iglesia ni kristo rallies, prosecution rests #cj trial

day 25.  synchronicity:  the iglesia ni kristo, known to be pro-corona (chief defense counsel cuevas is an INK member), holds a humongous rally in luneta  and many more simultaneous rallies nationwide, this as the chief prosecutor in the senate impeachment court surprises with the announcement that the prosecution is “dropping” 5 articles of impeachment, having presented, he believes, sufficient evidence to convict chief justice corona on articles 2, 3, and 7.

the co-incidence is hard to shrug off.  on the surface, nothing seems to connect the two events, but beneath the surface, who knows what kind of strings were pulled by what hands towards what end.

tupaz could have announced it tomorrow, but no, he had to do it today, as the rally rolled off, quietly, massively.  but what about the invitation they had sent justice sereno just this morning?  oh, but she’s not likely to defy the feb 14 resolution on judicial privilege, given midas marquez’s afternoon statement that all sc personnel are bound by it.

hmm. not that i can blame sereno.  di bale sana kung the case against corona is solid, but it’s not.  what would happen to sereno if corona were acquitted in the end?  too big a risk.

o baka naman it’s as simple a matter of having no witnesses to prove articles 1, 4, 5, 6, and 8.  or maybe they have witnesses, but the kind that defense counsel cuevas and / or senator-judge miriam would again make mincemeat of?

but acc to dean tony la vina on anc with lynda jumilla, witnesses are not needed for the dropped articles, which are not “evidence-based”, rather they call for “assertions of judgment.”  hmm.  maybe tupaz et al don’t feel up to asserting anything after being outclassed by cuevas, not to speak of miriam.

of course there is also the allegedly sagging public interest, on the one hand, and some pro-corona catholic bishops nagging for an end to the trial, on the other.

this brings me back to the iglesia ni kristo’s grand gatherings nationwide — i bet it made the catholic bishops and archbishops sort of nervous, if not envious.  kaya ba nilang magtawag ng ganyang klaseng rally, halimbawa, against the RH bill?  i doubt it very much.

catholics are quite divided, fragmented, on many issues.  iglesia members, in contrast, are quite united spiritually and politically.  in elections they vote as one.  perhaps the rally reminded the congressmen-prosecutors of the 2013 elections, and reality kicked in?

just wondering.

 

presidential backing #cj trial

day 24.  the prosecution’s request that the court subpoena justice ma. lourdes sereno to testify on her dissenting opinion (re the TRO on de lima’s watchlist order) was denied by presiding judge enrile.  senator judge trillanes also withdrew his request of day 23 that justice sereno be sent questions to be answered in writing.  on grounds that it would violate the doctrine of judicial privilege.

prosecutor colmenares pleaded that the feb 14 judicial privilege resolution, effectively forbidding members to testify against each other, was making it difficult for them to get witnesses, and that it might take a subpoena to make justice sereno appear in court.  or something to that effect.

enrile suggested that the prosecution try inviting the justice muna, because what if the senate issued a subpoena and sereno did not comply, then malaking kahihiyan para sa senate court.  and then what?  cite her for contempt?  it would mean a major major clash with a co-equal branch of govt that has the power to declare the senate impeachment court unconstitutional.  or something like that.

senator judge joker arroyo, for his part, expressed amazement at the prosecutor’s statement re difficulty of getting witnesses from the supreme court just because the respondent is the chief justice himself.

“But you have the backing of no less than the President of the Philippines! You should have no problem getting witnesses!”

true.  napa-tweet tuloy ako na medyo uncreative yata ang presidential backing for the prosecution.  kung sa West Wing yan, nagapang na ng palasyo ang mga anti-corona sa supreme court at meron nang nag-surprise witness sa senate court.  kumbaga, ala enrile and ramos nuong EDSA.

or maybe the palace has tried, pero talagang mas matindi lang ang firewall ng supreme court kaysa ng banking system?

as for the abs-cbn cameraman on the justice beat who took videos of sc spokesman midas marquez and of the lawyer topacio & cash, i hope it’s not true that he doesn’t understand what he was covering, not the TRO, not the cash bond, etc.  i hope he was only advised to pretend that he doesn’t understand what’s going on to save him from being grilled by the defense.  otherwise, medyo nakakadismaya for someone who has worked more than a decade in the country’s largest media network.

