I finally did it.
After weeks of alternating between resistance and procrastination, I have capitulated and have become a blogger. Another addition to those 'nattering nabobs of negativity.' God bless Spiro Agnew for that quote.
I just had to do it for my sanity. 2004 is an election year in the Philippines. Not just any election year, we get to vote (or cheat) someone into the highest office of the land this May.
It will be a unique election because for the first (and hopefully the last) time, a sitting president (never mind how she got there for now) will get to ran for reelection in a country whose constitution specifically forbids second terms for the position.
What is funny is that despite the full backing of the machinery of the moribund Philippine government, the full, albeit mostly clandestine support of private business coerced by presidential lackeys, and a massive PR fund to buy the pess and media, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the de-facto president of the Philippines continues to ran scared of poor unschooled, but supremely popular Fernando Poe Jr.
She has knowingly and decidedly allowed her hacks to destroy the goodwill of a chain of newspapers that was under government custodianship by having the People's Journal group of newspapers become a fount of yellow journalism ran by hack writers who could not even write a straight sentence without stumbling over the words.
She has infested supposedly independent government agencies with appointees tarred by the brush of her influence. And this is no more flagrantly displayed than in the appointments to the Philippine Supreme Court and the Philippine Commission on Elections.
How convenient! Now, her only way to stop Fernando Poe Jr from becoming President is to have her rubberstamp supreme court declare him unqualified to ran for public office. Lawyers who filed the case against Poe in the Supreme court were reported to be regular habitues of the same offices and diners favored by her husband, that hen-pecked porker also known as Jose Pidal.
