ONE huge advantage of internet-based social media, which we didn't have decades ago, is that, while being careful of trolls, propagandists and election campaigners, it becomes a venue for voices…

PARDON my language, but this really got my goat for reasons you’ll understand below.

Idiots calling themselves the Oxford Philippines Society (yet not identifying themselves individually) last week issued a statement that claimed that leading presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos had not graduated from Oxford University in the UK. Bongbong “only had a Special Diploma which is not a degree,” the statement said.

That’s totally false. Oxford’s official document dated March 31, 2015, titled “Degree Confirmation,” reads:

“This is to certify that the student named below has satisfied all the requirements to the award of the degree indicated below:

Student name: Ferdinand Martin Romualdez Marcos

College: St. Edmund Hall

Awarding Body: University of Oxford

Qualification: Special Qualification in Social Studies

Programme of Study: Special Diploma in Social Studies

Classification: Pass

Mode of Study: Full Time

Programme: Start Date: 01 October 1975

Programme End Date: 01 July 1978

Date of Award: 01 July 1978″

Do not insult Philippine Media!

AWARDING Maria Ressa the Senate Medal of Excellence for her being conferred the Nobel Peace Prize is an insult to us professional Philippine journalists, and to all Filipinos.

The peace prize (and not for journalism) was given by a five-man panel of Norwegians — most likely because of US maneuvering or pressure — who don’t know anything about the Philippines, like most of the other US media outfits that similarly praised her “work.” The Norwegians probably thought, because of Ressa’s claims, that we are a country somewhere in Africa barely out of the Stone Age.

Please read the Nobel committee’s sole justification for giving the award: “Ressa’s Rappler has focused critical attention on the Duterte regime’s controversial, murderous anti-drug campaign. The number of deaths is so high that the campaign resembles a war waged against the country’s own population.”

But it is not just President Duterte that the Nobel insulted through that award to an American Filipino; it is all of us.

A FACEBOOK-based poll by Rappler, a US-funded, anti-Marcos news website, showed Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. taking 54 percent of votes, and Leni Robredo, 42 percent. The poll was initially scheduled to run for three days from October 7 to 9. It was abruptly shut down on the second day though, when a Marcos win was obviously irreversible.

The poll results were deleted from the website, but fortunately, not a few patriotic netizens took “screengrabs,” even videos of these.

The Manila Bulletin undertook an exactly similar Facebook poll from October 15 up to yesterday at 12 noon, and its results would likely have also been similar to that of Rappler’s if it had continued its poll. The Bulletin was obviously taking a potshot at Rappler when it said in its announcement, “The survey will not be taken down and will be archived as we do this once a month.”

The Bulletin poll showed Marcos winning by a landslide, getting 72 percent of votes with Robredo just 24 percent. Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso was a far third with just 2 percent of the votes. Senators Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, Emmanuel “Manny” Pacquiao and Panfilo “Ping” Lacson each got less than 1 percent. They should just quit.

If you have doubts that the Manila Bulletin rigged its polls, note that its publisher is Herminio “Sonny” Coloma, who was the late president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino 3rd’s very loyal occasional spokesman and the head of his Presidential Communications Operations Office throughout his term. The Bulletin has had a tradition and a track record for being boringly nonpartisan to a fault.

RAPPLER CEO Maria Ressa continues to humiliate our nation. She has arrogantly defied our rule of law, in effect saying her stature and the West’s adulation of her place her beyond our legal system. To this day, Rappler continues to publish the article for which she was convicted of libel, and which she claims was President Duterte’s move to suppress her website’s critical coverage of his administration.

Ressa’s allegation is such total rubbish it is amazing that Western media believed it, which explains how it was easy for the US to get the Nobel committee to award her its peace prize.

She and the writer of the article himself, Reynaldo Santos, were convicted of libel by a regional trial court in June 2020 for claiming that a businessman, Willy Keng, was a murderer. The piece was part of a huge 2012 media campaign with Rappler’s “editor-at-large” Marites Vitug as one of its leaders, launched by the Aquino administration to demonize and remove Chief Justice Renato Corona from his post. It claimed that Keng, whom it claimed was a “shadowy” businessman, was the magistrate’s close friend and that Corona was even using his SUV.

Judge Rainalda Estacio-Mendoza, a highly regarded magistrate, pointed out in her decision that Ressa and Santos did not offer a “scintilla of proof that they verified the imputations of various crimes against the businessman.” Their only defense was that the cyberlibel law was enacted only in September 2012, months after the article was published in May 2012.

As a mere website without any hard copies, Ressa claimed they could not be charged under the law. In her arrogance though, and despite the businessman’s offer to withdraw his case if the article was taken down, Ressa continued to put it in the Rappler site, even updating it in February 2014. She and the reporter (who left Rappler in 2013) were convicted of libel under the new cybercrime law, sentenced to imprisonment of six months to six years, and made to pay damages amounting to P500,000.

