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There is something really repugnant to see how disaster relief has now become so politicized. While I think that there were a lot on the left waiting eagerly to blame delayed recovery efforts on Trump, he certainly hasn’t helped with his tweeting political attacks on the Mayor of San Juan. Yes, she blasted the federal response, but she’s in a middle of a crisis in her city. The proper response is compassion and rational explanations of what the federal government is doing all the while acknowledging the physical difficulties everyone is facing. The people of Puerto Rico are experience an unimaginable calamity and having the President of the U.S. tweeting out partisan attacks for her “failed leadership” on the capital city’s mayor was just so very despicable and the exact opposite of what we expect of a president during a disaster. And doesn’t he have any sense what it looks like to be staying in his golf resort while he’s tweeting these attacks?

Yes, the mayor is an admitted leftist and has been criticized by another Puerto Rican mayor, Angel Cruz of Guaynabo, for not participating in FEMA meetings.

Guaynabo’s mayor, Angel Perez, said in an interview with The Daily Caller that his experience with the federal government has been different from Cruz’s, in part because — unlike Cruz — he has been participating in meetings with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other federal agencies.

But that is not the point at this moment.

I think the American people can understand the unbelievably bad conditions in Puerto Rico after the storm are not going to be easily fixed and that the infrastructure problems are delaying relief efforts. We can understand the distress and passion of San Juan’s mayor, but instead of responding with sympathetic understanding, Trump immediately jumps into Twitter attacks. And it also doesn’t help that Trump has spent the past week on attacks on NFL players and other Republicans for the failure of the health-care bill while Puerto Ricans are struggling for survival. Perhaps he’s busy getting briefings and making decisions about disaster relief but, if so, he’s really hiding that. All we can see are his combative tweets, his DHS secretary telling reporters that Puerto Rico was a “good news story,” his attacks on the mayor and then his blasting “Fake News.” Read Jazz Shaw write about how, “In Three Tweets, Trump Undoes All The Gains He Made During Irma And Harvey.”

You can try to spin a lot of things that the President says in a positive direction and in some cases there’s a valid argument to be made. He tosses out inflammatory rhetoric on a regular basis and we can often write it off as ginning up support among his base. This is… something else. Was Carmen Yulín Cruz being a bit confrontational directly toward the White House? No doubt. And she’s been critical of Trump’s presidency in the past. But none of that really matters right now. The power is still out over most of the island, their infrastructure is almost entirely collapsed and people are literally dying.

That’s not to say this is entirely the fault of a flawed response at the federal level. There are plenty of forces on the ground doing work, distributing aid to the areas they can reach and more help is on the way. But regardless of where the blame (if there’s any to be assigned) eventually falls, we’re still in the middle of crisis mode down there. No matter how sharp tongued the Mayor’s comments might have been, President Trump needed to respond with compassion. I don’t believe that any significant portion of even his most die hard base will be impressed by turning this into a partisan political fight right now.

While such concerns are absolutely meaningless compared to the real world disaster unfolding in Puerto Rico, the politics and the optics of this are particularly bad. Trump had won high marks pretty much across the board for the federal response in Texas and Florida after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. I noted some CNN and MSNBC commentators who almost seemed to be gritting their teeth when reporting on the praise Trump was receiving for the relief efforts after both of those storms. You could tell that Trump’s detractors were hoping that he would fail in the response so they’d have something else to hit him with, but he came through in both cases. And his general approval ratings even began to show some signs of life as a result.

You can forget all of that now. Accusing the Mayor of bowing to political pressure and attacking him for partisan reasons (even if there clearly might have been more than a hint of that in play) is simply going to be viewed as callous. And calling out her “failed leadership” in getting her own people working on recovery was simply ugly.

I can just dream of the reaction of how a President Rubio or Cruz or Jeb Bush might have handled this crisis, offering sympathy and informative updates based on the briefings they received. Heck, that is one reason Jeb Bush was such a popular governor of Florida during his tenure – he knew how to respond to natural disasters. Read this report from the military commander on the ground in Puerto Rico and think of how a real leader could have delivered this information to explain the situation down in Puerto Rico instead of tweeting out overly optimistic evaluations of the situation accompanied by partisan attacks.

