That’s the term the President thought he was clever in coining to replace “all-out war,” as his strategy in dealing with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s massacre of 19 Special Forces troopers, including a captain, in Al-Barka, Basilan, on Oct. 18 last year.

In a televised address a week after the carnage, Mr. Aquino said: “We will not pursue all-out war; we will instead pursue all-out-justice.” He also boasted: “There is no question the state will find [the attackers]; the only remaining question is when.” (more…)

How short our memories are.  It was Sen. Franklin Drilon who fired the opening salvo of this regime’s assault against Chief Justice Renato Corona.  When the idea of taking out the Chief Justice had seemed too reckless a campaign for President Aquino to undertake, it was Drilon who launched the attack.

Drilon issued on Nov.  28, 2011 a widely circulated press release, using the Senate’s stationery, entitled “Drilon: Corona voted in favor of Arroyo in all 19 cases brought before the Supreme Court.”   It was the most comprehensive—even if fallacious—brief alleging the Chief Justice’s bias for former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Before that, Mr. Aquino could only whine against Corona, with no understandable, specific accusations against him. (more…)

With so much of our nation’s attention and the regime’s resources focused on the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona, with even the press shamefully yoked to this project, and especially with the damage it has inflicted on the Supreme Court as an institution, President Aquino owes it to the country to make a declaration.

This is necessary to convince everyone that his is really an anti-corruption crusade, and not just a last-ditch effort to prevent the bankruptcy of his Cojuangco clan because of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Hacienda Luisita case. (more…)

President Aquino’s camp has been adept in manipulating media and polls to manufacture a counterfeit public opinion, and then claim it as “people’s wisdom.” Malacañang spokesmen even cavalierly justify former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s anomalous arrest and the assault on the Supreme Court on grounds that “public opinion” supports these moves.

Opinion surveys are legitimate research tools. To mystify their findings though as “the voice of the people” and base our moral compass and our sense of justice and fairness on poll findings is utter inanity or crass populism. (more…)

If you applauded the arrest of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as a “triumph of justice,” yet you are puzzled by who, or even what, “Unas” is, then read on and find out how the press has abdicated its role and thereby helped in the travesty of justice.

Unas is one Norie Unas, whose allegation that Arroyo ordered cheating in the 2007 elections for her senatorial slate is the sole basis for her arrest. He claims he “overheard” the former president giving the order to his boss. (more…)

President Benigno Aquino III partying, giggling over starlet Valerie Concepcion’s jokes, when at least 1,200 Filipinos just drowned in a typhoon in Mindanao and 60,000 lost their homes, captures the ethos of the past 12 months: a horrible year of natural and man-made disasters, with an incompetent or uncaring national leadership’s mind elsewhere.

Five destructive typhoons hit the country, with the fifth the most horrible, Tropical Storm “Sendong” in December.  Yet government’s disaster preparation and management continued throughout the year to be a bungling one. (more…)

That was how the great American columnist Walter Lippmann in his column, titled “The Seizure of the Court,” described President Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt in 1937 to control the Supreme Court. Roosevelt’s victory would have meant that “one man shall become the master of all three branches of the government and the fundamental law as well,” he wrote.  Fast-forward 74 years later, soberly consider the recent events in our country, and a bloodless, though slow-motion coup d’état is also occurring by which President Aquino will dominate all three branches of government and the Constitution as well:

On President Aquino’s orders, the daughter of a respected former president, a former senator, the Philippines’ 12th vice president, the 14th president of the country, and a sitting member of the House of Representatives is arrested on the sole, very dubious claim of a warlord’s underling implicated in the Maguindanao massacre of 57 people. (more…)

December 12, 2011 is a day that will live in infamy in the history of our Republic. That was the day when the House of Representatives politically prostituted itself to a President demanding the head of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court because it ruled against his clan.

In the impeachment of Joseph Estrada and Merceditas Gutierrez, the proceedings went on for months.  In the case of Chief Justice Renato Corona, there were no hearings, no debates, no discussions.  Only secret meetings in hallways and restaurants.  Within hours, Speaker Feliciano Belmonte got 188 out of the 284 representatives to sign the document impeaching the Chief Justice, never mind if most of them hadn’t read the 57-page complaint.  “We were not allowed to read the document,” Bayan Muna Rep. Teodoro Casiño told this newspaper, oblivious to how servile his admission made him. (more…)

Never has this happened before in our nation: The President savages the Supreme Court, the core institution of the rule of law, insults the Chief Justice to his face, and claims that only he—and not the justices who have spent decades in the study of law—can correctly interpret the Constitution.

Never before has a president called for a lynch mob against a crucial institution of a civilized society, alleging that the Supreme Court justices rule not on the basis of the law but on the command of who appointed them to their posts. It didn’t occur to Mr. Aquino though that the person he claims to control the high court—former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo—is powerless, sick, and even nearly helpless in fending off a lynch mob. (more…)

You’d have to visit Hacienda Luisita to realize how vast it is, why it’s been a symbol not only of elite rule in our country but of its hypocrisy and powers of deceit. It’s the biggest hacienda in the country, with a total area of 64.4 square kilometers—nearly as big as the cities of Manila and Makati combined.

The sugarcane fields as far as the eye can see were a marvel for me when I first visited the hacienda in 1970. It was troubling though to see emasculated sugar workers, their skin blackened by the hot Central Luzon sun, their shoulders nearly buckling under the weight of sugarcane poles, and after that to be served US steak from nearby American Clark Airfield in an air-conditioned hacienda mansion. Class exploitation, class struggle are not ideas but realities in this hacienda, I then felt. (more…)