Manny Pacquiao, Noynoy Aquino at PSP

Manny Pacquiao at Sugar Shane Moseley may laban sa Las Vegas. Si Noynoy Aquino may laban sa PSP. Kamakailan lang ay itinanggi ni Noynoy na naglalaro siya ng PSP. Inaasahan na natin na sasabihin niya ito. Pero walang pagtanggi ang makakadaig sa katotohanan na nasasaksihan ng mga empleyado sa Palasyo at mga malapit sa Pangulo.

Hindi raw siya tamad, sabi ni PNoy. Pero senyales ba ng .niya ang walang ni isang programa para sa bansa lalo na sa mahihirap?

Ang sinundan niyang Pangulo ay napakaraming inanunsyong mga proyekto at programa. Si Benigno Aquino III, wala! Mag-iisang taon na si Noynoy Aquino sa pwesto pero wala pa rin siyang nagawa bukod sa mga hilaw na salita na labanan ang korupsyon.

Pinagiinitan niya nag mga Arroyo, sinusuportahan naman siya ng media. Paano na ang kawawang Pilipino?

The Ombudsman and PNoy

Now that the Ombudsman has resigned, what is next for the Aquino administration?



As Neil Tupas said, the impeachment trial would now be moot and academic. But if the administration allies really want to prosecute Merci because of her alleged inaction, then they should proceed with the impeachment trial. Otherwise, the other penalty of disqualification to hold public office would not be imposed - that is if the impeachment court finds her guilty. By the way, compared to Tupas who had a number of graft and corruption charges before the Ombudsman, Merci has no record of pocketing a single centavo in her entire tenure in the government service.

Tupas as head of the prosecution panel seems to have relaxed and is content with the resignation. That means he was probably instructed by Aquino to initiate the impeachment complaint for the sake of pressuring the Ombudsman to resign so that he (Aquino) can appoint his own Ombudsman. It must be noted that there is no need for the Commission on Appointments to confirm the appointed Ombudsman. President Aquino has a free hand in this future appointment.

In the first place, the present administration was in a hurry to proceed with the impeachment only to cover up President Aquino's obvious inaction to the more important complaints of the public, especially the poor - rising oil prices followed by rising prices of commodities. Poverty issues are not co-equal with corruption issues. The former is a more important concern for majority of the Filipinos.

This current development in the Philippine government is a lesser concern for Aquino. Ang mas mahalaga ay ang nagugutom at nahihirapan na mga Pilipino. Nasaan si Benigno Simeon Aquino III para tumulong?

PNoy and his trivial deeds

During the Holy Week, PNoy spent some time inspecting bus terminals and airports to "ensure" the safety of the public as they leave for the provinces. A radio commentator and a former president said, and I agree with them, that what PNoy did was too shallow of an activity for a head of state. It was simple police work which he should have left with his PNP chief. Once again, he has downgraded the office of the chief executive by doing stuff suited for a subordinate. Whoever advised him to go around the bus terminals is clearly a mediocre person. It's the President for chrissakes!

Yesterday, PNoy made news again, another showbiz news for that matter. He visited the wake of teen idol AJ Perez (RIP) as it was said he was a friend of the family. Again, another "state" event which caused the media to make a full story out of it. Well he may have just condoled with the family of the deceased so this is quite forgiveable. But then again, his the President! Now I expect him to visit the wakes of every deceased poor Filipino. Diba boss niya tayo?

Then there's his easter message for the former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Like his palengkera sister Kris, he has this penchant for talking around as if he/she is a saint. Pareho silang sumusuka ng mapagpanggap na mga salita.

These are just some of what PNoy did lately which makes me think of him as "unpresidential." As regards the rising oil price, he has nothing concrete to say. As regards impending food security issues, he has nothing to say.

Oil Price Hike and PNoy

What does President Benigno Aquino III have to say about the rapidly increasing oil prices and the sudden backtracking of oil companies on their posted price hikes? He says his people will study and investigate the incident. As always, his student-council type of leadership is irritating. In the middle of all this he would just engage in investigations instead of taking positive actions to help the poor Juan dela Cruz from the ill effects of the selfishness of these oil companies.

During the Holy Week, gasing up was a pain in the ass. Tanks don't get filled up much with just P500 pesos. Yet Noynoy Aquino says he'll ask his Energy people to find out what happened.

Oh my bigas!

Sabi ng Agriculture Secretary mayroon daw sapat na imbak ng bigas para sa bansa at hindi dapat mangamba sa rice crisis. Sabi naman ng NFA maaari daw kailanganin na mag-import tayo ng bigas.

Ano ba talaga mga ser? Niloloko niyo ba kami o pinapaasa lang?

