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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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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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.”

Greg Marmalard: Remain calm! All is well!
D-Day: Ramming speed!

Update:

...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.

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.

Yo-ho and avast, there still be pirates — and why you might care

I saw an article today in the StarTribune, Miami-based Cruise Ship Attacked by Pirates off Somalia, and it reminded me of a book I read last year by John S. Burnett entitled Dangerous Waters.

It's an excellent and eye-opening read about a subject most people think has become quaint: high seas piracy. Burnett was motivated to research and write the book after his own small boat was boarded and robbed. While you won't find much in the way of masted ships flying the Jolly Roger looking for easy pickings today, the reality is that the basics of piracy in the 17th century and today are still in place: slow-moving, lightly-guarded ships loaded with valuable cargo in international waters with little controlling authority — and a large, international pool of people greedy enough, or desperate enough, that have access to fast boats and weaponry and little fear of being caught. In fact, about all that's changed is the technology. Galleons have been replaced by high-speed boats; cannons replaced with rocket-propelled grenades; cutlasses with Uzis.

While this (literally) cut-throat business has never really gone away, even in the age of high-tech navies, it is mostly invisible because it doesn't affect our lives in many noticeable ways. As Burnett points out, however, piracy today can easily lead to a serious and confounding global problem.

One of the most pirate-infested areas today is the Malacca Straits. While the location might not be as colorful-sounding as, say, the Caribbean and you might be a little vague on the geography, the Malacca Straits are a very important little body of water. They link the Indian and Pacific Oceans and are the shortest sea route between India, China and Indonesia. They are filled with shallow reefs and tiny islands and there are only narrow channels available for the nearly 1000 ships - mostly cargo ships and oil tankers - that pass through each day like slow, fat fish in a barrel. Heavy traffic in narrow confines makes for relatively easy pickings for pirates in "smash and grab" types of raids (board, loot any crew and passengers, take electronics and other valuables from the bridge and beat it to a nearby hideout or fishing village). Sometimes, however, this results in tanker or cargo crews being tied up and their ships left to plow on out of control through a highly congested area. It doesn't take much imagination to think of the effects that a grounding or sinking of a tanker in this area could have on this vital commercial thoroughfare. Here's some of what the above link about the straits has to say:

The narrowest point of this shipping lane is the Phillips Channel in the Singapore Strait, which is only 1.5 miles wide at its narrowest point. This creates a natural bottleneck, with the potential for a collision, grounding, or oil spill (in addition, piracy has historically been a regular occurrence in the Singapore Strait, but over the past 15 years has grown alarmingly). Some 400 shipping lines and 700 ports worldwide rely on the Malacca and Singapore straits to get to the Singapore port. For example, 80% of Japan's oil comes from the Middle East via the Malacca Straits. To skip the straits would force a ship to travel an extra 994 miles from the Gulf. All excess capacity of the world fleet might be absorbed, with the effect strongest for crude oil shipments and dry bulk such as coal. Closure of the Strait of Malacca would immediately raise freight rates worldwide. With Chinese oil imports from the Middle East increasing steadily, the Strait of Malacca is likely to grow in strategic importance in coming years.

Whether through criminal accident or premeditated terrorism (elements of Abu Sayaff and Al Quaida are active in this area), it may be just a matter of time before such an incident fills headlines around the world.

It's not an unknown threat to people who's business it is to be concerned with these things, Burnett's book and others (see below) does a good job of describing the efforts cargo and passenger lines, governments and military forces are making to mitigate the problem while also describing the bureaucratic, political and logistical hurdles they face.

All in all, today's news story (selected by the Strib perhaps because it was so unusual sounding) highlights an issue we often overlook. If you're intrigued by this information, Dangerous Waters is a sobering but very interesting read. You might also find the following related books suggested by Amazon of interest:

Jolly Roger With an Uzi: The Rise and Threat of Modern Piracy by Jack A. Gottschalk

Pirates Aboard!: Forty Cases of Piracy Today and What Bluewater Cruisers Can Do About It by Klaus Hympendahl

Maritime Terror: Protecting Your Vessel and Your Crew Against Piracy by Jim Gray

Ammo in short supply; Dem takeover gets blame
OGDEN -- With firearm dealers struggling to keep ammunition on their shelves, it seems the gun and ammunition business has been stimulated in a way few people expected.

The minute Barack Obama stepped into the White House, people scrambled to gun stores to buy as much ammunition as they could get their hands on. Now, there's a shortage of ammunition all over the country as demand is three times the supply.

