Though coming from a family without single hectare of farmland into our name, I can be passionate about the effect of the recent SC decision parceling out the 6,000 hectares Hacienda Luisita (HL) to some 6,296 farmers. Not that the high tribunal’s decision came after a long deep slumber in the court which had earlier decreed…
“The devil can cite the Scripture for his purpose.” (Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice). It was in the case of Navy Colonel Generoso Mariano, who wanted President Noynoy Aquino replaced through extra-constitutional process by quoting the near “scriptural bidding” of Rizal: “If we have had bad leaders today and in the past , it is not the…
There is “tsunami” like efforts and lobby money too to reclassify the late strongman Mr. Marcos from a dictator-villain to a war hero. His supporters, as well as the Philippine military and the 204 Congressmen who want Mr. Marcos buried at the “Libingan ng Mga Bayani” consider the late dictator a hero for his 27…
I watched with great discomfort the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearing yesterday looking into the “money-trail” of General Jacinto Ligot and his wife, Erlinda and after about an hour of fruitless reel, I was rigid with stiff neck in a half-recumbent posture on a couch, but somehow I have managed to draw a conclusion that…
Ermita, the Novel is about the beautiful prostitute Maria Ermita, born to a rich aristocratic maiden, Conchita, of Spanish lineage, raped (the mother) by a Japanese soldier at the twilight of Japanese occupation of Manila, just before the American “liberated the city”. It is not coincidental that she was named Ermita the world “cheapest fuck”…
I watched the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee last night conducting a hearing on the grand thief by the army’s top brass and I was appalled by the galling conduct the generals played hide and seek of the millions of dollars and pesos they purloined from government contractors to the prejudice of the treasury. I kept…
At Newsbreak, an online blog, Atty. Theodore Te intoned: “The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.” Perhaps it is, but we did not take into account the warnings of the people where we copied the doctrine from. The problem with our legal learning is our uncompromising adherence to the American judicial model without examining…
The body of Angelo T. Reyes was interred today at the “Libingan ng Mga Bayani” with full military honors, while the mainstream media had tried to pillory and villify his tormentors, Senator Antonio Trillanes and Col. George Rabusa. It vividly comes to mind the lines from poet laureate, Francisco Balagtas’s Florante at Laura: Sa loob at labás, ng…
I should have posted this bit of historical note five days ago, to enliven our search for our nation’s soul and for us to reminisce, that once in the life of our nation, we have something to be proud of our past. That one glorious moment of our past happened 111 years and five days…
“MASS” is a novel written in 1976 by F. Sionil Jose which won the 1980 ‘Ramon Magsasay’s Journalism, Literature and Creative Communicattion Arts’ Award. The title, contrary to what it connotes, is not about a religious Sunday ritual which one can easily disrupt to highlight his displeasure against the church. It is mass as in…
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