Baka naman hirap lang sa pag-amin si Pnoy dahil binabatikos niya noon ang rice importation ng nakaraang administrasyon. Hindi niya kasi naunawaan noon na nag-import bilang paghahanda sa maaaring maging kakulangan ng supply sa world market.

Napakaimportante ng bigas sa ating mga Pilipino. Mabigat na pasakit sa ating mga ordinaryong Pinoy ang pagmahal ng presyo ng bigas sa gitna ng patuloy na pagbulusok ng presyo ng iba pang mga pangunahing bilihin. Kailangang maging tiyak at maingat ang ating pamahalaan sa pag-monitor ng supply nito, at hindi makakatulong ang mga magkakasalungat na pahayag tungkol dito.

03..30.11

Today is another painful day for the Filipino nation. Sally Ordinario, Ramon Credo, and Elizabeth Batain will meet their creator as they die in the hands of the Chinese after conviction for illegal drug trafficking.t

Today marks the Philippine government's consistent failure to act on the menace called ILLEGAL DRUGS. These international drug syndicates preying on our OFWs can still walk around the country, freely, without the government catching them.

PNOY is not doing anything!!!!

Power Crisis - another Aquino legacy

In his speech before the Ateneo college graduation, PNoy again played his favorite game: BLAME GMA, this time for the power crisis.

But how can you blame the former president for this if government is not allowed by law to build power plants? Yet despite this restriction, she still managed to oversee the addition of 2500MW of generating capacity on her watch.

May we remind PNoy that the worst brownouts happened from 1987 to 1992.

Tapos galit pa si PNoy sa utang ng Napocor??! Bakit ba lumaki ang utang ng Napocor? Gusto ba ni PNoy na isauli ng masa ang electric subsidy na binigay sa kanila ng dating administrasyon?

PNoy's ratings are falling. People want to see performance. It is well past time to stop blaming and start working.

Illegal Drugs and PNoy

Three OFWs were sentenced with the death penalty in China after the People's Court of China found them guilty of smuggling illegal drugs. These three OFWs are the so-called drug mules employed by South African drug syndicates who freely entered the Philippines, inviting them to earn huge amounts of money by transporting illegal drugs to China.

There can no longer be any remedy in order to save our three kababayans from the penalty of death. While that is the case, our government should now look into others who vulnerable to being pawns and victims of these internation drug syndicates.

Is the government doing anything about this problem?

Some months since this issue came to PNoy's attention, he has not done anything yet to stop and arrest the members of these syndicates? Buti pa sa MMK naipakita na ang NBI ay ginagawa ang lahat para mahuli at maparusahan ang mga sindikatong ito. Buti pa sa palabas sa telebisyon.

Eh ang administrayon ni PNoy, o siya mismo, may sinabi na bang hakbang na gagawin? O hanggang backchanelling na lang tayo para mapigilan ang bitay sa China?

It is time that the President act. Sabi nga ng lider ng MIGRANTE, "Hindi ka namin nararamdaman PNoy!"

NO TO PEOPLE POWER nth!!!

Remember that Noynoy Aquino called for people power once he does not get elected president of this country. That is all he knows because he grew up knowing only that with his mediocre understanding of things.

People power no more. We must respect our laws and our institutions. Let us not allow the whims and childish acts of those who badly want to take over the reins of government to lure us into believing that people power is the key to resolve our national problems.

If we want our people to live in peace and in prosperity, let us forget staging another EDSA people power.

The heat is up

If you are the owner of a company and you have some of your men applying for the post of COO, who would you choose if you had the following options?

1. One who has been rumored to be a psychotic, has not done well in his years in the company, and looks like an idiot by the way he stands and walks? or
2. One who has been accused a lot of times of using company funds for his own account, pretends to be poor to be pitied, and uses his mother to save his own ass? or
3. One who just came out from jail?

The top candidates for the presidency don’t seem to be presidential at all? I really don’t get it why Filipinos still eat these guys’ crap. When we offer jobs, even just a janitorial job, we screen the applicants and make sure they at least have some qualifications for the job. And that is just a janitorial position. How come the presidency seems to have lost any semblance of significance that the guys who we put there can just apply without possessing any attribute of being a worthy president?

The problem is not really with the candidates. The problem is the voting public. Sad to admit, but it is not only the candidates who are stupid. The voters are.

Noynoy and Luisita

Yesterday I read Patricia Evangelista's column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Her article yesterday was interesting as she gave her insights about Noynoy Aquino's decision to run for President vis-a-vis the indecision of the Aquino family to give up their ownership over Hacienda Luisita to its tenants-farmers despite the existence of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

Here's the article.

Jesus in yellow
Patricia Evangelista
http://archive.inquirer.net/view.php?db=1&story_id=234874

THE GRASS IS YELLOW OUTSIDE THE GATES OF HACIENDA Luisita. Jesus walked here once.

