More like: “Watch Out, All Of You Guys”
Days after filing her certificate of candidacy for president, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago has given the public a peek of who she is now, and has always been.
Not the affable lady who cracks pickup lines when speaking in public, or even the supposed “graftbuster”, who loses her temper at the corrupt and the inept, but the blowhard who brooks no opposition.
Earlier this week, Cristina Ponce Enrile, wife of Senator Juan Ponce Enrile and former ambassador to the Vatican, corroborated rumors of an affair between Enrile and his former chief-of-staff Gigi Reyes, a revelation that is about as earth-shaking as it is in the public interest (i.e. not at all).
Here is a Rappler transcription of Mrs. Enrile’s supposed tell-all interview aired over GMA News TV:
“I had heard that she was already too long. He has had many girls before Gigi but they don’t last too long. With Gigi, it lasted long. Somebody told me that it’s not only this time but more years that you don’t know. That’s what got me…,” she said.
While marginally significant because Reyes has been accused, along with Enrile, of plunder for supposedly diverting money from the Priority Development Assistance Fund, there is nothing in the interview that moves the case against the former Senate president either forward or back. read more
That the giant networks ABS-CBN and GMA have been trying to milk the Vhong Navarro incident for as much ratings and page views as they can is no real surprise.
Media critic blog Spinbusters pointed out as much in its recent post, and, coincidentally, nothing else. That they commented on the issue so late in the game and without contributing anything that everyone from the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility to basically anybody with an Internet connection and a social media account has already pointed out is telling, but that is a story for another day.
What should be of issue here is not the fact that media companies pushed the issue into national prominence in a bid to boost traffic.
That is the nature of the media beast and is news to nobody. The media companies will offer what the market wants, and protest as we may, a variety show host being beaten up and accused of rape is interesting, if mind-numbing and spirit-crushing, stuff.
What we should be looking at is the national prominence of the other players in this game. read more
Nancy Binay, Constitutionalist, civil rights champion, and, of late, Senator of the Republic, has chimed in on a bill that is aimed at preventing political families from fielding relatives and various scions for political posts in successive, simultaneous, or overlapping terms.
The passage of the bill at the committee level at the House of Representatives was hailed as historic by ACT Teachers party-list Representative Antonio Tinio.
“For the first time, an anti-dynasty bill has reached the committee level and has been approved,” he said almost tautologically.
Binay, though, daughter of the vice president and sister to a Makati mayor and a Makati district representative, warned that passing such a bill “may limit what the Constitution says about who can run.” read more
In case you were looking for something to show that politics in the Philippines is more about candidates than any actual polis, consider the diabetes-inducing wave of goodwill flowing from magnanimous officials-elect.
Senator Aquilino Pimentel III has extended an olive branch to defeated United Nationalist Alliance candidate Juan Miguel Zubiri months after Zubiri accused him of being a wife beater. Months after Pimentel called Zubiri a “fake senator”, to wit:
“Zubiri is the face of dagdag-bawas and other insidious and malevolent forms of electoral fraud in this country. He is one good reason why some of our people completely distrust elections and politicians.” (Press statement, March 12, 2013)
He was referring, of course, to the 2007 mid-term elections, when he was cheated out of a Senate seat. Zubiri resigned before Pimentel could be officially proclaimed the proper winner of those elections. Soon after his resignation, Pimentel and Zubiri were on TV holding hands and presumably slapping asses and talking about how they’re actually very good friends.
Until the 2013 elections, anyway. read more
An ethics complaint has been filed against Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III and the Senate Committee on Ethics and Privileges is busy preparing for hearings on it.
Unfortunately, those preparations are the same ones the committee was doing more than a year ago: deciding on the rules that it will use in ethics cases.
In January 2011, while Senator Panfilo Lacson was in hiding from the law, the committee’s chairman, Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano, set a meeting with the members of his panel. “We will have [an] organizational meeting of the committee on ethics and first agenda will be the rules,” he told reporters then.
“The intention is to assure that I will not be bias or prejudice. We will not make rules in accordance with the pending complaints. I will be a mediator rather than advocate,” Cayetano said.
And Cayetano was true to his promise. The committee did, indeed, not make rules. At all.
The senator said in an interview on DZMM this morning that the committee has to meet again to finalize the rules.
