Showing posts with label peter cayetano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peter cayetano. Show all posts

Friday, October 24, 2008

Boobs & Assholes: Anatomy of the Arroyo Administration

There is a rumor going around that Gloria Arroyo has breast implants. It should not come as a surprise if that were the case. She has always surrounded herself with big boobs so making her own bigger is but a logical extension of the concept.

Consider the Secretary of the Department of Justice Raul Gonzalez. When journalists were able to get an interview with MILF renegade Commander Bravo, he had the pinheaded notion to suggest that the journalists should have informed the authorities the location of the interview. The very idea itself is wrong on many levels and so many ways that it would take forever to enumerate them all. The basic ones need to be mentioned. First, journalists do not take sides. They are supposed to report on matters in an objective and fair manner. Raul Gonzalez must have been watching too much Fox TV that he now believes that being fair and objective means rooting for one side unabashedly. Second, even suggesting that journalists act as informants for the government places journalists in harm's way. The next time that some outlaw grants an interview, he might think that his interviewer is setting him up. He must really want our country to have the dubious distinction of topping Iraq as the country where most journalists are killed. Aside from being a big boob Raul Gonzalez earns for himself the honor of being an asshole. And if a rumor that Gloria Arroyo had another anus surgically implanted or her own surgically enlarged, that too, should not come as a surprise.

As Raul Gonzalez has increased the occupational risk of journalists, they should return the favor by attending all his press conferences even if, or especially when they are sick. His immune system is compromised because of a recent kidney transplant he underwent and a strategically directed spittle might just do the job that a total renal failure failed to do.

Then there's the confederation of idiots in the Palace. Where to begin? Let's start with the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain. Until now, those dolts could not make up their mind whether Gloria Arroyo authorized or knew of the terms of the so called agreement. To be fair, it is not much of a choice—either Gloria Arroyo was knowingly selling out our country to a handful of bandits or she was unknowingly selling out our country to a handful of bandits.

Recently there was the flap about the $10B emergency fund for ASEAN. First, Gloria Arroyo tried to take credit for nudging the World Bank to set up a contingency fund. The very next day, the World Bank denied it. All the president's men then scurried about and came up with the lame explanation that it was the International Monetary Fund. As lame as it was, it too, was wrong. There is a fund to help any country suffering from the global financial crisis. In essence, Gloria Arroyo was hogging the limelight for nothing at all. It's not really out of character. Remember when she tried to take credit for supposedly lowering the cost of text messages? It turned out that there was already an ongoing promotional program which was only for a limited time and subject to different conditions.

Former Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Jocjoc Bolante is in the news again. He is scheduled to be deported back here next week. His lawyer said that he chose not to appeal the denial of his application for refugee status in the United States. He has exhausted all his appeals, actually. He is accused of diverting money which was supposed to fund a fertilizer program, into Gloria Arroyo's presidential campaign. It's not as if he could not find enough conduits for the diversion scheme so it baffles the imagination why he had to make it appear that congressmen who were not close, but even hostile to Gloria Arroyo purportedly received funds from the fertilizer scam. Not content with such a blunder, he even went to the United States where he had the audacity to petition for asylum because of “persecution” here in the Philippines. On principle alone, he should be thrown out of the plane head first onto the tarmac once it arrives here to give a little bit of credence to his claim of persecution.

Bayani Fernando ranks up there with Raul Gonzalez in the anatomy category. His idea of beautifying EDSA is to have his picture plastered all throughout the entire length of the city's main thoroughfare. His face is not one that only a mother could love. It's one that could convince a mother to consider post-term abortion. Traffic along EDSA slows to a crawl because drivers do not know how to properly make a left turn at the intersections. Drivers usually occupy and block thru-lanes when making left turns. Bayani Fernando's solution is to eliminate intersections and have drivers do u-turns. Consider for a moment that a u-turn is essentially two consecutive left turns. Now, we don't have through-traffic being choked by drivers improperly making left turns, but by the same idiots improperly making u-turns.

Tito Sotto, currently head of PDEA, when he was a senator during the Oakwood Mutiny inquiry and upon being told that the supposed destabilization plan was a fake, asked for the original. Then Armed Forces chief General Angelo Reyes had to point out that “fake” meant “spurious” or just made-up and not “fake” in the manner of an illicit copy of a copyrighted DVD where an original existed. This is the same Angelo Reyes who is now secretary of the Department of Energy who, when lauding the benefits of using compressed natural gas as fuel for internal combustion engines claimed that one of such benefits is the reduction if not the elimination of carbon dioxide emissions. He probably meant carbon monoxide.

