LuisTeodoro.com

The media, particularly TV, discovered ghost writers during the Corazon Aquino administration. It was primarily because her principal ghost writer wouldn’t stop talking about it. That was Congressman Teodoro Locsin Jr., who on numerous occasions would mention that he wrote this speech or that for Mrs. Aquino. Mr. Locsin seems to have also ghost-written for Fidel Ramos, and lately for Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Not only does he not deny it; he even seems to glory in it.

On the other hand, the late Adrian Cristobal never admitted in public that he ever wrote anything for Ferdinand Marcos, whose spokesman he once was. In one forum introduced as “the President’s (Marcos’) ghost writer,” Cristobal declared that “that is not true; the President writes his own speeches.” But Cristobal was not only in the Marcos stable of speech writers. He also wrote “his” books, among them the regime bible Today’s Revolution: Democracy, and the equally wily The Filipino Ideology.

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Last year Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo issued what amounted to an in-your-face, say-what-you-will, I-dare-you-to contradict-me challenge in response to what were then already record lows in her approval ratings. Mrs. Arroyo declared that she would rather be right than popular — as if one were possible only without the other, and which presumes that what’s popular is necessarily wrong.

The occasion was that yearly ritual called the State of the Nation Address. Like Oscar awards night in Hollywood, the SONA has its own red carpet moments, when our presumptive betters alight from their limousines into the glare of TV lights and public attention. In the Batasan hall itself, Mrs. Arroyo usually delivers her SONA in a sea of congressional matrons, cabinet ladies, and congresswomen showing off their latest P200,000 gowns and most recent purchases from the ritzy jewelry shops of Manila, Sydney, New York, London, Rome and Paris.

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No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me… I am involved in mankind

-John Donne

The charge is “unlawful carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” That’s legalese in Malaysia for sodomy, a crime in that country.

Arrested last Wednesday on that charge, former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim had been accused of corruption and the same — uh — crime in 1998. In 1999 he was convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to a six-year prison term. The charge of sodomy earned him an additional nine years in prison in 2000. But the Malaysian Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2004, and Anwar was released.

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The “Palparan solution” to armed rebellion has never been a solution at all. As Philippine experience with the rebellions that have been part of the Philippine landscape before and after 1946 has amply demonstrated, it has always been part of the problem.

To the perennial unrest that’s the consequence of an unjust social order, all Philippine governments without exception have responded with the use of state violence. With predictable inevitability, that approach has included the arrest, torture, forced disappearance and killing not only of those who have taken up arms, but also of sympathizers, reformers, and protesters exercising their right to free expression.

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The families and friends of those who died in the sinking of Sulpicio Lines’ Princess of the Stars are understandably outraged at the shipping company. But they should be even more incensed at the corruption, inefficiency, and plain indifference of this country’s officials.

Sulpicio Lines is the same company that brought you the worst maritime peacetime disaster ever in the Philippines and the world, the MV Dona Paz collision, which killed some 4,000 people.

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The kidnapping of ABS-CBN anchor Ces Drilon has again raised and underscored a number of professional and ethical issues in Philippine journalism practice.

The professional issues certainly include the need for media organizations to adopt guidelines in the coverage of crisis and conflict situations. As a companion to those guidelines, safety training for those likely to be covering crisis and conflict situations has also become more and more urgent.

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It’s become conventional wisdom among observers in the United States and other countries that a Democratic Party victory this November will mean a shift in US government policies at home and abroad. It doesn’t matter who the Democratic candidate for president will be. Although they have different styles, the thinking went, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would undo the damage eight years of the George W. Bush presidency have inflicted on both the United States and the world.

Barack Obama’s emergence as the Democratic Party candidate for President this November is at least partly due to the results of the surveys, most of which show that despite his race, Obama could defeat Republican John McCain. Despite her support across a broad spectrum of white workers, the middle-class and women, Hillary Clinton’s being a woman, and an aggressive one at that, has been widely held against her. It suggests that sexism’s an even more difficult hurdle in US politics than racism.

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