This may or may not make you feel better, as Foster also says that Sunstein is also being considered as a candidate for the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Souter.

HT: Stones Cry Out

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by the Night Writer

The Obama Administration has been saying over and over that 90 percent of the guns recovered from criminals in Mexico come from the U.S. Fox News has reported the actual total is 17 percent. According to an updated FactCheck.org report, however, they are both wrong by a significant margin.

Both numbers seemed rather far-fetched to me when I first heard them, but the FactCheck report looks like it has a pretty good handle on the facts and methodologies of what is a bit of a convoluted process to calculate. (FactCheck itself admits getting an incorrect answer its first time through). Here’s the skinny:

President Obama and Mexican president Calderon both said 90 percent of the guns recovered by Mexican authorities come from the U.S. SoS Hillary Clinton, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), Diane Feinstein (D-CA) repeated the figure (using the same teleprompter, perhaps?) and they’ve been faithfully echoed by the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor and NBC who can’t afford calculators due to budget cuts. Their error — deliberate or inadvertent — is to leave out a few important words. What they should be saying is that 90 percent of guns recovered that the Mexican government submits for tracing can be traced back to the U.S. As Fox and others noted, Mexico only submits a percentage of the guns it recovers for tracing, mainly because most of the guns are untraceable. As FactCheck notes:

…Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora put the number of recovered crime weapons in the country over the past two years at nearly 29,000, according to USA Today. And figures given by ATF make clear that the agency doesn’t trace nearly all of those.

According to ATF, Mexico submitted 7,743 firearms for tracing in fiscal year 2008 (which ended Oct. 1) and 3,312 guns in fiscal 2007. That adds up to a fraction of the two-year total given by Mexico’s attorney general. He may be referring to a slightly different 24-month period, but that can’t account for more than a part of the discrepancy. The number is growing, and already this year, Mexico has submitted more than 7,500 guns for tracing, according to ATF. But even if all those guns are added in, the total submitted for tracing since the start of fiscal 2007 doesn’t come close to the 29,000 figure that Mexico says it has recovered.

While the Administration stumbles over words, Fox — deliberately or inadvertently — used the wrong number (based on confusing ATF testimony) to do its math. Fox said only 5,114 of the 29,000 recovered guns came through the U.S. Back to FactCheck:

The 5,114 figure is simply wrong. What Newell said quite clearly is that the number of guns submitted to ATF in those two years was 11,055: “3,312 in FY 2007 [and] 7,743 in FY 2008.” Newell also testified, as other ATF officials have done, that 90 percent of the guns traced were determined to have come from the U.S. So based on Newell’s testimony, the Fox reporters should have used a figure of 9,950 guns from U.S. sources. That figures out to just over 34 percent of guns recovered, assuming that the 29,000 figure supplied by Mexico’s attorney general is correct.

Even that number is too low. At our request, an ATF spokesman gave us more detailed figures for how many guns had been submitted and traced during those two years. Of the guns seized in Mexico and given to ATF for tracing, the agency actually found 95 percent came from U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 93 percent in fiscal 2008. That comes to a total of 10,347 guns from U.S. sources for those two years, or 36 percent of what Mexican authorities say they recovered.

Ok, 34-36 percent isn’t exactly a small number (unless you compare it to 90 percent). As other bloggers have noted, most of the guns used in Mexico are fully-automatic weapons which are not readily available in the U.S. but can be purchased, stolen or donated by other entities throughout Central and South America. Not that a shade-tree armorer couldn’t convert a U.S. semi-automatic AR-15 to automatic, but the drug gangs and cartels do have other options.

While it would be very nice if these guns didn’t cross the border (and kept prices down domestically) and some might say even 34 percent is horrific when innocent by-standers are being killed, the purchases are being made by criminals to use on other criminals. The Administration’s 90 percent chorus, however, seems like part of a plan to further complicate (if not outlaw) legal gun transactions for law-abiding citizens in the U.S.

Now that the numbers have been brought together and the math is out there it will be interesting to see if the Administration and Fox (and others) continue to use their incorrect numbers going forward, or if any other media will bother to do the math as part of the responsibility of a free press. Whatever numbers you see being used next will tell you a lot about the person or organization using them.

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by the Night Writer

I thought I was pretty well-read, being a fan of history and having minored in poli-sci in college (though my profs were generally left-of-center and one was a flaming communist), but my wife forwarded me an essay the other day by someone I’d never heard of — and really should have: Albert Jay Nock. The essay is entitled “Isaiah’s Job” and originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1936. It makes a strong case for refusing to pander to the “masses” in favor of serving the nearly invisible and unknown “remnant”.

It was especially relevant to me because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how far one can compromise in politics (or anything) without losing a working grasp on one’s principles. This has been especially true in light of the series Mitch Berg has been doing on what the Republican Party needs to do to develop and disseminate its message in Minnesota. I’ve frankly long-since grown weary of the philosophy of voting for the lesser of two evils (since that’s still voting for evil), which forces me to think in terms of what I really believe is important and what I’m willing to do to achieve it — even if it means “losing” a few election cycles. Reading Nock’s essay it was amazing and stirring to see how eloquently he was stating some of the conclusions I’ve come to, some of which have found their way into recent posts here.

