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For me, my earliest political memory was the Interim Batasan election of 1978, when the famous noise barrage took place. I was in the hospital, recovering from appendicitis, and I have two fleeting recollections: my father nervously…
Back in July, when Daughterte was riding high as the potential candidate to beat, the People’s Reform Party (PRP) chaired by Narciso Santiago declared it would back her and join the coalition coalescing around Hugpong ng Pagbabago…
A straight line connects Asuncion Perez, suffragette and the first woman to head the Bureau of Public Welfare (in 1941), to Corazon Juliano-Soliman, who became Secretary of Social Welfare and Development (for the first time in 2001).…
Recently in my newsletter, I repeated my belief that presidents are brought down not by their critics but rather, themselves. Take the President who has remained bulletproof as far as criticism is concerned because of two things.…
A fundamental difference between the democracy we had prior to martial law, and the democracy restored after the fall of the dictatorship, is that the rule of the majority was replaced with the rule of the…
The State of the Nation Address (Sona), besides being a requirement, is supposed to achieve two things. It’s supposed to highlight what the administration has done over the past year, and justify the money the President will…
Senate President Vicente Sotto III and colleague Sen. Panfilo Lacson Jr. have been playing coy about forming a tandem for the presidency and veephood, and within weeks Sotto has started becoming more independent. After the will-they or…
Three interesting pictures appeared online yesterday. The first featured masked police and other officials signing an agreement to implement the President’s pandemic-related threat to remove local officials who allow large gatherings. The second photo showed Cebu Gov.…
There is a basic truth about living in the Philippines, and it is this: those who try to abide by the rules more often than not get punished for it. A corollary truth can be proposed: those…
Near the end of the last administration, I came to believe, and still believe, that one of its mantras — “Kayo ang Boss ko” — was actually secretly hated by the public, since it is the same…
In India, they have a lovely term for the combination of insanity and unfairness that characterizes the tyranny of the bureaucracy, which thrives on demanding permits for everything—they call it the “License Raj.” The term Raj was…
A detail that has always struck me as revealing was that during the Diliman Commune, some residents banded together to hunt down students participating in the revolt. That was the other face of the University of the…
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