Speaking today exclusively and live from Puerto Rico, is Puerto Rican born and raised, Colonel Michael A. Valle (”Torch”), Commander, 101st Air and Space Operations Group, and Director of the Joint Air Component Coordination Element, 1st Air Force, responsible for Hurricane Maria relief efforts in the U.S. commonwealth with a population of more than 3 million. Since the ‘apocalyptic’ Cat 4 storm tore into the spine of Puerto Rico on September 20, Col. Valle has been both duty and blood bound to help.

Col. Valle is a firsthand witness of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) response supporting FEMA in Puerto Rico, and as a Puerto Rican himself with family members living in the devastation, his passion for the people is second to none. “It’s just not true,” Col. Valle says of the major disconnect today between the perception of a lack of response from Washington verses what is really going on on the ground. “I have family here. My parents’ home is here. My uncles, aunts, cousins, are all here. As a Puerto Rican, I can tell you that the problem has nothing to do with the U.S. military, FEMA, or the DoD.”

“The aid is getting to Puerto Rico. The problem is distribution. The federal government has sent us a lot of help; moving those supplies, in particular, fuel, is the issue right now,” says Col. Valle. Until power can be restored, generators are critical for hospitals and shelter facilities and more. But, and it’s a big but, they can’t get the fuel to run the generators.

They have the generators, water, food, medicine, and fuel on the ground, yet the supplies are not moving across the island as quickly as they’re needed.

“It’s a lack of drivers for the transport trucks, the 18 wheelers. Supplies we have. Trucks we have. There are ships full of supplies, backed up in the ports, waiting to have a vehicle to unload into. However, only 20% of the truck drivers show up to work. These are private citizens in Puerto Rico, paid by companies that are contracted by the government,” says Col. Valle.

Put another way, 80% of truck drivers do not show up to work, and yet again, it’s important to understand why.
“There should be zero blame on the drivers. They can’t get to work, the infrastructure is destroyed, they can’t get fuel themselves, and they can’t call us for help because there’s no communication. The will of the people of Puerto Rico is off the charts. The truck drivers have families to take care of, many of them have no food or water. They have to take care of their family’s needs before they go off to work, and once they do go, they can’t call home,” explains Col. Valle.

It’s a dilemma with dependent conditions. The citizens need fuel and supplies brought in by relief efforts. The truck drivers who move the fuel and supplies from ports and airstrips need fuel and traversable roads—and before anything else they need supplies for their own families.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes at the WSJ about the mistakes that FEMA made in preparing for the storm based on their assumptions of what would be available after the storm.

The only thing more certain than Maria’s devastation has been the rush to politicize it. As video of waist-deep water, washed out highways, splintered roofs, and uprooted trees scattered across the island hit American living rooms, Donald Trump’s adversaries and their media cheerleaders painted the president a heartless Anglo snob.

Yet the failures in Puerto Rico have not been due to a lack of federal attention. Rather the local FEMA team failed to execute fundamental aspects of emergency operations. Whether that’s because it was overwhelmed by the widespread devastation or because of bureaucratic incompetence can be debated. But efforts to chalk up the crisis to mainlander disregard for life are dishonest….

Meanwhile, the Boricua are slowly recovering from what can only be described as a giant FEMA fubar. True, an island tyrannized by labor unions some 1,200 miles from Florida with an annual per capita income of $29,000—and a bankrupt state-owned electricity monopoly—presents special challenges.

Yet this was common knowledge before Maria landed. So too was the high probability that cellphone service would be extremely limited in the wake of the storm. Nevertheless FEMA was caught off guard.

The emergency plan centered on the use of diesel generators to replace lost electricity for hospitals and to pump drinking water. But a week after the storm 44% of the island was still without agua potable and public-health services were deteriorating.

Amid the chaos, Alejandro de la Campa, the local head of FEMA, tried to explain away the agency’s responsibility. “We have no control over diesel in Puerto Rico,” he said. “We have contracts with certain companies that are giving us service.”
Right. And the fire department has no control over water.