Gloria Arroyo's band of idiots even made it to the legislature. There's Lito Lapid. Res Ipsa Loquitur. There too, are the Cayetano siblings whom Gloria and Mike Arroyo helped in their election campaign. Senate President Manny Villar is currently out of the country and he appointed Pia Cayetano as officer-in-charge. Now, Senator Santiago wants a warrant of arrest issued against Eliseo dela Paz but Pia Cayetano would not sign one until she has received guidance from the absent senate president. If she has to await instructions from Manny Villar on such a simple matter, she's not really in charge, is she?

Finding people in the current administration who is neither an asshole or a boob is getting to be like finding good people in Sodom (by definition, there would be relatively bigger assholes here, but I digress) and Gomorrah. So, when people in the Arroyo administration resign their positions, ask not why. They probably just have had enough of being big boobs or assholes.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Of Idiots and Liars

After hearing the first few minutes of Alan Peter Cayetano's privilege speech before the Philippine Senate on September 16, 2008, I can't understand why the other senators (or senate-tors, as Benjamin Abalos would say) tried so hard to prevent him from doing so. Peter Cayetano rose on a matter of personal privilege... and proved that he is either an idiot or a liar.

Senator Lacson, in a previous privilege speech regarding the alleged insertion of an additional item amounting to some two hundred million pesos in the 2008 national budget, made an issue of Peter Cayetano's seemingly cavalier comment that the additional 200 million pesos tacked onto the bill was just loose change. Peter Cayetano took offense.

In his privilege speech, Peter Cayetano said that his off-the-record comment to the news media was taken out of context and given a sinister meaning. And so, he set forth to lay the proper context to his comment.

He claimed that Senator Manny Villar earned 20 billion pesos in the latter's company's went public via an initial public offering (IPO) some years ago. He further claimed that 200 million pesos, although a big amount in itself, is relatively very small to the twenty billion pesos that Senator Villar earned in a clean and honest manner. Therefore, according to Peter Cayetano, Senator Villar would not be interested in benefitting from a mere 200 million pesos in the national budget. In that way, 200 million pesos is just loose change.

Logicians call what Peter Cayetano laid out a syllogism. Syllogism is a method of proof in logic where two premises are established to reach a conclusion. In this case, the premises are: 1) Senator Villar earned a huge amount of money when his company went public—in other words, he is very rich; 2) Two hundred million pesos is not a lot of money—mere loose change—compared to the 20 billion pesos he earned when his company went public so he would not be interested at all in padding the national budget by that amount. The conclusion then, is that Senator Villar has nothing to do with the insertion of an additional line in the 2008 national budget

The thing is, both the premises are wrong. Consequently, the conclusion is a fallacy.

First, Senator Villar did not earn 20 billion pesos when his company went public. Apparently, Senator Villar's company raised that amount in the IPO. Generally, the proceeds of an IPO is additional capital for the corporation and not income for the owner of the company. In fact, doing an IPO is one of the popular ways by which a company raises additional capital that it can use to expand its business. Capital is not the same as income. Of course, some investors may cash out their investments in a company when it goes public via an IPO. Senator Villar may have cashed out some of his investment in his company during the IPO but surely, not the entire proceeds. Doing so could have violated several provisions of the Corporation Code as well as SEC rules, at the very least.

Peter Cayetano might have confused capital and income because his father, the late Rene Cayetano, admittedly earned millions from trading BW Resources stocks. That was income. Most if not all of the money raised in the Camella & Palmera Homes IPO was capital. A lawyer should know the difference.

Second, there is no such thing as being too rich. Martha Stewart who was worth at least a billion dollars at the time she traded on inside information regarding the biotech company ImClone served time in federal prison for what experts calculated as only about $70,000 difference in the sale price of ImClone stocks.

The conclusion is also wrong because one does not have to actually receive the 200 million pesos to gain unfair, and ultimately, financial advantage or benefit from it. A politician can take credit for the program where the additional funding was used, as they often do.

Now, Peter Cayetano should find himself in what logicians call the “horns of a dilemma.” That is just a fancy way of saying that one is between a rock and a hard place. One is left with only two options, both of which are bad. On one hand, he can admit that he did not know the difference between capital and income and come out a fool. On the other hand, he can say that he knew the difference between capital and income and admit that he lied about Senator Villar earning 20 billion pesos from the Camella & Palmera Homes IPO.

Maybe Peter Cayetano was thinking about an American politician when he made that flippant comment about 200 million pesos being just loose change—the politician whose comment went something like this: “A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon we're talking about real money.”

Peter Cayetano should probably emulate his fellow senator Lito Lapid who seems to have taken Mark Twain's words to heart. It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it.