I HEARD from an uber-rich friend that Albert del Rosario and his 1Sambayan's zany fund-raising project for their candidate LR has been canceled, not indefinitely but definitely. Read on to find out why. Of…

AFTER much contemplation and some study of Philippine history this past weekend, I have come to the conclusion that presidential candidate Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, Jr. should be disqualified from running for president in…

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″

THE Yellows’ intense campaign last week to propagate their view that the martial law era was all black and that the strongman Ferdinand Marcos was the devil incarnate backfired on a nearly catastrophic scale.

I estimate some 300,000 comments deluged posts by Marcos bashers, among them the University of the Philippines’ (UP) “Dambana ng Gunita” series, Bam Aquino, and even the tiny opposition social club 1Sambayan’s “roundtable discussion on bridging generations.”

It was the equivalent of a people power uprising, this time against the Yellows, in cyberspace.

A similar show of force occurred in the 20-million-plus “unsubscribe” actions against Raffy Tulfo’s YouTube channel in retaliation against his declaration that he would bring ABS-CBN back when he wins as senator.

The DDS — diehard Duterte supporters, who are also all pro-Marcos — now control social media, a formidable force in the 2022 elections, especially considering that even by early next year, Covid-19 will likely still be with us, limiting in-person campaigning. Anybody who knows how social media and Facebook work would laugh at the Ressa or Hontiveros kind of allegations that President Rodrigo Duterte has a massive “troll farm.” Check out for yourself that Bam Aquino post described here and go over the comments — these come from ordinary people.

LAST week, I asked readers for their thoughts on why for the first time since our independence we have such a pathetic group of puny politicians or would-be politicians for an opposition. Here are some of their responses:

“It’s our broken system. Our bastardized American presidential system depends on personalities and candidates’ individual traits. I say bastardized because we eliminated the proper check and balance that makes the American system work such as the Electoral College and the vice president being voted together with the president.

“We have to change our system to a parliamentary (ideally Westminster-type of parliamentary) system so we can shift our focus from the candidate’s personality and charisma to the political party’s agenda. Our current presidential system breeds and nurtures nincompoops. Our current politicians have free rein to muddle the issues in the media without being challenged while in the parliamentary system, politicians have to clash every week in parliamentary debates, thus frequently exposing who’s a fool and who’s bright. In the parliamentary system, erring leaders could easily be replaced via a vote of no-confidence, and good leaders can be reelected indefinitely. Look at Angela Merkel.

“Our presidential system requires a divisive, tedious and expensive impeachment process to remove a bad leader and deprives us of continuity of good policies by limiting a good leader with term limits. It’s been more than 30 years since we’ve been trying to make this broken system work to no avail. It’s been more than 30 years since we keep on saying ‘Vote wisely’ and we still cannot find Mr./Mrs. Wisely. It’s in our system, sir, we have to change it.” – B.R.

Second of a series on the Scalice revelations
WITH the franchise for the Lopez clan’s ABS-CBN broadcasting network still in limbo, it would be very informative to look at this oligarch’s history, why it fought Marcos (and was depicted after his fall as noble pro-democracy tycoons) and how powerful its media empire was, so formidable that only Marcos’ martial law could stop it.

What follows are not my claims, but a narrative on the Lopezes from a meticulously researched PhD dissertation by Joseph Scalice, submitted as a requirement for his doctorate at the University of California in Berkeley.

Scalice writes:
“Like Marcos, Vice President Fernando Lopez was reelected in the 1969 elections but in the immediate aftermath of the election, Lopez and Marcos had a falling out with explosive political consequences. Noted historian Lewis Gleeck stated that, ‘The relationship of President Marcos, the political sovereign, and the Lopez brothers, the economic giants, was always an uneasy one … In the beginning, each needed the other, but in the end only one, of course, could be top dog.’ The Lopezes were not to be taken lightly, as Benigno Aquino Jr. made clear in his apt description of their political influence:

I WROTE the following column in November 2015, republished here completely unchanged. That was three years ago, but I’m sure our readers will find it very relevant today, with more and more indisputable facts being unearthed over the massive cheating undertaken through Smartmatic’s computerized voting system, apparently in order to pad votes for vice-presidential candidate Leni Robredo.

This was written when the Comelec chairman then, Andres Bautista, seemed to be squeaky clean, before his wife Patricia made public his huge P1 billion unexplained bank holdings. After a PR blitz defending himself, even crying in a TV interview, Bautista surreptitiously left the country early this year, with nothing being heard from him again, except a message from his Oklahoma-based gastroenterologist brother Martin that he was ill, and can’t return to the Philippines. In Bautista’s media campaign, Martin claimed that the money in his brother’s accounts were all his, and that he was a billionaire.

Celebrating: Controversial former COMELEC chairman Andres Bautista (with moustache) living it up with brother Martin in Oklahoma City. (Photo March 2018).

2015 column starts here:
A bit of information that was not mentioned in the bio-data of Smartmatic Chairman Mark Malloch Brown, as posted on the company’s website, was that he was the close media adviser and speechwriter of the late President Corazon Aquino. He was then disguised as a foreign correspondent during the “snap” elections that led to the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines.

He even played a very crucial role in Cory Aquino’s ascent to power in 1986, according to an authoritative book on that episode.  (more…)

I’ve written several columns debunking the Yellow Cult’s distortion of the history of the Marcos era, certainly not to defend the strongman. Indeed, Marcos’ biggest crime was his failure to…