“Peace, prosperity, liberty and morals
have an intimate connection.”

- Thomas Jefferson

The big news for us is that Faith and Ben finally got back from their honeymoon yesterday. Of course, there are other things going on in the headlines, but it's hard not to see everything in terms of the kids being back. For example, I'm so happy I'm thinking about turning over some police cars and setting small trees on fire. Nothing shows the world how happy you are like wanton property damage and abuse of authority, I guess. To follow the lead of the Laker fans I suppose we should have rampaged through our neighborhood immediately after the wedding three weeks ago, but I was just too tired.

With a couple fewer mouths to feed the last couple of weeks we've had quite a few leftovers piling up in the refrigerator. This, of course, is just another way Americans are killing the planet with our wastrel ways through excess food accumulating in landfills and producing methane gas that's 20 TIMES WORSE THAN CARBON DIOXIDE! I thought the problem for years has been Americans eat too much, leading to an obesity epidemic, now we're criticized for not cleaning our plates? Oh, if only we didn't live in a functioning economy (for the moment) with an effective infrastructure that efficiently and cost-effectively delivers food to us on a daily basis! Don't worry, I'm sure that within a few years the government will take care of this oversight while also mandating how much and what kinds of food we can buy. I mean, once the goverment takes over health care and we still die too expensively it's only logical they regulate consumption for our own good. Or maybe they'll just let the natural results of their policies run their course: whatever flaws the Soviet Union had, they certainly were never known for letting their wasted food pile up into methane-producing heaps.

Anyway, now that Ben's back there is sure to be fewer left-overs, and the cattle industry can breathe a sigh of relief after demand took a brief dip in June. To be honest, though, I don't know how much our household is actually contributing to the food piles in the landfill. I don't recall ever throwing out any pizza or half a bag of Fritos. Our policy is simply that we will never throw good food away. We merely wrap it and put it in the refrigerator until it becomes bad food, and then we throw it away.

As for the riots in Iran, I guess they're just upset that Faith and Ben decided not to visit there as part of their world-wide, whirlwind honeymmoon tour.

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!