LuisTeodoro.com

A group with the acronym smart—for Southern Mindanao Alliance and Response to Terrorism—has urged the passage of the antiterrorism bills that have been pending in Congress since early this year.

Representatives Joseph Ace Durano and Imee Marcos are the authors of two House of Representatives versions of an antiterrorism bill, while Sen. Robert Barbers is the author of the lone Senate version.
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If any of the generals and other military officers present were uncomfortable, they didn’t show it. But one could imagine them wincing inwardly, but only for a moment.

The commander in chief had actually used the “R” word! Taking a page from one of her father Diosdado Macapagal’s less forgettable speeches when he was President of the Republic, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo enlisted the Armed Forces in completing “the revolution” during her remarks at the turnover of the AFP command to Lt. Gen. Dionisio Santiago from retiring general Benjamin Defensor.
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It doesn’t help the administration case much for its officials to continue blabbering about how it was necessary to keep the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement a secret, despite its being a “boring,” supposedly accounting instrument to facilitate US military aid to the Philippines and US access to “facilities” in the Philippines.

On the other hand, it doesn’t help those opposed to it either to keep on harping on the need for the Agreement to have passed Senate scrutiny first.
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The government plan to take over the management of the Lopez-controlled Manila Electric Co. has inevitably aroused suspicions that it is meant primarily to provide the President’s associates (“cronies” is the less polite term) with cushy jobs, as administration Sen. Joker Arroyo has pointed out.

But it is also reminiscent of the martial-law period, when the Marcos dictatorship seized the power company ostensibly for the public good.
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Who’s afraid of the family-planning issue? Almost any politician you can name. But not Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who declared on Tuesday that he was all for encouraging the use of artificial means of contraception.

Lacson may have struck pay dirt. The Church has always been opposed to him anyway, and whoever’s managing his campaign knows Church influence over the public on the famil-planning issue to be steadily declining, if not near zero.
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SENATOR Panfilo “Ping” Lacson announced during a Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP) forum yesterday that he would seek the Presidency in 2004, making him the first politician to do so.

Lacson also confirmed the rumor that the opposition is considering two other people for that contest aside from himself. These are Senator Edgardo J. Angara of the Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino, which as the biggest party in the opposition coalition would be crucial in providing the organizational and manpower muscle needed for a credible campaign; and actor Fernando Poe Jr., who’s still being convinced to run by his best friend and compadre, former President Joseph Estrada.
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