There’s the Rub
Have a heart
By Conrado de QuirosI almost fell out of my chair when Miriam Defensor-Santiago came out with her advice to the newbies in the Senate. Would you take advice from Erap on how to live an abstemious life?
I almost fell out of my chair when Miriam Defensor-Santiago came out with her advice to the newbies in the Senate. Would you take advice from Erap on how to live an abstemious life?
“It’s like being captain ball of a team,” said Sen. Pia Cayetano of her role as an endorser of candidates for tomorrow’s polls. “When you choose your possible teammates, you choose the most capable, most qualified and proven people to join your team. You choose the best.”
Joining the ranks of political endorsers is Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, who recently announced her support for two members of Team PNoy: Rep. Juan Edgardo “Sonny” Angara and former Rep. Risa Hontiveros.
This is in reference to the now widely publicized so-called Lacson-Santiago exchange, which was the subject of Conrado de Quiros’ Jan. 21, 2013, column.
Among the enduring standards we hold judges against is found in Canon 2 of the Code of Judicial Conduct: “A judge should so behave at all times as to promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” In other words, a magistrate must at all times be the embodiment and epitome of good manners and right conduct (GMRC)—something taught even as early as in grade school. And we are talking here of the basic norms of civility in a Third World country like the Philippines. We shudder to imagine what stratospheric degree of behavioral refinement is expected in the arena of well-developed countries around the globe.
One, Fr. Melvin Castro says the Church has Edcel Lagman to thank for spreading its teachings—if only by negative example. That’s so, he says, because more and more young people, especially women, are now confessing to having used contraceptives. So now they know it’s a sin, something the Church has been trying to tell them for some time now. Thanks to Lagman, says Castro, they’ve learned the lesson.
The internecine feud between Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and Senators Alan Peter Cayetano, Pia Cayetano, Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Antonio Trillanes has brought upon all of them a common scourge: a headache—a kind of headache that respects no medicine, making all the paracetamol tablets in the world pieces of junk. It is the type of headache that rankles the nerves and makes the diastolic reading soar like a rocket.
After Miriam Defensor-Santiago comes Alan Peter Cayetano.
It’s another one of those magic-realist quirks of this country that an 89-year-old man should be unctuously solicitous about the health of an adversary in her late 60s. He’ll pray for Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s swift recovery, Juan Ponce Enrile says, after their exchange of verbal fire last week, which had Miriam’s blood pressure shooting through the roof. It was in fact, say her doctors, a minor stroke—after her major stroke of shining a light again on Enrile’s past—which manifested itself in burst blood vessels in the eyes and not in the brain. Of course some will say too late, but let’s be kind and refrain from the jokes.
Controversy over the unequal distribution of Christmas cash gifts by Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile to 22 senators has morphed into demands for the exhumation of the truth about his role as martial law administrator of the Marcos dictatorship. The demand came from Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago in the course of her running battle with [...]
Comes now Miriam Defensor-Santiago to set the record straight. Or to remind her countrymen of what they already know. Or to put back in shape the history that someone has tried violently to twist.
FIRST OFF, an irresistible aside. Why on earth would you watch J-Lo and complain later that you were shocked by the concert’s loudness? In fact, why would you claim to have finer sensibilities—“I have high taste in music”—and watch J-Lo in the first place? When in fact at about the same time J-Lo did MOA’s The Arena to a full house, Dave Grusin and Lee Ritenour were doing PICC to a fairly empty one? The latter was magical by the way.
