We beg to differ.
Quite a number of Filipinos were shocked by the news that Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri had filed his resignation following allegations of electoral fraud during the 2007 senatorial elections. The move was a first in Philippine political history. There has been no Filipino public official on record who resigned out of delicadeza or shame in…
Read More “Senator Zubiri resignation: Is it an admission of guilt?” »
The latest “victim” of the most recent media (both old and new) circus is a guy named Christopher “Cris” Lao. The poor sod apparently drove his car past motorists who had prudently stopped at both ends of a recessed and flooded section of a Manila road and ended up with a car submerged and, perhaps…
Read More “Empathising with flood ‘victim’ Christopher Lao” »
Driving up or down EDSA, the main road transport artery through the Philippine megalopolis of Metro Manila, is like navigating a badly-designed website. The huge billboards that line the iconic thoroughfare competing for the attention of motorists and their passengers are monuments to the aesthetic sensibilities of Filipinos. Manila, after all, is the cultural capital…
Read More “What Metro Manila billboards tell us about the Filipino character” »
Tired, old, and quite frankly embarrassing. That’s what’s become of the whole yellow motif of the Aquino clan and its circle of business cronies, relatives, “shooting buddies”, lackeys, Media outlets, and cadre of bloggers, publicists, and “social media activists”. It was the primary colour of a successful propaganda campaign that started in 1983, peaked in…
Read More “A call to President Noynoy Aquino to ditch the color yellow” »
I’ve seen more than enough. I’m passing my judgment. I don’t like President Aquino. But that is actually secondary to the point I want to make here, so bear with me as I attempt to find a straightforward way to explain it. For an outsider like me, comparisons between the country of my birth and…
A statement issued last week by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) on the matter of some of its members using taxpayers’ funds to buy luxury sport utility vehicles (SUVs) for use in their “field work,” made it quite categorical: “Our conscience is clear.” But of course it is. This is a statement…
Read More “Mitsubishops: the CBCP conveniently absolves its own and remains above the Law” »
The longer I write about Philippine society and its politics, the more convinced I get that the country’s state of law and order is a joke. Take Davao City for instance. All this time I thought that the city was a model for what following the “rule of law” could do. It turns out, to…
The imbroglio Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte suddenly finds herself in after she punched court sheriff Abe Andres on the face in front of TV cameras is becoming complicated. It is complicated by her family’s uncoordinated public relations approach as evident in the belligerent stance her father, now acting Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, exhibited when he…