His father watched him die, almost five years to this day. Nov. 16 was when close to 15,000 tenants gathered to protest their treatment under the Cojuanco-owned Hacienda Luisita. Dispersal units charged with a thousand soldiers in full battle gear. The Northern Command numbered over five hundred. Stones and shouts, water cannons, tanks that barreled into gates. It was three in the afternoon. The sun burned yellow. The father heard it first: rifle cracks, a barrage of bullets punching through bodies. Jesus died that day, one of seven reported union deaths. They tell me there are more whose names were never reported.

They called it a massacre. Sen. Benigno Aquino III called it propaganda.

On that day, Federico Laza and other farmhands loaded the 38-year-old Jesus into a tricycle. The father wept and Jesus bled. It was too late when they brought him to the hospital. The police claimed they found powder burns on Jesus’ hands, proof he, too, had a gun. The autopsy said otherwise.

Today, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III runs for president of the country his father died for.

I believed in him, not very long ago. I believed in him in spite of a long-ago interview on Hacienda Luisita, on his first run as senator. As it happened, I was standing by Federico Laza, looking at a death certificate, while Noynoy claimed the dead were Manila radicals shipped to Tarlac for the purpose of terrorizing the hacienda. He said the farmers were content, and that all I knew were left-wing lies. The Cojuangcos still own Luisita, even if on paper they are meant to share profit with the same starving farmers who are worse off now than before they were made to sign land meant for them into stock market shares.

And still I was glad Noynoy was running, believed his mistakes, and his mother’s, were a result of their class and could change in the lead-up to 2010. I believed he could bring together a scattered field of candidates, pare down the fight between administration and opposition. I believed that the myth of the Aquinos behind him would be enough to convince his rivals to throw their support behind one candidate, and allow him to prove he was not just a paper doll hero, a crudely-cut outline of his parents. I was afraid he might lose. Now I am afraid he may win. I wish I still believed in him, because without him there’s very little left in the rogue’s gallery of would-be leaders.

For months he has been leading headlines. The Aquino son, soaring on the wings of heroes. His rivals have not stepped back; the field is still open. A fever sweeps through the media, crowning Noynoy, the man who has yet to say anything that is not an echo of the old revolution. Remember my father. Remember my mother. Vote for me, and you vote for them. And that is all. It has been months since he became suddenly the nation’s moral choice, and there is little resembling platform, policy or position. Miracle, they call him. This is the revolution, say his supporters. This is Edsa. So he may not be as intelligent. So he may not be as articulate. So he may not have proven himself. And because we are faced with the usual array of the corrupt and the devout, we wait, we believe. And we are rewarded, in all its cinematic splendor, by a music video.

The scene is a forest, in the dark of the night. Yellow shirts and soft yellow light, Regine Velasquez by a fire in the woods, singing of togetherness and unity and a farewell to fear. There is the small child, offering a bamboo torch to the senator. There is talk show host Boy Abunda, standing on a boat manned by a young boy. There is Kris Aquino, Noynoy’s sister, who is rumored to have been wining and dining A-list celebrities to support her brother. It is national unity via television ratings: the top stars of the warring networks linked by yellow. ABS-CBN’s darlings of prime time television are lit beautifully in the flickering firelight, holding their bamboo torches, hair bouncing as they walk, smiling soulfully into the distance. The camera lets GMA7’s number one love team Dingdong Dantes and Marian Rivera look lovingly at each other as they walk on, a smiling Sharon Cuneta raises a lantern, Ogie Alcasid marches with torch. There is the odd farmer and soldier, but it’s clear who the stars are. And so the full shot, a great phalanx of torch-bearing, yellow-clad men and women marching to battle, the celebrities at the front lines. Through it all, Noynoy smiles at children, at people, at the camera, smiles blankly, and you can almost hear him count in his head the seconds before he has to turn to the lens. In the end, he leaps awkwardly up to a mound of soil, surrounded by his beautiful constituency, and a sun explodes behind him in shattering brilliance.

In a nation where government responsibility has shifted to the media, and calls for aid are directed to newsroom desks instead of the hotlines of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, this sort of move isn’t particularly surprising. A united GMA7 and ABS-CBN may seem like the best of metaphors for a united nation, but it says very much about the sort of man Noynoy Aquino is. Flanked by stars, surrounded by celebrities, content to ride on the waving banner stamped with his parents’ faces. There is no message, other than that personality is king. There are no voices, not even his. His defenders say it’s not the time for campaign—and yet that video rolls on and on in prime time television. You are not alone, they say, but who stands with you? Anne Curtis? Ate Shawie? Marielle Rodriguez? Just recently, Noynoy promised to give up his share of Hacienda Luisita, and yet denies knowing of eviction notices to farmers even while the case sits in the Supreme Court. Laza continues to march in rallies, five years after a bullet ripped a good man away. Nothing has changed, the same songs, the same names, the same injustices.