"It's been a huge topic since the election," said Mike Casey, vice president of Smith & Edwards in Farr West.

"Ammunition is hard to come by, and the demand isn't getting smaller. Even with production increases, it is extremely difficult to get ammo."

Casey has been out of several calibers of ammunition for more than six weeks now, with no expected date of delivery.

From Jan. 1 through the end of March, 63,348 people in Utah have gotten the background check necessary for obtaining a firearm, according to data on an FBI Web site.

In the past 10 years, the state has averaged 90,000 people a year getting those background checks. If this year continues at the same rate as its first three months, Utah would have nearly met its yearly average of background checks by the end of April.

One manufacturer, Winchester, has back orders for 200 million rounds of .45-caliber bullets.

The company's machines produce 1.6 million rounds a day, which puts them more than 120 days behind.

And it's getting tougher to make your own bullets, too. Reloading supplies sell out nearly as fast as they hit stores, Spencer said.

Recently, Kent Shooters Supply received a shipment of 80 pounds of gunpowder. That amount, typically a six-month supply for the store, was sold in three days.

"It's crazy. The guy in the past who bought a pound of powder is now buying all I have on the counter," Spencer said.

Senator Warner wants to start a "discussion" about end-of-life issues
From The Virginian Pilot. Make no mistake about where this is headed: first it will be just ensuring that everyone has "information," next it will be voluntary "guidelines," and then the "guidelines" will no longer be voluntary. Translation: your friendly federal government wants to decide when to pull the plug--because it knows best

Sen. Warner calls for discussion of end-of-life treatment
By Dale Eisman
The Virginian-Pilot
© March 6, 2009
WASHINGTON

Two months into his term, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner has marched into the policy thicket that is health-care reform, urging a national discussion on the touchy question of how best to treat terminally ill people.

In a speech to hospital executives this week, Warner called for intensified efforts to educate individuals and families in advance about end-of-life care. With better information, many people would forgo expensive and almost-always-futile treatment for patients near death, he said.

Such measures account for more than one-fourth of Medicare payments and 10 to 12 percent of all health costs, studies suggest.

"We leave it to families to resolve these extraordinarily difficult decisions with little guidance," Warner said. "Other industrialized nations have dealt with the end-of-life issue. It's time we did as well."

21st Century British Healthcare (Terminally Ill Can Be Starved to Death, UK Court Rules) (featuring an assist from Monty Python)

Charlotte's Web: When the State Decides if Your Baby Shall Live or Die

An update on Charlotte Wyatt ... and the state of socialized medicine

Scottish seniors aren't dead yet: the rising cost of "free" healthcare

MORRISTOWN, Tenn. — Homeschooling is so important to Uwe Romeike that the classically trained pianist sold his beloved grand pianos to pay for moving his wife and five children from Germany to the Smoky Mountain foothills of Tennessee.

Romeike, his wife, Hannelore, and their children live in a modest duplex about 40 miles northeast of Knoxville while they seek political asylum here. They say they were persecuted for their evangelical Christian beliefs and homeschooling their children in Germany, where state school attendance is compulsory.

When the Romeikes wouldn't comply with repeated orders to send the children to school, police came to their home one October morning in 2006 and took the children, crying and upset, to school.

"We tried not to open the door, but they (police) kept ringing the doorbell for 15 or 20 minutes," Romeike said. "They called us by phone and spoke on the answering machine and said they would knock open the door if we didn't open it. So I opened it."

Stones Cry Out excerpted a story last week about German police forcibly delivering home-schooled children to the local state schools.

A Nazi-era law requiring all children to attend public school, to avoid "the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions" that could be taught by parents at home, apparently is triggering a Nazi-like response from police.

The word comes from Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit, or Network for Freedom in Education, which confirmed that children in a family in Bissingen, in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, have been forcibly hauled to a public school.

"On Friday 20 October 2006 at around 7:30 a.m. the children of a home educating family ... were brought under duress to school by police," the organization, which describes itself as politically and religiously neutral, confirmed.

A separate weblog in the United States noted the same tragedy.

Homeschoolblogger.com noted that the "three children were picked up by the police and escorted to school in Baden-Wurttemberg, with the 'promise' that it would happen again this week."

The Network for Freedom in Education, through spokesman Joerg Grosseluemern, said the Remeike family has been "home educating their children since the start of the school year, something which is legal in practically the whole of the (European Union)."