The troubles went beyond diesel and turned into a supply-chain nightmare in which chaos reigned. Gasoline lines stretched miles. Merchandise at the port couldn’t be delivered due to driver shortages and the collapse of the communications infrastructure.

Emergency management is all about anticipating disruptions and establishing contingencies. The failure of the local FEMA office to do so is organizational negligence, not a mainland plot against our Spanish-speaking brethren.

The President could have explained these problems as Colonel Valle and O’Grady have done. He could have admitted the unanticipated problems facing FEMA and the challenges facing rescue and rebuilding efforts. I know that a calm recitation of a problem is not the President’s forte, but it is what is most appreciated in a crisis. People can accept that a natural disaster is devastating; they just want to see that the government is working as quickly and efficiently as possible to address those challenges. They don’t want to hear partisan bickering or attacks on the media while people’s lives are ruined and still in danger.

I know his committed admirers won’t mind and will just attack the San Juan mayor. However, Republicans were happy to criticize President Obama a year ago for refusing to interrupt his golfing vacation at Martha’s Vineyard while Louisiana suffered a disastrous flood. Apparently, when it comes to partisanship overrides consistent principles or just human decency.

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Jonathan H. Adler previews the Supreme Court term starting today. There are a lot of important cases. While the case on the Trump administration’s travel ban might be postponed or determined to be moot, there is no shortage of momentous cases the Court will be considering. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that the term “will be momentous” this Fall. Probably the case that will receive the most attention is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, cerning whether a baker can refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex marriage. And, as usual, all eyes will be on Justice Kennedy, since he has been the key vote on some Freedom of Speech cases as well as some cases on gay rights. No one can really predict how he’ll rule when those two rights seem to be in conflict.

The case will likely split the Court down the middle, and it pits two of the swing justice’s most cherished causes against one another. While Justice Kennedy authored the Court’s decisions recognizing same-sex marriage, he has also been the most speech-protective justice on the Court. While he is likely to share Colorado’s concern regarding arguable discrimination against same-sex couples, he is also likely to have misgivings about forcing an artisan to participate in a celebratory event of which he disapproves. As a consequence, it should not surprise if this case divides the Court 4–1–4, with equal numbers of justices supporting the baker and the couple while Justice Kennedy slices the cake in some unique way down the middle.

If the baker wins, it will be because his attorneys will have convinced a majority of the Court that the act of baking and decorating a custom wedding cake entails enough artistic expression to warrant First Amendment protection. This argument is strengthened by the fact that the baker regularly serves homosexual customers and also refuses to bake cakes for other events to which he has religious objections (including Halloween). While the baker’s objections are religious, it’s worth stressing his strongest legal claim is based on free expression, not religious liberty. This is because (under Justice Scalia’s opinion in Employment Division v. Smith) there is no constitutional right to a religious exemption from a generally applicable law, such as a non-discrimination ordinance. (The Religious Freedom Restoration Act essentially overrode Smith in regards to federal law, but it does not apply to state and local laws, and Colorado has no similar law at the state level.)

Because free expression is key to the case, one approach that might appeal to Justice Kennedy (and perhaps the chief justice) is simply to deny that compelled expression is at issue in this case at all. Baking a cake, after all, is not quite a public endorsement of a particular event, so it’s not as if the couple asked Phillips to personally embrace a particular message. One reason this might appeal to Justice Kennedy in particular is that it would enable the Court to affirm the importance of free expression — and the right to refuse to endorse a message with which one disagrees — without appearing to create an exception to civil-rights laws for those who oppose same-sex marriage.

There also is a key case, Gill v. Whitford, on gerrymandering and how partisan is too partisan when it comes to designing legislative districts.

The theory offered in Gill is known as the “efficiency gap,” a measure that academics developed to measure the extent to which a given redistricting plan produces more “wasted” votes for one party than another. The “efficiency gap” is an interesting measure, and perhaps better than those that have been tried before, but it’s hard to argue that such a measure is objectively the correct one, let alone that it’s somehow embodied in the Constitution. The question, in all likelihood, will be whether this measure appeals to Justice Kennedy. Notice a pattern yet?