First UP Diliman rally after the war

By Elmer Ordonez

March 29, 1951. The military and police were on red alert. The date marked the 9th anniversary of the founding of the Hukbalahap (Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon) renamed after the war as Hukbong Magpapalaya ng Bayan (HMB). Early that morning the troops of Col. Napoleon Valeriano trucked out of their camp (now UP Bliss) flying their black flags with white skull and bones heading for Central Luzon where the HMBs were waging people’s war and preparing for an offensive to take Manila. The leaders greeted each other with “See you in Malacañang” despite a severe setback with the arrest the year before of the “In politburo” including several UP alumni – Jose Lava, Angel Baking, Sammy Rodriguez, and the roundup of reported members of the Communist Party and brought to military camps for interrogation. Among those “invited” were journalists like Jose A. Lansang, executive editor of the Philippine Herald, and writers and reporters like Macario Vicencio, Rafael de Tagle and Juan Quesada. Popular bookstore owner Joaquin Po himself was detained by the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) who suspected that his bookstore was a message center of the movement. The writ of habeas corpus had been suspended. Lawyers of the Civil Liberties Union rose to defend those arrested and charged in court with “rebellion (complex with murder).”

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The Edsa Shrine

A WASTED OPPORTUNITY
An Opinion
By Godofredo U. Stuart, Jr., MD

I wasn’t here in 1986, but i watched it in television fragments, mesmerized, gripped and shivering in elation. I have relived it many times, through my sister Angela Stuart-Santiago’s writings of those historic days, and later, again, transplanted by a magic carpet of story-telling, page by page, uploading the English and Tagalog versions of her Edsa Works onto the web site: The Original People Power Revolution and Walang Himala! Himagsikan sa Edsa. I heard the tanks. Watched the swelling masses of people. The political defections. The rapidly multiplying cast of characters. The improbable convergence of disparate elements and events, fueled by years of festering anger and frustration, with the lumpen proletariat providing noise and number, marching into the crescendo of that historic crossroad in EDSA. Four days that galvanized the nation and transfixed the world. The culmination of the rivalry between Marcos and Ninoy, climaxing non-violently with the ouster of a dictator and the end of his regime of oppression and terror.

And in its wake, the birth of people power.

Years before, when Ninoy was assassinated, I found catharsis in doing a small collage artwork which I titled: WHERE ARE THE HEROES? In those four EDSA days, the hero came to life.

Seek no more, the hero. There they were. There it was, the collective hero: the masa.

Alas, it was too grand, too sublime, too extraordinary a victory to attribute to the populace. In the epilogue, everyone started dipping their fingers into the hero-bowl. Attributions and claims came from all fronts: CIA (of course, always in the cast, real or imagined), the high-end political defectors and military rebels (without us, it couldn’t have happened), the burgis-power-elites (only because we allowed it to happen). In the end, the miracle brokers won. With nuns standing their grounds on advancing tanks, a Cardinal power-player, the bloodless coup, and a populace steeped in religiosity – it was no hard-sell. The Miracle of Edsa.

A few years later, they built the Edsa Shrine.

Personally, I was greatly disappointed. And it lingers. Hey, I’m no miracle-hater. I like miracles. I like the inevitable clash of the debunkers and the faithful, the desperate application of quantum physics and singularities by the miracle slayers to the unabashed piety and adoration of the worshipers. And I’m no anti-Marian zealot either. Although I have became the nominal-situational Catholic, my roots are severely Catholic. I can still recite half the mass in Latin. I have a reassuring accumulation of plenary indulgences for my thanalogical needs and was avidly Pro-venial sin and Pro-purgatory for my certain detour needs on the way to heaven’s gates. Whenever the opportunity, I take Tiaong rural villagers to the Lady of Manaog shrine to invoke Her help in ridding them of their dastardly addictions and aberrant and sinful ways of life.

And with this affirmation of my Catholic roots, my point is:

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