Category Archive for: komentaryo

komentaryo

CJSereno VS Duterte: A timeline to impeachment (Part 2: 2017)

Wherein 2016 Duterte revealed himself to be very defensive about the war on drugs, and therefore ready to attack anyone at all — including the Chief Justice — for putting it into question, in 2017 he was on a roll, blaming practically everything on the Supreme Court, and specifically on Sereno.

He continued to be hung-up on the judiciary imposing TROs on government projects, even when early on Sereno had clarified that there were very few such TROs. He started stating as fact the allegations against Sereno detailed in Larry Gadon’s impeachment complaint. He insisted that Sereno was part of a plot to oust him from the Presidency, alongside the Left, the Dilawan, the Ombudsman, and Trillanes.

Talk about Presidential paranoia.

Here’s how Duterte’s men in the House of Representative decided to give him Sereno’s head on a silver platter.  (more…)

komentaryo

CJSereno VS Duterte: A timeline to impeachment (Part 1: 2016)

For anyone at all who even thinks for a minute that the CJ Sereno impeachment is exactly the same as the CJ Corona impeachment, here’s a huge difference: Corona was a midnight appointee of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who was allowed to do a midnight appointment, expressly disallowed by the Constitution but allowed by a CJ Reynato Puno Supreme Court. If that name’s familiar, he’s now in charge of the Consultative Commission for ChaCha (can you smell the stench of Prime Minister GMA?) — the rest of the story’s here. In that sense pNoy was actually and in fact undoing an illegal midnight appointment by GMA in his push to impeach Corona. At any other time, a President like Duterte would be praising pNoy for righting a wrong.

Ah, but we are in this time, when Duterte is the model of the most petty, most juvenile President this side of town — America has its own problems after all. And in this world where Duterte is king, and Congress reps and every other hooligan or clown lawyer is ready to fall at his feet and deliver whoever’s head he wants on a platter, we watched as Senator Leila de Lima was jailed for not much else but rumors and very flimsy, highly questionable proof of culpability; as we are watching Chief Justice Sereno being brought to an impeachment court.  (more…)

komentaryo

Asec #Mocha is correct …

There ARE many, more important, things to talk about, other than her award from the UST Alumni Association Inc. I couldn’t care less about the fact that she was given it, in fact, and it must be said that it is absolutely offensive that the photos of Asec Mocha’s past life are being reposted on social media just to point out that she is undeserving of this award. Seriously: since when did this kind of shaming, as bound to an unapologetic conservatism, cloaked in Catholic righteousness, been acceptable?  (more…)

komentaryo

State of blogging, microblogging, media #crisis

At the tail-end of 2017, Bebang Siy invited me to judge some 18 blog entries that talk about fake news for the Saranggola Blog Awards. While many of the entries were taking from the same sources and tended to be redundant, the more interesting ones were those that tried to bring into their writing the more personal effect of being bombarded with lies and falsity and exaggeration that take the form of the news. The two other judges, even when we didn’t sit down to deliberate, actually had chosen the same winners I did.

It was certainly an experience that gave me hope: both for blogging and for writing. Because it reminded me of a time when blogging wasn’t about keeping a Facebook Page and microblogging, that is, writing statuses that detail your activities of the day, i.e., Asec Mocha, and most other Duterte Diehard Supporter pages. Neither was it about keeping a blog site that’s nothing more than reactionary, living off what’s happening on social media, and leeching off what’s already trending, i.e., Jover Laurio’s Pinoy Ako Blog.   (more…)

komentaryo

Putting out fires

If there’s anything this government, this President, is good at, it’s putting out fires. And it’s not by actually ensuring that we get to the bottom of the cause(s) of these fires, or even count the victims properly (hello, HTI), and certainly it is never about calling out those who are so obviously responsible for these fires, whether oligarchs or factory owners or the leadership of the Philippine Export Processing Zone (PEZA), and certainly not the family that owns NCCC Mall, now found to have violated building safety requirements, which led to the death of 37 in the December 23 fire. (more…)