Ang naging status po noong magdedesisyon na kami sa finality ng rules ng komite noong Hunyo ng nakaraang taon, doon na po pumasok ang mabibigat na hearing sa Senado tungkol sa PCSO scam, sa 2004 at 2007 elections, at iba pang mga hearing. Matapos po nito ay pumasok rin po ang impeachment ni CJ Corona. Kaya ang nangyari po noon, hindi na po masyadong maganda ang attendance ng hearing ng Ethics Committee at hindi na bumalik yung consensus sa gagawing rules.
The senator says there were “several meetings, technical working groups and hearings that were working on the rules of the committee” before the members basically just lost interest. Who, after all, wants to have a mechanism in place to hold senators accountable, a mechanism that might one day be used against him?
Why was there a need to craft new rules for the ethics committee? Cayetano explains in Filipino that, during the 14th Congress, “the Ethics committee became controversial because there were always accusations within the Senate that cases were political in nature, or members of the Senate were using the committee against other members.” He neglects to mention that those accusations came from him and other allies of Senator Manuel Villar Jr., then aspiring for the presidency and facing an ethics probe.
Funnily enough, the head of the Ethics committee at the time was Senator Lacson, who was also Villar’s accuser.
Given the probe on Villar was partly political in nature (and achieved nothing in terms of accountability), Cayetano was right that better rules were needed when trying senators for disorderly conduct. He was wrong in not pushing for those rules to be finalized and adopted. As committee chairman, he certainly had the power to call for meetings and it should not have been impossible to get two to three members of the seven-member panel to attend.
Not shown: The Rules of the Senate Committee on Ethics and Privileges. Because they don’t exist.
In his radio interview this morning, Cayetano mentions failed attempts in past Congresses to come up with a Code of Ethics for senators. He does not mention, however, whether he will try to come up with one.
And this is what is the most irksome about Cayetano. For all his statements and speeches about transparency and justice and good governance, he has done little in the way of legislation. It is not uncommon for his office to issue statements that sound great but are not backed up by bills or resolutions that will actually make things happen.
According to a GMA Network News report in 2011, Cayetano beat only Senator Joker Arroyo in the number of bills and resolutions filed. Considering Arroyo only filed 17 resolutions by then, that is really not saying much.
Here’s a development that surprised few but disappointed many: The Makabayan Coalition, an alliance of progressive party-list organizations promising a new brand of politics, has admitted guest candidates to its slate.
None of them is a new name and Bayan Muna Representative Teddy Casiño’s justification for the team-up is as old as Cebu Representative Pablo Garcia, who, at 86, is the oldest lawmaker in Congress.
Makabayan Coalition has thrown its support behind Senators Francis Escudero, Loren Legarda and Aquilino Pimentel III, former Las Piñas representative Cynthia Villar and former Movie and Television Review and Classification Board chair Grace Poe Llamanzares, calling them, along with Casiño, the “Senate Champions.”
Escudero and Legarda are already old hands at the Senate while Pimentel is seeking his second term. Villar is the wife of Senator Manuel Villar Jr. and mother of Las Piñas Representative Mark Villar. Escudero, Pimentel, and Villar are from political families.
Escudero, Legarda, and Llamanzares are common candidates of the two big coalitions fielding candidates in the 2013 elections, the administration’s and the also-administration-but-not-as-much United Nationalist Alliance.
Villar is an official candidate of the administration coalition while Escudero and Pimentel are friendly to Malacañang. Casiño is not and has been critical of the Aquino administration, but that apparently doesn’t matter as long as everybody’s happy.
Casiño, before he officially filed his candidacy, promised an alternative to “basically the same names, faces and vested interests that have dominated Philippine politics for decades.” His challenge then: “Wala na bang iba?” Is there nobody else?
That question has apparently been answered.
What’s our problem with the Cybercrime Law? None, really, other than the utterly ham-handed insertion of a libel provision, which goes like this:
LIBEL – THE UNLAWFUL OR PROHIBITED ACTS OF LIBEL AS DEFINED IN ARTICLE
355 OF THE REVISED PENAL CODE COMMITTED THROUGH A COMPUTER SYSTEM OR
ANY OTHER SIMILAR MEANS WHICH MAY BE DEVISED IN THE FUTURE.
What’s Article 355 of the Revised Penal Code? It goes like this:
Art. 355. Libel means by writings or similar means. — A libel committed by means of writing, printing, lithography, engraving, radio, phonograph, painting, theatrical exhibition, cinematographic exhibition, or any similar means, shall be punished by prision correccional in its minimum and medium periods or a fine ranging from 200 to 6,000 pesos, or both, in addition to the civil action which may be brought by the offended party.
