Analysis
A generation of Young Turks enters Senate
By Amando DoronilaThe results of the May 13 elections gave President Aquino a mandate to consolidate his control of both houses of Congress in the midterm of his office.
The results of the May 13 elections gave President Aquino a mandate to consolidate his control of both houses of Congress in the midterm of his office.
But of course Grace Poe topping the senatorial race is the one dramatic, phenomenal, game-changing feature of the last elections.
When the newly elected senators assume office on June 30, there will be six women senators—Grace Poe, Loren Legarda, Nancy Binay and Cynthia Villar, plus the two holdovers, Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Pia Cayetano. At least three new opposition senators—Binay, JV Ejercito and Gringo Honasan—will be added to the opposition ranks in the Senate.
I am not saying that I can name specific foreign investors who are ready to pull out. But there must be a good number of them. This I surmise from a joint letter to Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima from the heads of various foreign chambers of commerce in the Philippines.
“WHY WOULD someone with the name Asuncion [a great feast of Mary] find time to pass judgement on the Catholic Church?” (reaction to “Spiritual but not religious,” Inquirer, 4/27/13). Once in a while I do get such rebukes, friendly and not so. A prelate once commended me for a column but remarked that “the institution can’t be destroyed; many have tried but failed.” But he got me right; it’s the institution that I twit, not the wonderful works of the people of God. Probably for my ears, a priest said that the Church “is like an elephant”—that is, big and indestructible.
On the last day of my visit to the United States last month, I dropped by Barnes & Noble in San Francisco to check out what I could read on the long flight home the next morning. What quickly caught my attention among the new releases was “Proof of Heaven” (2012), No. 1 on the New York Times’ list of bestsellers. The intriguing title plus the professional credentials of the author got me sold on the book in no time.
We are all brought up to recycle paper to save trees. We get countless e-mail admonitions: “Please consider the environment before printing.” Indeed, environmentalism was born with a call to preserve the forests.
With due respect to the Commission on Elections, I find no legal and factual basis for the proclamation in installment of six senatorial candidates (Grace Poe, Loren Legarda, Alan Peter Cayetano, Chiz Escudero, Nancy Binay and Sonny Angara) on May 16, and another three (Bam Aquino, Koko Pimentel and Sonny Trillanes) on the next day, May 17.
In an ideal world, how would the recent shooting by the Philippine Coast Guard of a Taiwanese fishing boat, which resulted in the killing of one of the fishermen, have been handled? I think that both Filipino and Taiwanese authorities might have immediately sought one another to express grave concern over the incident, and to offer cooperation to ascertain the facts. Both would have drawn assurance from the fact that, despite national differences, a legal order was in place and could be trusted to work.
The story is told of a boy who was admiring a very expensive car. “It is a gift from my brother,” the owner of the car said. “Don’t you wish you had an expensive car like this?” The boy answered: “I wish I had a brother like yours.”
The death of a loved one is almost the death of you. It’s been more than a month since we lost our sister, our precious Ate Katrina, who was only 29, to a viral disease that started out as dengue and ended in a complex heart condition that baffled even the doctors attending to her.
The adult posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD is now a well-accepted condition, which was first observed among Vietnam War veterans. Now I think there is another form of PTSD—the fetal posttraumatic stress disorder.