Then last week the Court granted cert to a case on mandatory fees to public unions for public-sector employees.

Combined with other labor-law cases already on the Court’s docket, Janus creates the real possibility this could be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad term for organized labor, public-sector unions in particular.

Most court watchers were ready to say goodbye to mandatory agency fees for public-sector unions last term after the Court heard argument in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, but the Court deadlocked 4–4 after Justice Scalia’s passing. Thus it was only a matter of time before the Court revisited the question, and it appears that time is now.

There are several other important cases the results of which are uncertain. It’s going to be an exciting term.

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It really has been startling to see the outpouring of respectful obituaries for Hugh Hefner. I’m old enough to remember when he was much derided for objectifying women. When I teach the 1050s and 1960s in American history, that’ is part of the background to the period. We talk about how Gloria Steinem got her real start in women’s activism by going undercover (so-to-speak) at a Playboy’s Club. And the idea wasn’t to praise Hefner for establishing a magazine and venue that showcased women’s naked or semi-clothed bodies. Here is a summary of what she wrote about in that article.

“A Bunny’s Tale” takes the form of a diary and moves from Steinem’s initial decision to adopt the alias of Marie Catherine Ochs to her last day on the job when she overhears another Bunny say of a customer, “He’s a real gentleman. He treats you just the same whether you’ve slept with him or not.” In between, Steinem learns the requirements of being a Bunny. On the club’s orders, she is tested for venereal disease, and after being hired, she is told which club members she can date (Number One keyholders) and which she cannot (all the rest).

Her new status leaves no room for doubting how she is viewed. A guard greets her by calling out, “Here bunny, bunny, bunny!” The club wardrobe mistress stuffs a plastic dry cleaning bag down the front of her Bunny costume to increase her cleavage.

Finally, the job doesn’t come close to paying the $200 to $300 weekly salary the Playboy Club advertizes that Bunnies earn. At every turn, Steinem and the other Bunnies are nickeled and dimed. They must, she notes, pay for the upkeep and cleaning of their costumes as well as the false eyelashes they are expected to wear. The club also takes 50% of the first $30 in tips they make on food and liquor bills that are charged.

Feminists of the day went forth to protest against being treated like a side of beef for a man’s physical pleasure. That was all part of the women’s movement and much of it was a reaction against Hefner. Now he’s died at 91 and he’s being celebrated for his libertine lifestyle as if publishing pictures of naked women was just a side job when his real focus was to publish great writers and fight for the First Amendment. It’s as if all these reporters spent their youth telling others that they looked at Playboy for the pictures have come to believe their own prevarications.

Ross Douthat comes right out to speak “ill of Hugh Hefner.”

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

The arc of his life vindicated his moral critics, conservative and feminist: What began with talk of jazz and Picasso and other signifiers of good taste ended in a sleazy decrepitude that would have been pitiable if it wasn’t still so exploitative.

Douthat isn’t impressed with all the paeans of praise that have cropped up in his obituaries to celebrate his support for liberal causes and his role as a pathbreaker for the sexual revolution.

What a lot of garbage. Sure, Hefner supported some good causes and published some good writers. But his good deeds and aesthetic aspirations were ultimately incidental to his legacy — a gloss over his flesh-peddling, smeared like Vaseline on a pornographer’s lens. The things that were distinctively Hefnerian, that made him influential and important, were all rotten, and to the extent they were part of stories that people tend to celebrate, they showed the rot in larger things as well.

His success as a businessman showed the rotten side of capitalism — the side that exploits appetites for money, that feeds leech-like on our vices, that dissolves family and religion while promising that consumption will fill the void they leave behind.

The social liberalism he championed was the rotten and self-interested sort, a liberalism of male and upper-class privilege, in which the strong and beautiful and rich take their pleasure at the expense of the vulnerable and poor and not-yet-born….

