Philippine National Police Chief Alan Purisima a lucky man. He told the Senate committee chaired by Senator Grace Poe that he bought from a San Fernando, Pampanga car dealer a Toyota Land Cruiser for P1.5 million. The vehicle has a market price of P4 million.
Santa Banana, a top-of-the-line Land Cruiser costs more that P1.5 million when car dealers get them from the factory!
Purisma also said that his 4.7-hectare mansion had a fair market value of only P3.75 million he bought it in 1998 when he was not yet a police general. That one is for Ripley’s.
He also justified the donations of his fellow masons to the repair of the “White House” at Camp Crame.
My gulay, Purisima’s fellow masons must be so in love with him that they would donate that much without expecting anything in return.
What takes the cake in Purisima’s testimony before the Senate was that he rated himself 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 – and this at a time when criminality is in an upsurge.
My gulay, the crime rate for the first half of 2013 was even as much as the crime rate for the entire year of 2012.
If Purisima thinks Poe’s committee believes him, Santa Banana, he must be insulting our intelligence. Purisima is as deluded as his boss, President Aquino.
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We are told that the “decommissioning” or “normalization,” which means disarming the Moro separatists and secessionists, is already ongoing.
Disarming the Moros in Muslim Mindanao is actually a farce. There exist so many armed groups where the Bangsamoro political entity is supposed to exist.
You have the Abu Sayyaf Group, the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, the Pentagon gang and others how can you expect the MILF to surrender their firearms and become helpless against other Moros?
More importantly, with the alliance of the Abus and the BIFF with the ISIS extremists in the Middle East, it’s difficult to contemplate that an MILF fighter will surrender his firearm.
What he’ll surrender is his old and useless firearm, but not his new and sophisticated ones given to the MILF by the Malaysians.
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Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes is so much in love with the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines that he plans to buy more of the same for the 2016 presidential and senatorial elections.
I cannot fathom the mind of Brillantes. The need for a more credible Automated Election System is the cry of the hour in the wake of so many complaints of vote manipulation, fraud and cheating during the 2013 senatorial polls.
I fully support businessman Raul Concepcion’s “Government Watch” when it posted an advertisement for “A Credible Electoral System” to ensure that lasting reforms continue beyond 2016. The bottom line is that we cannot go on with the “Hokus-PCOS” of the Comelec, whose credibility and integrity are under question. Thus, we have to consider the wisdom of using a new AES and discard the old PCOS machines.
Like what Concepcion suggested, there’s still enough time for public hearings, biddings, and consultations. More importantly, there’s still enough time to appropriate funds, awards contracts, make purchase, and receive delivery. Likewise, there is still time for installation, training of election personnel, quality control and audit, and an open and transparent review of all the hardware and software source codes.
Consider the fact that Comelec has P16.9 billion to spend in the 2015 national budget to achieve a credible election in 2016. If a supplementary budget is needed, so be it.
Of all people, the United Nationalist Alliance of Vice President Jojo Binay should be concerned about the credibility and integrity of the 2016 polls. If the people lose faith in the credibility and integrity of the 2016 polls, the people will make the difference.
This is not to alarm the nation, but history tells us that governments have fallen for less compelling reasons.
* * *
I have never agreed with the goals of militant organizations, especially those that have known ties with the communists and subversives. I must commend them and their representatives in Congress, however, who are at the forefront of denouncing the misuse and abuse of the people’s money by the Aquino administration.
We have a so-called minority group in the House of Representatives, but it does seem that it has becomes more or less an adjunct of the ruling Liberal Party. There’s the independent minority bloc led by Leyte Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, but it’s a small bloc. I commend it just the same.
Along this line, I wonder if it will ever come to pass that our people will soon express their disenchantment and disillusionment on what the Aquino administration has been doing to the people’s money like. Will we ever do as the young people are doing in Hong Kong now?
The problem with us Filipinos, taking off from the 1986 People Power Revolution, we are passive by history and culture.
* * *
Many I have talked to, especially people who know paintings by the known wold masters, say that the paintings seized at the ancestral homes of the Marcoses are not original.
For one thing, it would be the hight of recklessness and stupidity for the Marcoses, especially former First lady Imelda R. Marcos, to just keep those paintings in an old house vulnerable to theft.
We have seen how world known paintings by the masters are secured. Like in the movies, they are kept in heavily secured vaults with sophisticated systems.
The works of art may just be reproductions, even as they are still worth a lot.
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