Of course I share the sentiments of most of the Tweeters, which are shock and outrage. That is on the jail sentence of Carlos Celdran for standing in front of the altar of the Manila Cathedral during a Mass dressed like Jose Rizal, shouting, and waving a placard that said “Damaso!” A Manila court gave him two months to a year of jail for it.
INQUIRER’S OCT. 13 editorial referred to “The ‘punishment’ of push-ups that President Fidel V. Ramos imposed on the men mentored by Gringo Honasan …”
Before yesterday’s State of the Nation Address, Bayan posed an interesting perspective. P-Noy, it said, may no longer blame Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for the country’s ills.
This is a reaction to lawyer Romulo Macalintal’s letter defending the right of schools to impose their disciplinary policies on misbehaving students. (Inquirer, 4/18/12) There’s no question that, as he said, “[o]n or off campus, students should protect (their) school’s name.”
This time, Malacañang got its language right. Reacting to the recent conviction of suspected car-theft syndicate leader Raymond Dominguez to 17 to 30 years in prison, President Aquino’s spokesperson Edwin Lacierda lauded Judge Wilfredo Nieves for having “handed down the decision with impartiality and swiftness, taking only a year and four months to resolve the case,” as well as public prosecutor Maureen Abad Moises “for her capable handling of the case.”
China is probably one of the most practical nations in the world when it comes to the treatment of condemned criminals. They are not merely executed. As soon as they are killed (usually by a shot in the head), their warm but lifeless bodies are rushed by waiting ambulances to a nearby hospital, where their healthy organs are harvested for immediate transplantation to patients who urgently need them.
Filipinos weary of corrupt officials might find consolation (albeit consuelo de bobo or a fool’s consolation) by looking to the state of Illinois, where some 1,500 government officials have been convicted on corruption charges during the last 40 years. And if we are sick and tired of corrupt presidents, note that four Illinois governors have [...]
The execution by lethal injection of the 35-year-old Filipino man in China last Dec. 8 should serve as a dire warning to overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who, knowingly or unknowingly, act as “drug mules” for drug syndicates. After all, that was the fourth of such executions in China this year, which involved Filipinos. Last February, three other OFWs were executed for the same crime. The message should now be clear: should you get caught, there really isn’t much the Philippine government can do to get you off the death row, save what everybody else can do, which is pray.
Should we send the corrupt to the gallows? That’s what most Filipinos want, according to a study made by several UP professors. The corrupt should be meted out the death penalty. Punishing the corrupt to the max should help to erode their ranks. Not really. First, you have to catch them. That proposition is exactly [...]
IT IS quite obvious that the main reason why investors’ confidence in the Philippines was boosted is the seemingly credible war launched by President Aquino against graft and corruption. Fulfilling an election promise to weed out corruption in the bureaucracy, which is the culprit behind the age-old problem of poverty, P-Noy swiftly set the antigraft [...]
FIDEL RAMOS has a piece of advice to give P-Noy: Stop the witch-hunt against the Arroyo regime. “These investigations,” he says, “are not (creating) a pretty picture for us. It is not very attractive to those who want to invest and travel to the Philippines. They end up going somewhere else.” I don’t know where [...]
