The campaign's already on for the Catalan statute referendum, and the Socialists' slogan is, "The PP will use your no vote against Catalonia." It's clearly aimed at Esquerra voters, since their party has come out against the statute as well; ERC doesn't think the statute goes far enough, and the PP thinks it goes too far. There have been some complaints from PP files, as the slogan directly states that the PP is anti-Catalan, which of course it isn't. Anti-Catalan nationalist, yes. I'm not sure I agree with the PP's complaints, since this is a political campaign and all's fair that you can get away with.

The PP's response was to call the Socialist campaign "fascist," which seems a bit excessive to me; I prefer to use the term to refer to Hitler, Mussolini, and company rather than Maragall and his bunch of simpletons currently in charge of the Generalitat. But, of course, Socialist complaints seem a bit out of line, too, since they started the mudslinging bout.

I figure the whole thing is both sides trying to stir up some excitement about the referendum, because from what I can tell a lot of people are pretty apathetic about it. Turnout is estimated to be about 55%, and the yes vote is likely to win with about 65%. No campaign is going to change either of these figures; people have pretty much decided what they think and the vote is going to go along party lines, except for ERC voters, who are going to split three ways between yes, no, and a spoiled ballot.

The new statute is not going to change anything important in people's daily lives, which is why not too many of them particularly care about it. (Yes, I am aware of the misinterpretation by some elements of the Spanish nationalist right of the use of the word "nation" in the statute's preamble. No, it won't give Catalonia the right to self-determination or anything of the sort. ERC knows this, which is why they oppose it.)

The funniest piece of evidence was that 60% of viewers who called in to a TV3 sports program, if forced to choose between a FC Barcelona victory in the Champions League and the passage of the Catalan statute, would opt for the Barça victory. Shows you where people's real priorities are, which is a good thing. I much prefer for fanatical enthusiasm to be funneled into a sports club than into a political or religious or nationalist group.

The other thing I thought was hilarious were statements from Ibarretxe and the PNV that the Montenegro referendum was an example for Spain to follow. Yeah, that's brilliant. We want to be just like the smallest, poorest little backwater in the Balkans. In order for the referendum to happen in Montenegro, the dissolution of the Yugoslav state was necessary. That dissolution took ten years and cost tens of thousands of lives, at least. NATO finally had to bomb the Serbs in order to stop the killing. Or have we all forgotten Vukovar, Srbrenica, and Sarajevo? The last thing anyone with any sense would want is the balkanization of Spain.

A wave of violent home invasions is going on right now in Catalonia, specifically in semi-rural areas and small towns in Tarragona province. The criminals are Eastern Europeans and Latin Americans, and operate in gangs of four or five. They break into people's houses, threaten, torture, and sometimes kidnap them in order to make them tell where their valuables are, and then steal everything they can.

According to La Vanguardia, "Though the National Police and Civil Guard are totally silent about the wave of robberies, in towns in Tarragona province they talk about nothing else. People who live in isolated houses, above all, are afraid. Due to the lack of police officers and the evidence that the Mossos (Catalan regional police) will not be deployed for the next two years, they are installing more and more sophisticated alarms, such as those that detect movement in the garden. And in towns like Alforja, the residents want to hire security guards."

Huh. I thought it was only rich white Americans frightened of the swarthy brown-skinned hordes who lived in subdivisions with guards.

"Faced with a situation of growing insecurity, in rural areas some residents have even decided to sleep with their hunting shotguns under the bed. Others are thinking about taking out hunting licenses."

You see, you need a hunting license in order to own a long gun in Spain, and you basically can't get a pistol at all. And most owners of long guns use them for hunting birds; we're not talking deer rifles here in most cases. Sometimes the Second Amendment is a good thing. I guarantee you nobody would be pulling this kind of crap anywhere near Leawood, Kansas, because if they did they would be dead.

Meanwhile, the illegal black African immigrants are piling up in the Canaries, there are more than three thousand of them, and there are serious questions about what the government is doing with them. The detention camps on the islands are way overcrowded, and rumors are going around that some immigrants are simply being flown to mainland Spain and turned loose. I can't believe this myself, but I also know that the immigrants' home countries won't take them back, and there's not enough room in the camps for them.

I am absolutely amazed that no attention is being paid to the story in the English-speaking media. This is a major humanitarian disaster. The Spanish government estimates that perhaps a thousand immigrants have died at sea trying to reach the Canaries from the coasts of Mauritania and Senegal.

Of all the different subjects La Vanguardia had to choose from today, they gave Neil Young and the sophomoric political ditherings on his new album the whole first page of the Culture section. I've always liked Neil, but come on, it's not like this album is actually going to get any airplay. It'll go down as just another one of those offbeat Neil albums that nobody ever bought, like the time he tried electronic music or his rockabilly record. I dare suspect that Neil got the front page not because of the quality and interest of this new album, but because of its political message.