This, of course,deserves the question, what is libel? That is answered by Article 353 of the RPC, making this piece of legislation seem more like a magical treasure hunt than a law:
Art. 353. Definition of libel. — A libel is public and malicious imputation of a crime, or of a vice or defect, real or imaginary, or any act, omission, condition, status, or circumstance tending to cause the dishonor, discredit, or contempt of a natural or juridical person, or to blacken the memory of one who is dead
What the senators did, essentially, was copy-paste the definition of libel (which, as words on a page, are totally sound) into the
Cybercrime Law and slapped “through a computer with the Internets lol” after it.
Because, as Senator Edgardo Angara explains in deliberations recorded in the Senate Journal (which we took the liberty of reading for you): “lol cyberspace, or as they call it, the Internets, is just a new avenue lol for libel lol wtf”
What will this do to you, dear reader, from least to worst-case scenarios? Let’s face it. You’re probably not going to get thrown in
jail for Liking a funny picture of Tito Sotto as Robocop.
We suspect the DOJ Office of Cybercrime, backed by the PNP and NBI, are first going to come down hard on Anonymous Philippines, who so brazenly hacked a fistful of government websites in protest. Also, that Carlos Celdran, because he’s so goddamn outspoken and freeee.
The worst-case scenario, however, is no laughing matter: twelve years in jail, because if you commit crime with a computer, it apparently deserves the next higher degree of punishment. Also, you won’t have the Filipino Freethinkers to bail you out… Celdran.
Nobody is truly free.
But you know all this. What we’re going to talk about is how it happened, and why the production of such a law is ten times scarier
than what’s going to happen to your asshole in jail.
How did it happen? Legally, and through the proper avenues. Scared yet?
The passage of the Cybercrime Law, libel provision included, followed due process, which means:
1. A senator filed a bill from his brain. In this case, Senator Angara.
2. It was referred to a committee which held hearings, and produced a
committee report.
3.That report was then delivered to twenty-three senators, who are
expected to read and discuss it.
4. The bill went through a period of amendments, a battering of comments like “change this word to that,” “make this illegal,” and “charge 50,000 pesos rather than 10,000.”
5. The bill was voted on twice, and passed twice.
6. The bill was then sent to a bicameral conference committee, AKA the shady number-crunching area, which reported back. With, well, a report.
7. Both Houses of Congress approved that report and sent it to the President for his signature.
8. He signed it.
9. Now it’s in your life. Fucking. You. Up.
Didn’t follow? It means the Cybercrime Law went through no less than presumably three hundred pairs of eyes and three hundred brains –including that of the President of the Philippines — before it decided to. Fuck. You. Up.
What the hell were these senators thinking? Let us, two indolent indios, try to guess.
Maybe the senator was assigned to a different section of the law, or missed the libel provision all together. We’re looking at you, Pia
Cayetano and Chiz Escudero, backpedaling furiously on your votes.
This suggests that our legislators approach lawmaking like college groupwork: a cocktail of dictatorship, halfhearted contribution, and a lot of “Bahala na si Batman.”
Dear senators, read the whole damn thing because you’re going to affix your name to it. Now that the populace has wrapped its collective head around the implications of the libel provision, certain senators are trying to take it back — which obviously means they didn’t read it and are now trying to convince the angry professor that their groupmates fucked up and they’re ready to do extra work to make up for their failing grade.
Maybe the senator skimmed the law. Sure, they read it, and checked off all the obviously bad things like child porn, fraud, and
cyberprostitution, and in the process, blissfully lumped libel into the Scary Things on the Internet category. This implies that libel is
as easy to identify and condemn as child porn and fraud.
It’s not, especially because identifying malice in a badly spelled Facebook status is more complicated, than, say, identifying malice in the act of owning ten gigabytes of naked ten-year-olds.
Child Porn! Fraud! Cyberprostiution! Libel!
Finally, maybe the senator read the law, understood it fully, and approved it anyway. Thirteen out of twenty-three approved it. This is
terrifying, but it’s also the most reasonable thing to assume because it implies that the senators were doing their job.
This also implies that they know that libel has long been used (since American colonial times, in fact) to “keep dissent responsible,” and
in one infamous case, jail a man for more than two years. It also implies that they’re ready to do the same to us fucktards on the
Internet. But worse: Steeper fines and seizure of your shit. Also, more jail.
It also shows, not just implies, that legislation is based on personal experience and interest.
