We beg to differ.
A friend of mine had shown me a post on the ABS-CBN Facebook site. It read “Cory Aquino. Democracy icon. How do you #RememberCoryAquino?” I was half expecting people who would leave comments there to still shower praises upon the former president and icon of the People Power Revolution here in the Philippines. And like…
A colleague of mine had the presence of mind to take a big screen capture of the epic response to ABS-CBN News’s legendary update “Cory Aquino. Democracy icon. How do you #RememberCoryAquino?” posted on its Facebook page late last night — in case it was deleted. I thought for a while that it had been…
It seemed like an eternity ago that Joseph “Erap” Estrada was a whipping boy of the Philippines’ chattering classses. The late Teddy Benigno summed up the pickle — what he called “Our Crisis” — Filipino voters had gotten themselves into when they voted Erap to the presidency in 1998… As many of us in the…
Read More “Has Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada changed for the better?” »
Funny when we recall how back in April 2001, Howie Severino wrote how just “months later” in the aftermath of a second Edsa ‘revolution’, deposed President Joseph Ejercito Estrada “was grimly posing for a mug shot in Camp Crame.” Then he was shown lying on a cot inside a cell with wire mesh windows. The…
It’s been 27 years since the Edsa People Power, a time when we all hoped for the best. Where has that spirit gone? Has that “Proud to be a Filipino” tagline, gone beyond lip service? Has that popular mantra translated to a country where the rights of its citizens is upheld and its citizens know the…
Read More “On Edsa People Power and the legacy of the Jabidah massacre” »
It’s a fitting reminder of what Filipinos are really all about. After a specatcularly-fizzled attempt to rally the usual ocho-ocho “people power” crowd around her “Hole Up for a Cause” spectacle, suspended Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia can only watch helplessly from her “office” in the Cebu Capitol as Filipinos reportedly snap-up hotel rooms in Cebu…
Flawed in its execution or not, Malacañang had come out locked and loaded when it ordered Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia suspended for alleged “grave abuse of authority” on the 19th December 2012. Yet ten days later, what could’ve been a clean strike has turned into a quagmire. What’s the big delay anyway? If the government…
See, the thing with being in bed with rogue states is that you get bitten eventually. Governments tend to reflect the character of the people they subject. You can argue that Libya was ruled by an iron fist by Muammar Gaddafi for much of its recent history. But there is nothing really “victim-like” in how…