And his appreciation of male-female difference was rotten, too — the leering predatory sort of appreciation, the Cosby-Clinton-Trump sort, the sort that nicknames quaaludes “thigh openers” and expects the girls to laugh, the sort that prefers breast implants to female intellect and rents the charms of youth to escape the realities of age.

No doubt what Hefner offered America somebody else would have offered in his place, and the changes he helped hasten would have come rushing in without him.

But in every way that mattered he made those changes worse, our culture coarser and crueler and more sterile than liberalism or feminism or freedom of speech required. And in every way that mattered his life story proved that we were wrong to listen to him, because at the end of the long slide lay only a degraded, priapic senility, or the desperate gaiety of Prince Prospero’s court with the Red Death at the door.

I find it amusing that the same people who pretend to be shocked at Donald Trump’s behavior toward women all his life are now blinking at Hefner’s much worse behavior because, after all, Hefner was all about fighting back against the supposed Puritanism of Americans.

The Federalist is amused at how CNN was supposedly scandalized by radio sports talk host Clay Travis saying “boobs” on air a couple of weeks ago, but devoted hours to covering Hugh Hefner’s life.

In the wake of his death, the founder of Playboy Magazine is being lauded as a “cultural icon” by the same news outlet that pretended saying the word “boobs” aloud was triggering.

Ben Shapiro writes on the same theme as Ross Douthat as he notes the media’s celebration of Hugh Hefner.

He spent his life sleeping with women (he estimated over 1,000 conquests) and pretending to be a deep thinker. But the media’s gushing focus on Hefner is truly astonishing: in an era in which the media routinely condemn President Trump’s “toxic masculinity,” blast the casual vulgarity of Clay Travis’ support for the “First Amendment and boobs,” and complain about exploitation of women in culture, they were willing to overlook all of their basic views about female value in order to laud Hefner. Why? Because Hefner was a creature of the Left through and through, a man who sought to break down traditional sexual mores in favor of a “freer” and more vulgar America.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Hefner’s attempt to glorify the “swinging” lifestyle was a dressed-up version of pure hedonism. While he said he liked to listen to jazz, talk about Nietzsche, and be surrounded by beautiful women, he’s only famous because of the last element: without publishing pictures of bare breasts, Hugh Hefner would have been a nearly-anonymous, seedy-type trying to hit on women who could pass for his granddaughters. Hefner is iconic only because our culture has been so degraded. Yes, Hefner published articles by Norman Mailer and John Updike. So did Picador and Random House. But neither of those publishers have been feted for doing so. The media may pretend that Hefner’s “sophistication” is the reason they’re praising him today, but it’s his obscenity and his open hatred of traditional morality that really turned them on….

It’s also worth noting that the Left’s attempts to attribute Hefner’s reputation to his forward-thinking on civil rights is an attempt to coat turd in gold. Martin Luther King, Jr. somehow pushed for civil rights without publicly touting a lifestyle straight out of a Saudi harem. Rosa Parks didn’t have to pose as a Playboy centerfold to effect change.

What the Left truly loves about Hefner is that he was instrumental in destroying public support for monogamy. It was Hefner who celebrated polyamory, who suggested that prior generations were repressed and ignorant — as though he was the first man to discover the pleasures of sex….

Feminists used to be wise enough to understand that Hefner’s brand of female objectification didn’t liberate women; now, feminists suggest that Hefner, who built his infamous grotto into a “squalid prison” for buxom younger women, was somehow a breaker of chains. Hefner didn’t make women more respected; he made men more open in their piggishness.

But he broke the old consensus about the value of marriage, so bully for him.

All of which shows that for many on the Left, principles about female value and opposition to men acting like garbage are disposable, so long as the man in question fulfills certain anti-traditional standards. From Bill Clinton to Teddy Kennedy, political leftism is the golden ticket to enjoying all the rewards of personal depravity. That’s why Hefner was treated as a cultural hero rather than as a pornographer masquerading as a highbrow philosopher.

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You know that vaunted Cuban health system that liberals all like to pump up when talking about the positives of the Castro regime? Well, it turns out that the doctors are not as happy with it as western liberals are.