Take, for example, the insertion of a provision making cybersquatting a crime. Based on the Journal notes, this was not prompted by a legitimate business concern (e.g. Sulit.com.ph vs. Sulit.ph) but rather the fact that titosotto.com and lorenlegarda.com are taken, with Tito Sotto bitching that “someone else was already using [titosotto.com] and that individual, in fact, asked him for a huge amount of money in return for the right to use the same.” (Lucky for him, sleazeball.com/insensitivelyingfuck is still available. As of
this post.)
It doesn’t take someone smarter than Tito Sotto to assume that the senators who passed the bill were thinking, “Aw fuck yeah, we can
finally shut Professional Heckler down.” Because, come on, what senator has not been criticized on the Internet? Bashing Senator Manuel Villar Jr., one of those who voted for the bill, was even a backyard industry during the 2010 presidential campaign.
Nobody objected to the inclusion of the libel provision, not even Senator Guingona, whose initial opposition stemmed from the imposition of morality on cybersex. Not libel. Among the senators there, though, he was on the right track and has done the most to make up for that oversight. So, go you!
Hey, at least I opposed it.
So now the Cybercrime Law, as of yesterday, is in force. The Palace is being smug, telling us uneducated masses to read the bill in its
entirety and to utilize “proper avenues” for opposing opinions. Fact of the matter is: those proper avenues are precisely what led to this.
Meanwhile, the government is asking us to trust that they will respect our basic rights. Sure, the Aquino administration might. The next president might not. Laws are as solid as Bong Revilla’s biceps, as enduring as Tito Sotto’s mustache. It will take another law to repeal this one, and as the production of Cybercrime Law proves: it’s not a cakewalk.
Vitaliano Aguirre
Remember this guy?
He was cited for contempt during the Corona impeachment trial for covering his ears while Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago railed at the prosecution for being gago and epal and all sorts of things. This, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile said was “a sign of disrespect to a member in this court and that can’t be allowed to pass and must be dealt with according to the rules.”
He was escorted out of the Senate session hall and was banned from appearing before the Senate impeachment court again. All this for covering his ears because a senator was screaming her lungs out. But that is understandable. We must, after all, protect the dignity of the Senate as an institution.
But nothing at all from our esteemed senators over a clear and present danger to the dignity the Senate holds so dearly and guards so jealously: its own majority floor leader making a mockery of discourse, intellectual property, and of the Senate itself.
Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III, ending his multi-part turno en contra (literally “turn against”) speech against the Reproductive Health bill, appears to have appropriated parts of a speech made by the late U.S. senator Robert Kennedy in 1966 and claimed them as his own.
His response to critics who said he had copied someone else’s words again:
“I found the idea good. I translated it into Tagalog [Filipino]. So what’s the problem?” Sotto told the Philippine Daily Inquirer when asked about his reaction to the fresh accusations.
“Ano? Marunong nang mag-Tagalog si Kennedy? (What now? Does Kennedy now know how to speak in Tagalog)?” he added.
This, apparently, is par for the course at the Sotto School of Rhetoric. Last month, when he was accused of stealing content from a U.S.-based blogger for use in his speech, he dismissed the accusation as silly.
When his staff later admitted to copying from the blog but without Sotto’s knowledge, the defenses became doubly damning: That copying is normal at the Senate, and that it is all right because it is not a crime.
Despite that, there has been nothing but support from the Senate. Neither Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago nor Senator Pia Cayetano, who are pushing passage of the Reproductive Health bill have said anything.
Enrile has dismissed the plagiarism allegations saying the copying was done in good faith and what matters is whether the copied content was factual or not. Senate President Pro Tempore Jinggoy Estrada’s reaction is even more reason to damn the whole Upper House of Hypocrisy: “I have no business meddling in the affairs of other senators.”
This from an institution that holds hearings on the barest hint of corruption and the slightest chance of TV time. This from an institution that earlier this year voted to remove then Chief justice Renato Corona from office for lying on his Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth. This from a Senate that actually did meddle in the affairs of Senator Manuel Villar Jr. when he was accused of getting rich on a supposedly diverted road extension project.
Allegedly!
Indolent Indio has received reports from an unimpeachable source (which is to say, he cannot be impeached even by 2/3 vote of the House of Representatives) that money is flooding into the media in anticipation of the impeachment trial of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez in May.
Our source says payoffs go up to as much as P50,000 for one guy who does blind items. Payoffs are significantly smaller for guys who don’t do blind items, or are less famous than this famous guy who does blind items.
We cannot prove this but they’re supposedly being paid to launch black propaganda campaigns against Senators Franklin Drilon and Jinggoy Estrada.
“Marami ang yayaman, abangan mo (A lot of people will get rich,watch for it),” our source said.