They say the miracles are colored yellow now—the yellow of thick lengths of ribbon, the triumphant swags of bright flag, the inside edge of a flame on a bamboo torch held up to a camera lens, the same yellow of grass outside the gates of Hacienda Luisita, where a man named Jesus once walked with his father.

Noynoy and Chiz

Two big events have occurred within the week.

First, as we all know, is the Mar-Korina wedding. The couple have finally tied the knot and exchange vows during their big wedding which was attended by politicians, showbiz personalities, and members of both families. Political personalities from the administration and the opposition arrived, clad in their designer ternos and barong tagalog.

photo courtesy of inquirer.net

Former Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima and other personalities within and around politics expressed their hopes that Noynor and Mar will get their sweet victory in the 2010 elections. Oh well, as expected, Kris Aquino and Korina Sanchez will use their connections with different names and groups to campaign for Mar and Noynoy. These two chismosas and maarte girls in ABS-CBN will surely exert every effort to make sure the men will win.

The second big event this week is Chiz Escudero's announcement that he is leaving the Nationalist People's Coalition on the argument that a presidential aspirant should not have any political party in order to properly bring about change and good governance.

Chiz, however, said that he does note exclude from his options the possibility of abandoning his presidential bid. He has not made up his mind yet whether he would run or not. His fickle-mindedness or his lack of a long term plan is a sign that he is not yet prepared for the big role of the presidency.

Or could it be that Danding Cojuangco is not so willing to fund NPC's bet because he already expressed his support to Noynoy Aquino. Hmmm... Another interesting turnaround in Philippine politics.

Survey says

Today's editorial of the Daily Tribune (Tribune) is a very interesting read. It's so interesting that it told of the real intentions behind the release of the SWS surveys every quarter.




The most recent survey result showed LP's bet Noynoy Aquino getting 60% votes and Manny Villar of the Nacionalista Party got 37%, followed by former President Joseph Estrada with 18% and Sen. Chiz Escudero with 15 %.

But the manner by which these results were obtained was quite unusual. Instead of asking the respondent who is their top pick (note that it's in the singular), the survey asked the respondents who are their top picks (that's in the plural) for the presidency, choosing three candidates each. Thus, the 60% vote that Noynoy got does not necessarily mean that he was indeed the top pick. With two other choices in the selection, then it would naturally mean he shared the rank with some other choices.

Clearly, this is indeed one of the many ways that surveys tend to condition the mind of the people. In 2007 SWS and Pulse Asia surveys began this conditioning of the minds of the electorate. And now, SWS is obviously doing it again.

This recent survey is like preparing an instant 3-in-1 coffee mix in order to put SWS clients Aquino and Villar in good positions. Well Mr. Mangahas is apparently taking good care of his clients.

We can't be fooled by these surveys which treat us like idiots who know nothing about simple mathematics and logic.

Relief Ops aka Advance Campaign ni Noynoy at Manny

Two strong typhoons hit the Philippines in just two weeks. The relief efforts during the aftermath were overwhelming and I can personally say that the Filipino spirit of Bayanihan is very much alive in each one of us.

But what disturbs me are the reports that there are some politicians who make use of the relief operations as an advance campaign mechanism.

For one, a photo was uploaded on the internet by a concerned citizen, which showed a food pack distributed by Manny Villar but which food pack bears the good Senator's name. Not only that. I also saw pictures of bottles of water and some clothings with photo's of the same Senator printed on it. He also personally indorses the show Wowowee and he even goes around distributing relief goods along with Mr. Willie Revillame.

Then there's Noynoy Aquino's own relief operations where volunteers are encouraged (daw) to wear yellow while on their shifts in packing goods. Of course, there are streamers of the also good Senator in some calamity stricken provinces.

Tsk tsk.

I will not upload their pictures in this blog because doing so would just provide them additional publicity. I don't want to contribute to the popularity of politicians like them.

Helping should be done wholeheartedly, not for purposes of getting the people's votes for the coming elections.

Angkas ng angkas

Funny text my friend got this morning.

"Si Erap may jeep ng masa. Si Villar may Bilyon. Si Chiz naman may NPC. Si Noynoy? Nakikiangkas lang. Sumakay sa pangalan ng ama at ina. Sa ads puro TY dahil may ABS-CBN at Inquirer naman. Pati sa donasyon at kampanya humihingi pa ng piso piso. Hanggang kailan ka aasa sa pera at kasikatan ng iba? Be ur own man."

These speaks so much about Noynoy Aquino capability to stand on his own once the real campaign begins. It's a challenge for him to move away from the popularity of his parents and his sister and do his own thing. If he can't this early, how much more when he becomes president?

We don't want someone who can't stand up on his own two feet, do we?