In a rare act of collective defiance, scores of Cuban doctors working overseas to make money for their families and their country are suing to break ranks with the Cuban government, demanding to be released from what one judge called a “form of slave labor.”

Thousands of Cuban doctors work abroad under contracts with the Cuban authorities. Countries like Brazil pay the island’s Communist government millions of dollars every month to provide the medical services, effectively making the doctors Cuba’s most valuable export.

But the doctors get a small cut of that money, and a growing number of them in Brazil have begun to rebel. In the last year, at least 150 Cuban doctors have filed lawsuits in Brazilian courts to challenge the arrangement, demanding to be treated as independent contractors who earn full salaries, not agents of the Cuban state.

“When you leave Cuba for the first time, you discover many things that you had been blind to,” said Yaili Jiménez Gutierrez, one of the doctors who filed suit. “There comes a time when you get tired of being a slave.”

Cuban artists and athletes have defected during overseas trips for decades, most of them winding up in the United States. But the lawsuits in Brazil represent an unusual rebellion that takes aim at one of Cuba’s signature efforts. Sending doctors overseas is not only a way for Cuba to earn much-needed income, but it also helps promote the nation’s image as a medical powerhouse that routinely comes to the world’s aid.

It used to be that Cuban doctors would try to travel to live in the U.S. because they were allowed to get visas here, but Obama put an end to that in his efforts to normalize relations with Cuba.

The end of the visa program means that the future of these doctors now rests in the hands of the Brazilian courts. They have mostly ruled against the doctors, but some judges have sided with them, allowing the doctors to work on their own and get paid directly.

The doctors’ defiance puts them at risk of serious repercussions by the Cuban government, including being barred from the island and their families for years.

The seeds of the rebellion were planted a year ago in a conversation between a Cuban doctor and a clergyman in a remote village in northeastern Brazil.

Anis Deli Grana de Carvalho, a doctor from Cuba, was coming to the end of her three-year medical assignment. But having married a Brazilian man, she wanted to stay and keep working.

The pastor was outraged to learn that, under the terms of their employment, Cuban doctors earn only about a quarter of the amount the Brazilian government pays Cuba for their services.

Cuba treats them almost as indentured servants without the right to keep the money they earn. They aren’t allowed to bring their children with them. The U.N. has praised the program as a method to bring doctors to countries and areas of the world that have few trained doctors. But now the doctors involved are realizing that there is something wrong in how Cuba has treated them.

Soon after arriving in Santa Rita, a poor village in the northeastern state of Maranhão, Dr. Álvarez and her husband began to feel uneasy about the terms of the contract they signed, particularly after befriending doctors from other countries.

“We began to see that the conditions for the other doctors were totally different,” she said. “They could be with their family, bring their kids. The salaries were much higher.”

Hundreds of miles away, in Minas Gerais State, Dr. Jiménez, 34, found the work rewarding, but also began to harbor feelings of resentment.

“You are trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what price?” she said. “You wind up paying for it your whole life.”

Now they’re suing in Brazilian courts to say that their contracts violate Brazill’s equal protection clauses and some judges have agreed that the contracts treat them as slave labor. Other judges have ruled against them.

It’s amazing how the benefits of a communist government don’t seem so great once people can move away from it and witness for themselves how it is to live under a more free system.

Sometimes, there is an amazing confluence in what I’m teaching in class and what is in the news. Today is the day that we’re discussing the decline of Spain in the 17th century. As I was reviewing my notes, I was reading about the Catalan Revolt in 1640 as part of war between France and Spain. And today the push for Catalan independence is rocking Spain right now. It does seem that the government of Spain is exacerbating tensions by sending in the National Police to block the vote. This is not going to end with the government shutting down and denying the vote.

Just minutes after the first boisterous voters entered the polling station at an elementary school here on Sunday, dozens of National Police officers in riot gear smashed through the front window and began searching for the ballot boxes.

But the activists who organized this controversial vote on independence for the Catalan region were two steps ahead. As the police forced their way through shouting crowds into the polling station, the organizers spirited away the ballots and hid them in the classrooms amid coloring books and crayons.