Even though some of what I’ve learned so far about Nock suggests that he gets out on some philosophical ledges where my brain isn’t willing to go, I’d like to read more about him. In this essay alone I feel my brain stretching in unexpected ways as he describes the differences between the masses and the remnant, and the potential rewards and ultimate futility of pandering to one with the nominal rewards but lasting utility of serving the other.

The term “remnant” has developed strong religious overtones in certain evangelical circles where it has become a by-word of particular eschatological beliefs. In Isaiah’s Job, Nock begins with the prophet Isaiah and the original biblical references, but connects the concept to the writings of Plato and Marcus Aurelius as well, offering a classic “old times” rather than “end times” perspective along with a stirring call to embrace an apparently impossible assignment.

Update:

Today’s Day by Day cartoon is apt:

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It struck me the other day that the modern Disney classic The Emperor’s New Groove, is a stunning forecast of the Obama administration, even though it was released at the dawning of the previous administration in 2000.

Now, I don’t blog about politics too much because there are so many better bloggers out there with more fire and deeper insights than I, plus my own belief is that there’s really not a nickel’s worth of difference between the two major parties’ ruling credo of “just win, baby.” I am a big movie fan, however, and some of the recent political headlines started dovetailing with the great songs and dialog in the movie. Were the Disney studios eerily prescient in their allegorical (not Al-Gore-ical) forecast of an Obama administration, or did I simply spend too many hours in a car this weekend with too little to occupy my mind? You be the judge.

Submitted for your consideration, the following excerpts with President Obama as Emperor Kuzco, Senator Judd Greg as Pacha, Rahm Emanuel as Kronk and a host of “characters” that Obama has thrown under the bus represented by the emporer’s ex-advisor, Yzma.

Kuzco’s theme song: This was sung by the great Tom Jones, but the cartoon vocalist with his red-blond afro and over-the-top enthusiasm sounds a lot like Chris Matthews to me. Consider these lyrics (think “Big O” instead of “Kuzco”):

He was born and raised to rule
No one has ever been this cool
In a thousand years of aristocracy
An enigma and a mystery
In Meso American History
The quintessence of perfection that is he

He’s the sovereign lord of the nation
He’s the hippest dude in creation
He’s a hep cat in the emperor’s new clothes
Years of such selective breeding
Generations have been leading
To this miracle of life that we all know

What’s his name?
Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco…

He’s the sovereign lord of the nation
He’s the hippest cat in creation
He’s the alpha, the omega, a to z
And this perfect world will spin
Around his every little whim
‘Cause this perfect world begins and ends with him

What’s his name?
Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco…

Weird, huh? Well how about these lines of dialog (real names inserted for cartoon characters):

Pacha/Judd Gregg: Uh-oh.
Kuzco/Obama: Don’t tell me. We’re about to go over a huge waterfall.
Pacha/Gregg: Yep.
Kuzco/Obama: Sharp rocks at the bottom?
Pacha/Gregg: Most likely.
Kuzco/Obama: Bring it on.

[after the stock market’s fallen into the alligator pit]
Kuzco/Obama: Why do we even have that lever?

Kuzco/Obama: Oh, and by the way, you’re fired.
Yzma/Rick Wagoner: Fired? W-W-What do you mean, “fired”?
[Kuzco/Obama snaps his finger and a servant comes in and writes down Wagoner’s “pink slip”]
Kuzco/Obama: Um, how else can I say it? “You’re being let go.” “Your department’s being downsized.” “You’re part of an outplacement.” “We’re going in a different direction.” “We’re not picking up your option.” Take your pick. I got more.

Kronk/Rahm Emanuel: Hey, it doesn’t always have to be about you. This poor little guy’s had it rough. Seems a talking llama/talk show host gave him a hard time the other day.

Kuzco/Obama voiceover: This is Carville, the emperor’s advisor. Living proof that dinosaurs once roamed the Earth.

[Kuzko/Obama collides with an old man/Jim Cramer while dancing]
Kuzco/Obama: D’oh! You threw off my groove!
Palace Guard/Media: I’m sorry, but you’ve thrown off the Emperor’s groove.
[the old man/Cramer is thrown out of the palace window]
Old Man/Cramer: Sooooorry!

Kuzco/Obama: When will you learn that all my ideas are good ones?
Pacha/Gregg: Well, that’s funny. Because I thought that you going into the jungle by yourself, being chased by jaguars, lying to me to take you back to the palace were all really bad ideas.
Kuzco/Obama: Oh, yeah. Anything sounds bad when you say it with that attitude.

Pacha/Gregg: Why did I risk my life for a selfish brat like you? I was always taught that there was some good in everyone, but, oh, you proved me wrong.
Kuzco/Obama: Oh, boo-hoo. Now I feel really bad. Bad Obama.

Yzma/Rev. Wright: Why, I practically raised him.
Kronk/Emanuel: Yeah, you’d think he would’ve turned out better.
Yzma/Rev. Wright: Yeah, go figure.

I don’t know about you, but right now I’m scrutinizing Monsters vs. Aliens for predictions of the next election.

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