President Aquino’s daang matuwid is more and more strewn with damaged institutions he has debased for his purported crusade.

Constitutional bodies designed to be above the fray of politics were mobilized to take out Chief Justice Renato Corona: the Ombudsman teaming up with the Commission on Audit. Before this, to force Corona to resign before the Supreme Court could finalize its earlier decisions on the Hacienda Luisita case, the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s head tried to whip up mob frenzy against him by falsely claiming that he had not even filed his income tax returns for several years. (more…)

Pity our President. After expending so much capital—political and otherwise—to remove Renato Corona, he is now in angst on who to replace him. And he’s got to be sure that the new chief justice is firmly under his thumb, or else that bloody, protracted fight would be for naught.

That disqualifies Antonio Carpio, the most senior associate justice in the Supreme Court, and therefore the most logical to succeed Corona. Why would Mr. Aquino appoint somebody who’s openly declared he won’t be the President’s stooge? The Liberal Party’s all-out rooting for Carpio to be chief justice—step one to get the high court to uphold Mar Roxas’ electoral protest—is already his kiss of death. (more…)

The most widely read article in this paper in the past 30 days, based on its Internet version’s metrics, wasn’t about Chief Justice Renato Corona’s trial or about singer Jessica Sanchez. It was the May 13 front-page piece, “Filipino grandmama could be Russia’s Anastasia.”

With a record-breaking 84,000 readers e-mailing the article to their friends and to social network sites, it could even be this paper’s most widely read article ever, with a million Filipinos probably enthralled by the tale. (more…)

Chief Justice Renato Corona’s removal from office is indubitably President Aquino’s clear victory. But it is a pyrrhic one: its costs to him and his clan, and the damage to our institutions are so enormous, that history will show that it isn’t worth it.

For Mr. Aquino’s Cojuangco clan, Corona’s ouster came too late. Corona didn’t resign, as he was expected to do, as Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez did soon after her impeachment was initiated. (more…)

That proverb by the Roman philosopher Seneca is useful in understanding what the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona is really all about. Consider the following draft of history, a perspective.

Early 2010:  Benigno Aquino III’s rivals allege that the real reason he wants to be president is to save his Cojuangco clan from utter bankruptcy, which would happen if the Supreme Court rules against the sham land reform at its Hacienda Luisita. (more…)

It’s been awkward—even comical—for the Aquino administration to be begging the United States for arms to defend our Scarborough Shoal claim, which it declared is based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos): the Americans aren’t with the convention.

The US—together with Israel and Turkey—is among 34 nations that have not ratified Unclos; they therefore officially do not recognize it. State Secretary Hillary Clinton in 2009 said the US Senate would ratify it soon. Three years later, it hasn’t even scheduled a vote on it. (more…)

Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales’ allegation that Chief Justice Renato Corona has $12 million in dollar accounts will go down in Philippine history as one of the biggest and most deviously constructed deceptions ever foisted on the public.

Morales unfortunately swallowed hook, line and sinker the deeply flawed analysis of raw data made by Heidi Mendoza, whom President Aquino deep-selected to overtake five officer-levels to become deputy commissioner of the Commission on Audit. (more…)

Solid as our territorial claims against China are, we could lose these areas if President Aquino keeps making colossal blunders on this front.

Blunder No. 1:  The biggest, and the damage done probably irreparable until we get somebody else to represent our nation: Mr. Aquino deployed a warship, the BRP Gregorio del Pilar, to Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal to confront the Chinese fishermen, with naval soldiers even boarding their vessels. (more…)

IT WILL be an episode studied in law schools and social science departments by many generations of Filipinos to come:

How President Aquino used the House of Representatives as well as his allies in the Senate, the enormous resources of the executive branch, and even a witting or unwitting mainstream media to coerce the Supreme Court by attacking its head, to subvert the agrarian reform program, and to hand over P10 billion to his Cojuangco clan as payment for its hacienda. (more…)

Not contented with mainstream media sympathetic to its master, President Aquino’s camp has been faking letters to the editor to vilify those critical of his actions and policies, sources disclosed to this writer. Such bogus letters, many oozing with uncivilized venom, have especially targeted, ever since the impeachment trial started in December, Chief Justice Renato Corona.

Mr. Aquino’s PR operatives have hijacked young people’s Facebook names and fabricated e-mail addresses to use as authors of these spurious letters. These bogus e-mail addresses are mostly Yahoo or Hotmail addresses, as these services enable their users ($20 yearly for Yahoo Plus) to use so-called “disposable e-mail addresses” which conceal the senders’ identities. (more…)