Legalizing the illegal Ellen Tordesillas Malaya March 19, 2010 ‘Arroyo can do anything illegal to stay in power beyond June 2010 and the Supreme Court will give it a mantle of legality.’ THIS is what is disturbing about the Supreme Court decision allowing Gloria Arroyo to make a midnight appointment to succeed Chief Justice Reynato Puno: Arroyo can do anything illegal to stay in power beyond June 2010 and the Supreme Court will give it a mantle of legality. This is the scenario that we are looking at: There will be partial failure of elections, only at the national level. That means no president, vice president and senators would be proclaimed by June 30. Since the term of incumbent Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile will end on June 30, there will be no Senate President, who is third in the Constitutional order of succession. (There have been calls for Enrile to do the patriotic act of resigning as Senate President so that someone whose term will end in 2013 could sit as Senate Presi...

An unlooked-for gift -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editorial www.malaya.net.ph July 29, 2009 ‘Thanks to Gloria, Mar no longer needs to define himself.’ Gloria Arroyo might have unwittingly paid the highest compliment to Mar Roxas when she singled him out among her administration’s critics in her state of the nation address. There are lingering suspicions that some opposition figures, including presidential aspirants, are prepared to strike a deal with Gloria, assuming they have not already done so, in pursuit of their personal ambition. In her spite, Gloria may just have established Roxas’ credentials as the genuine oppositionist in what is emerging to be a wide-open 2010 electoral race. Gloria’s attack on Roxas stemmed from the latter’s allegation that she had sought to undermine the Cheaper Medicines Act by refusing to sign an executive order cutting the prices of 22 essential medicines by half. Gloria’s position was that there was n...

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 By Antonio C. Abaya Manila Standard Today It was only last July 3 that US Ambassador Kristie Kenney was quoted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer as assuring President Arroyo that her much sought-after meeting with US President Barack Obama will happen “before the end of the year” on the grounds that a new US President always meets with the Philippine President during the US President’s first year in office. (See my article of July 6 titled Puno’s “Devious Plan?”) Now all of a sudden, barely 10 days after Ambassador Kenney’s lollipop, Malacañang announces that this epochal meeting will take place, not before the end of the year, but on July 30, right after President Arroyo’s “last” State-of-the-Nation Address before a joint session of Congress on July 28. And to add mystery to the puzzlement, the newly appointed head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, drops by for a 12-hour visit in Manila to meet with President Arroyo and other top Philippine offici...

One of the clearest, sharpest analyses I have seen on the whole mess that is the GMA presidency, coming from the managing editor of my newspaper. Sayang si GMA, at kawawa ang magiging Pangulo sa 2010. But as they say, the task of renewing the country goes on, and on, and on. -- Danton *** SKETCHES By Ana Marie Pamintuan Monday, July 28, 2008 The Philippine Star www.philstar.net In her State of the Nation Address today, President Arroyo will reject calls to scrap the value-added tax on oil imports. This is the SONA part where she will stand against populist moves, as Palace officials put it yesterday. The President will then announce the many subsidies, mainly for the poorest of the poor, that will be funded from VAT collections. This is the “caring administration” part – reportedly the theme of the SONA. She is expected to promise that the nation will survive the food and fuel crunch, which she thinks is worse than the Asian financial crisis that struck in 1997. There is no doubt that ...