IT was jailed Sen. Leila de Lima’s comment on the Nobel committee’s grant of the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Ressa that was most accurate, a part of it, that is. “It is a big slap to the face of [President Duterte],” she said.

But not only to him: it is a huge insult to the Philippines itself and especially to all Filipino journalists. The award, in effect, portrayed the country as being in the league of countries like Haiti, Sudan or Uganda in the 1970s with a brutal dictator in power, a cowardly citizenry and a press doing nothing about it — except Ressa who is, therefore, being granted the Nobel peace award.

For whatever explanation Ressa and others have given for her getting the award, the Nobel committee’s justification is given solely in what is called its “announcement.” In its arrogance or by tradition, the Nobel committee and its members do not give any other explanation.

In Ressa’s case it was as follows: “Ressa’s Rappler has focused critical attention on the Duterte regime’s controversial, murderous anti-drug campaign. The number of deaths is so high that the campaign resembles a war waged against the country’s own population.”

If you agree with those claims, then congratulate her and praise her for being the first American Filipino to be awarded the Nobel. But that Nobel justification is clearly a total lie, a fabrication that Ressa has strived to disseminate to US media since 2019 when a private businessman sued her for libel, claiming P50 million in damages to wiggle out of that suit, and another the next year involving her media outfit’s violation of the Constitution by taking in foreign money.

WITH only a puny opposition less than a year to the 2022 elections, and a Duterte 2 administration inarguably on the horizon, the United States has employed what has been its special propaganda weapon, the Nobel Peace Prize, to give American-Filipino Maria Ressa, the chief executive officer (CEO) of a viciously anti-Duterte news website, the stature to demonize the Philippine president, and consequently whoever he endorses as his presidential candidate.

Ressa’s co-awardee is Dmitry Muratov, an editor of the most widely circulated newspaper in Russia very critical of Vladimir Putin, the four-term president of the Russian Federation, one of the two adversaries of the US for world dominance. The US must be so desperate it didn’t care that the motives of its Nobel move are so obvious: one is aimed against the strongman Putin, the other against the strongman Duterte, whom the Americans are furious at for drawing the country close to their second adversary, China. A Reuters headline on the story summed it up: “Journalists who took on Putin and Duterte win the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize” although it should have added the phrase “US targets” before “Putin.”

The US has demonstrated several times in the past its power to manipulate the Nobel awards committee into handing the peace prize to whomever it wants, when it needs to do so. The committee consists of just five people nominated by the Norwegian Parliament. If you’ve ever been in such a panel (as I have), you will realize how easy it would be for a determined party, such as the US, to manipulate the committee: it receives over 300 nominations for all awards per year. How did Russia get into the minds of these Norwegians? In terms of contributing to humanity, Julian Assange, who started Wikileaks, and Edward Snowden, who told the world of the massive US monitoring of private cell phone conversations, didn’t cross their minds. Oh, these two pissed off the US government.

The US has done this Nobel move before. To boost the profile of the first black US president, an obscure Illinois senator, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 2009 to Barack Obama just nine months into his term — even if he had done absolutely nothing to deserve the purported justification for it, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.” To draw attention to the imprisonment of a largely ignored Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the peace prize was awarded solely to him in 2010.

Ressa was awarded not for any work of journalism but entirely on her portrayal of herself as a crusader for press freedom in the Philippines, which she claims President Rodrigo Duterte has been suppressing. She is a master of the sound bite, spewing such obvious lies that tug at Americans’ hearts such as her claim that for criticizing Duterte, she had received at one point “90 hate messages an hour, 90 rape threats per minute.”

TO be quite frank, I think the Pasig River Expressway (Parex) scheme, a P95-billion undertaking of government with the San Miguel Corp., to build a 19-kilometer elevated expressway along the banks of the Pasig River, is a stroke of genius, a brilliant out-of-the-box idea. It would run from the Radial Road 10 in Manila all the way to Taguig, with several exits along its course, including one to skyways leading to the NLEx and SLEx.

I should know. Many years back, I was with a study group that researched and brainstormed how the horrendous Metro Manila traffic that was costing the country at least P4 billion daily could be solved.

None of us thought of a highway along the Pasig River. This was probably because at the time, it was so polluted, its banks (especially along Pasay and Manila) sickeningly crowded both with the poorest squatters and big-business warehouses, that it seemed impossible to imagine these areas being cleared for decades.

THE latest PulseAsia survey on the May 22 national elections, and similar published and unpublished polls, very strongly point to the next administration being made up of any of these teams:

– President Sara Duterte-Carpio (24 percent in that poll) and vice president (VP) Rodrigo Duterte (14 percent for that post);

– President Sara and vice president Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (12 percent for VP in the poll);

– President Marcos (14 percent) and vice president Sara; and

– Either president Marcos or president Sara and vice president Duterte.