LuisTeodoro.com

Those who say that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s decision to allow the execution of death row convicts ten days after she had argued against it was meant to get the support of Chinese Filipinos are wrong. She isn’t just courting the Chinese Filipino community; she’s courting the entire Filipino majority.

None of the polling groups has recently taken a survey on it. But the death penalty is widely popular among the citizenry, including the poor from among whom the flawed justice system draws most of its victims. Businessmen approve of it, and so do most professionals, students, and workers. Certainly, Chinese Filipinos think the death penalty is the best way to stop the kidnappings that target non-Chinese as well.
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Some of its past surveys have elicited skeptical reactions before. But the most recent Social Weather Stations survey has provoked an outright accusation that its results had been rigged.

SWS released its findings on voter preferences for president of the Republic December 3, and in effect confirmed civil society and business community fears that an actor could once again be elected to that post.
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Although US President George W. Bush gave the American people an optimistic assessment of the state of the US occupation of Iraq during his US radio address last week, his November 26 visit to Baghdad spoke more eloquently than ten speeches of the actual conditions there.

Bush flew to Iraq for Thanksgiving dinner with US troops under elaborate precautions to assure his safety. The trip was kept from journalists, most of whom were told he would be spending Thanksgiving with his family in his Texas ranch. Up to the last minute, only a handful of US officials in Iraq knew about the two and a half hour visit, during which Bush never left the safety of his security detail and the heavily fortified Baghdad International Airport.
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News of Fernando Poe Jr.’s announcement that he would seek the presidency of the Republic made it to CNN last Wednesday. It wasn’t just because here was another actor seeking public office a la Arnold Schwarzeneger. That’s hardly news nowadays, actors of all stripes including porn stars being in the running for public office from India to Italy. Poe’s announcement was news even to CNN primarily because Filipinos had already elected an actor to the presidency in 1998, but had removed him from office in 2001 and detained him on charges of plunder.
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Former senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago suggests that her alma mater, the University of the Philippines College of Law, might have been responsible for the suicide of her son Alexander Robert, or “AR”.

At the time of his death last week, the younger Santiago was a law student at the Ateneo de Manila University. “AR,” said Santiago during the funeral mass for her son, had passed the written admission tests for both the UP and Ateneo colleges of law.
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