An hour later, after police had driven away in their big black vans, under a hail of insults, the ballot boxes reemerged and the voting recommenced.

The pattern was repeated again and again across hundreds of polling stations Sunday in the Catalan region of northeast Spain, where a secessionist movement is pushing ahead with a disputed referendum on independence that the central government in Madrid, backed by the courts, has called illegitimate and illegal.

Having hundreds of people injured after getting into brawls with the police is not going to endear the central government to the people of Catalonia.

The portrayal of the day’s events could not have been worse for the central government. Although Madrid might have had the Spanish Constitution on its side, the images being blasted around the world out of Catalonia showed ordinary men and women being dragged from the polls by helmeted police dressed all in black.

The vote in Catalonia was a mass act of civil disobedience, organized by the regional government but propelled by WhatsApp groups, encrypted messages and clandestine committees.

Thousands of parents and their children were deployed to occupy hundreds of polling stations before the vote to keep them from being locked down by National Police and Guardia Civil militia officers.

Closing the Barcelona soccer match to spectators when the Spanish league wouldn’t let them postpone the game is a sign of how bad things have gotten in Barcelona.

Barcelona joined the protests against the Spanish government’s attempt to halt Catalonia’s independence vote on Sunday by preventing fans from entering Camp Nou Stadium for its Spanish league game against Las Palmas.

The club made the decision to play behind closed doors after its request to postpone the game was denied by the Spanish league. Barcelona said playing in an empty stadium was a way to show its discontent with the incidents in Catalonia.

If we think our sports are politicized in the U.S., just read about soccer in Spain.

Barcelona had openly backed the referendum and criticized the Spanish government for trying to impede the vote.

“Today was my worst experience as a professional,” said Barcelona defender Gerard Pique, who couldn’t hold back tears as he talked about the incidents in Catalonia. “It was a tough day. I am and I feel Catalan, and I’ve never felt prouder of the people of Catalonia.”

Pique, one of the most outspoken players defending the referendum, had called Sunday’s incidents “shameful.”

“It was very strange,” Busquets said. “This game was marked by all that happened today (in Catalonia).”

Las Palmas added a Spanish flag to the shirts that the players wore against Barcelona to show its support for a unified Spain.

In Madrid, Real Madrid fans were handed cards with the Spanish flag colors and displayed them before the team’s match against Espanyol, another Catalan club. There were very few Espanyol fans at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, but they displayed at least one flag with the red and yellow colors of Catalonia….

Las Palmas said that the match had become more than a sporting event, especially because of the recent statements by Barcelona expressing its support for the referendum.

The Canary Islands club said the club did not want to limit itself to being a “quiet witness at an historic crossroads.” It said that by wearing the flag it was showing its unequivocal support for a “united Spain.”

Las Palmas said that even though it is based far from the mainland, it “never felt the slightest temptation to become another country.”

“We are doing this to show the world that we are hurt by what is happening,” the club said in its statement.

Other games for young players across Catalonia were cancelled.

Somehow, worrying about who is kneeling the National Anthem or whether the players are linking arms seems a bit less important in contrast to the day in sports in Spain.

The rest of Europe must be watching all this and shuddering as other separatist movements are watching and taking notes.

European officials have expressed firm, though muted, support for Spain’s central government. A European Union official said Friday that people should respect the constitution and rule of law in their countries. But E.U. officials also say that they won’t mediate the clash between Spain and Catalonia, calling it an internal matter. It has galvanized secession-leaning politicians across Europe too.

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, which itself has questioned leaving the United Kingdom, offered her quiet support of the independence effort. And politicians in Belgium’s Flanders region, who themselves have called for secession, sympathize with Catalans and wonder if their region might be next. “There is already a dynamic (toward independence around Europe). You only have to look at Scotland. It’s an evolution that no European government can avoid,” Jan Peumans, speaker of Belgium’s Flanders regional parliament, told the Associated Press.

In Italy, the far-right Northern League, which wants more autonomy for Italy’s north, spoke out against the arrest of Catalan leaders.