It kind of makes you wonder about a government that's afraid of what parents might teach their children...or that believes it is the rightful parent of the nation. Perhaps they've read their William Ross Wallace and know that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world," and they find that discomforting. I'm also amazed that this "Nazi-era" law is still on the books in Germany; it is all für der Kinder, no doubt.

This all reminds me of how the roots of the U.S. education system go deep into the Prussian model of the early 20th century (believe me, we got more than just "kindergarten" from this influence). I had started digging into this topic for a post a long time ago and got sidetracked; it might be time to resurrect this effort. For now, at least, we can appreciate that our money is the only thing the state forcibly takes from our homes and sends to public school.

More compelling was one judge's written opinion:

"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. "Parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling under the provisions of these laws."

Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.

The ruling sent shock waves throughout the estimated 166,000 home-educators in California as well as through the California legislature and even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said, "Every California child deserves a quality education, and parents should have the right to decide what's best for their children. Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children's education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts, and, if the courts don't protect parents' rights, then, as elected officials, we will." Interestingly enough, Schwarzenegger's signing of SB777 last year may be one of the things that have led many parents to abandon the public schools. Give the Governator credit though; he may not be great at logic but he definitely knows how to count votes and probably realizes that whatever other political beliefs a homeschooling family may have, telling them that they have no right to educate their own children trumps them all.

Personally, I'm not shocked. California has long been the most overtly hostile state toward home-educators (ironically it's own school system struggles to place a certified teacher in every classroom, yet would seek to mandate it in every home-school). Similarly, Education Minnesota has no love lost for home-educators and my hunch is that they wouldn't mind if their pet DFL pupils in the Minnesota legislature were to bring them a similar bill as if it were a bright, shiny apple.

Of course, it takes a real socialist mentality to proclaim that the State is the rightful owner of your children, as I've documented before regarding events in England and Germany. The Germans, in fact, are still embracing the 1937 law instituted by a certain mustachioed megalomaniac that mandates compulsory state school educations. Seventy years later they're still enforcing it by forcibly taking kids from their homes to school in police cars or even removing children from their parents' homes and hiding them in psychiatric hospitals for evaluation.

Homeschooling in Germany is illegal with rare exceptions. The requirement to attend school has been upheld, on challenge from parents, by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. Parents violating the law have most prominently included devout Christians who want to give their children a more Christian education than what is offered by the schools. Penalties against these parents have included fines (around €5,000), successful legal actions to take away the parents' custody of their children, and jail time for the parents.[1]

In a landmark legal case commenced in 2003 at the European Court of Human Rights a homeschooling parent couple argued on behalf of their children that Germany's compulsory school attendance endangered their children’s religious upbringing, promoted teaching inconsistent with their Christian faith — especially the German State's mandates relating to sex education in the schools — and contravened the declaration in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union that "the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions". In September 2006 the European Court of Human Rights upheld the German ban on homeschooling, stating "parents may not refuse ...[compulsory schooling] on the basis of their convictions", and adding that the right to education "calls for regulation by the State". The European Court took the position that the plaintiffs were the children, not their parents, and declared "children are unable to foresee the consequences of their parents' decision for home education because of their young age.... Schools represent society, and it is in the children’s interest to become part of that society. The parents' right to educate does not go as far as to deprive their children of that experience." The European Court endorsed a "carefully reasoned" decision of the German court concerning "the general interest of society to avoid the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions and the importance of integrating minorities into society."

SOURCE: CBO, White House Office of Management and Budget | The Washington Post - March 21, 2009

• President Bush expanded the federal budget by a historic $700 billion through 2008. President Obama would add another $1 trillion.
  
  
• President Bush began a string of expensive finan­cial bailouts. President Obama is accelerating that course.



• President Bush created a Medicare drug entitle­ment that will cost an estimated $800 billion in its first decade. President Obama has proposed a $634 billion down payment on a new govern­ment health care fund.



• President Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation. Presi­dent Obama would double it.



• President Bush became the first President to spend 3 percent of GDP on federal antipoverty programs. President Obama has already in­creased this spending by 20 percent.



• President Bush tilted the income tax burden more toward upper-income taxpayers. President Obama would continue that trend.



• President Bush presided over a $2.5 trillion increase in the public debt through 2008. Setting aside 2009 (for which Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for an additional $2.6 trillion in public debt), President Obama’s budget would add $4.9 trillion in public debt from the beginning of 2010 through 2016.