The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
When Rodrigo R. Duterte first flew off the handle with his unmitigating tempestuous and temperamental tirades against the United States, these had all began in the public’s eye during the presidential campaign where he accused the Americans of undue interference in a sovereign political exercise, commenting as they did on a statement spawned in at least two rallies. Claiming entitlement …
Points of View & Perspectives
November, 2016
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13 November
An SC justice’s dangerous tendency
For the record, we would like to say that we have much respect for Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen. After all, he is one the youngest ever to be named to the High Court.
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13 November
But where was Lincoln’s log cabin?
I fussed as we circled round to the visitor’s center, hoping I’d find it tucked somewhere. Of course, it wasn’t, as I later learned because it’s in Hodgeville, Kentucky, where he was born, now a living farm. How then could Hildene’s “Gilded Age” opulence fit into what I knew of Lincoln’s beginnings? I later realized that the contradiction between what …
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6 November
The hard truth on soft corruption
Only smart-ass lawyers, hucksters and politicians have the gall to split hairs, invoke quantum physics they do not understand and eventually create razor-thin fine distinctions between hard and soft corruption. As if there really was a great and discernible difference for the people who are its victims. Hard or soft, corruption is corruption. The statutes make no distinctions and neither …
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6 November
The return of Edwin Lacierda and US dependence
Social media observers say there has been a significant rise in the number of rants in the internet against President Duterte during and after his visit to the People’s Republic of China.
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6 November
‘The end is near’
An ominous phrase, indeed, if referencing noxious clumps of both real and figurative debris, which for months, have gotten more and more bloated from wars both with weapons and rhetoric the world over, especially, one tilting on a friable balance, the US—where from an ad featuring both presidential candidates in a highly toxic race for the White House I borrowed …
October, 2016
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30 October
For want of a battle
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost,” is the penultimate phrase of a short nursery rhyme and an old crusted idiomatic expression that illustrates the distorted trade-offs among choices that people make where they effectively surrender greater causes in pursuit of one lesser and more insignificant. The rhyme starts off with, “For want of a nail, a shoe is …
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30 October
Turning around regrets
Or more like retrieving a limb or heart chamber we realize we’ve left behind, which soon metamorphoses into a bunch of regrets, long after we’ve settled into our seats on a flight to another country, where with bursts of Facebook happy-face emoticons, for millennial and youngish septuagenarians, that is, we would begin a new life.
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23 October
The salacious sex standard
The issues and challenges affecting the United States in its presidential derby that the country and the rest of the relatively lesser Free World has somewhat adopted as the model of the ideal democracy and whose society many have subconsciously held as the model to emulate, at least in its perfect, upstanding, squeaky clean and antiseptic Hollywood Donna Reed Show …
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23 October
When lawbreakers are lawmakers
As we write this column, the media have just reported that the Sandiganbayan has ordered the 90-day suspension of incumbent Muntinlupa Rep. Rufino “Ruffy” Biazon over graft charges in connection with the multibillion-peso pork-barrel scam.