THE presidential-preference poll by the Pedro Laylo Jr. outfit, undertaken from March 15 to 22 and leaked to media last week, was another nail on the coffin of Leni Robredo’s presidential bid.

The survey’s findings, that Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s lead of 59-63 percent to Robredo’s 17-21 percent — basically, unchanged since October — means he is unstoppable at this time. As a result, potential funders, even the stridently anti-Marcos elites like the Lopez clan and the leftist wife of a Hong Kong-based tycoon have decided to stop funding the loser’s campaign.

Sources said that several of “Pinklawan’s” campaign headquarters have been shut down, salaried staff have not been paid, and a major worry for them now is that Robredo won’t have any campaigners on the ground on May 9.

That would send the message that she has given up, with her supporters deciding just to stay home and not vote at all, or even to vote for Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. because of the bandwagon effect (uso-uso would be the translation) Filipinos are so prone to.

No wonder, the Pink Party in the past week has been desperately calling for “volunteers” — with little success. So shameful though has been the posts of Diwa Guinigundo, a fanatic Robredo supporter, asking God to “intercede” so “He remains in control.” It didn’t occur to him that, well, God might be preferring Marcos, and that he would be better off not mistaking the deity’s preferences by praying for instance for Russia to end its ruthless invasion of Ukraine, and save thousands of lives and relieve millions of Ukrainians from misery.

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A FRIEND’s niece — studying at UP Diliman — asked incredulously why I wasn’t voting for the university’s choice, Leonor Robredo. I didn’t want to ruin my friendship with her uncle by insulting her intelligence. So, I restrained myself and later Vibered to her the link to my column entitled “Robredo: Our worst and most useless vice president ever,” written in October 2019. Actually, she’s gotten much, much worse than my portrayal of her in that piece:

To very clearly see why Leonor Robredo — the Yellow cult’s last pathetic attempt to create a false idol — has been the republic’s worst vice president, one just has to remember our past vice presidents.

In comparison to these, she is an intellectual and political pygmy.

Let’s start with the most recent one. Jejomar Binay had been Makati mayor for six terms and, despite the Yellows’ intense campaign to paint him as corrupt in the last presidential elections, his role in Makati’s growth as the country’s premier financial district is incontestable.

Even as he won the vice-presidential post in 2010 against the Yellows, he helped President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino 3rd as chairman of the Housing Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC). He was also presidential adviser for OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) concerns and head of the Task Force OFW, which assisted OFWs who were maltreated by their employers to return to the Philippines with the assistance of the government.

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Last of 2 parts

CHECK out presidential candidate Isko Moreno Domagoso’s recent statements, his recent screams on the campaign trail:

– “If I become president, I promise I will collect the P203 billion unpaid estate tax of the Marcos family”;

– “The P203-billion estate tax could feed rice to 59.7 million Filipinos daily for a year if the Bureau of Internal Revenue is able to collect it.”

Obviously on the same intellectual level as Isko is another candidate, Panfilo Lacson, who became was his echo chamber, pontificating that the “P203 billion estate taxes” won’t be collected if Marcos Jr. wins the presidency.

There is no P203 billion unpaid estate tax. A single scheming devious person, retired justice Antonio Carpio, invented that astronomical “unpaid tax” number. This is another proof of that adage attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”

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FOUR US-funded, local news websites are campaigning one way or another for the pro-American Leni Robredo to become president.

I find this disgusting and shameful for my colleagues to be doing.

The Constitution bars any foreign money in media — a means, even if a modest one, of ensuring Filipinos are in control of the apparatus that mold its citizens minds. You may not agree with that, but that is our Constitution and we are duty bound to follow the basic law of the land.

Yet four local news websites, run by Filipinos (one by a Filipino American, Maria Ressa) have defied this ban, and spat on this constitutional principle, by taking in foreign funds, in two cases, for more than a decade now, totaling P170 million, which is their outfits’ main means of funding, and apparently a lucrative source of their individual incomes.

And these are not just funds from some foreign entity. These come from the government itself of a still hegemonic superpower, the US, which wants to control as many nations as it can — not always through arms, but through control of the minds of these countries’ leaders.

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IT was astonishing — or maybe not considering his Yellow mental monoplegia — that Sen. Francis Pangilinan in a sparsely attended election rally four days ago said: “The killing of our Moro brothers in the Jabidah Massacre during the Marcos regime is a tragic part of our national narrative that we must never forget.”

Other than being explainable by his intellectual laziness, it is a testament to the phenomenon that fake news, once disseminated by the elites or by the current rulers, takes many, many decades to eradicate. Indeed, as that adage of many versions puts it: “A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

The following is the first column I wrote nine years ago on March 20, 2013, demolishing completely this for-propaganda myth of the “Jabidah Massacre,” which fantasy-weavers claim occurred on March 18, 1968 but which never happened. I have written over eight columns to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the Jabidah massacre was a hoax, and nobody, not even the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), have questioned my assertions. These columns appear in the chapter, “The Jabidah Hoax,” in my book “Debunked” (rigobertotiglao.com/shop).

The Column

The so-called Jabidah “massacre” of March 1968 was the Yellow Cult’s first colossal fake news.

That fake news though terminated President Ferdinand Marcos’ covert plans to forcibly take over, when Malaysia was then weak, Sabah over which we had — and continue to have — legitimate claims under international law, but which Malaysia arrogantly ignored, and continues to ignore.

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Third of 4 parts

TO be precise, some 77 percent, or 1,786 of the 2,326 “alleged human rights victims” killed during martial law — their heirs given compensation of P3.2 billion, or P1.8 million for each case — were very likely casualties of the New People’s Army (NPA) and the two Muslim separatist groups, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

This is according to data given by Carmelo Victor A. Crisanto, who claims he is the executive director of a no-longer-existing Human Rights Victims Claims Board (HRVCB).

He wrote the newspaper to correct my “inappropriate” computation done in my column of March 7, which had a somewhat higher figure of NPA, MILF and MNLF casualties of 2,755. (See accompanying table.)

Crisanto though claimed that his office or the HRVCB “never released any data identifying any province as an ‘NPA Province’ or an ‘MILF Province’.”

Of course it hasn’t, but Crisanto did release the locations where the alleged “extrajudicial killing” or “disappearance” occurred. It didn’t take much of an average Filipino’s common stock of knowledge and IQ to recognize, after puzzling over the uneven distribution of killings, that provinces like Cagayan, Isabela and Samar as well as the Davao provinces were epicenters of the communist insurgency while Sultan Kudarat and Maguindanao had been the MILF and MNLF areas of operation in the 1970s and 1980s.

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