Category: Politics

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Praise :: Voters to go for candidates who promote contraceptives –surveys | ABS-CBN News Online Beta

Kudos to the Filipinos!!

Voters to go for candidates who promote contraceptives –surveys

by Lilita Balane, Newsbreak | 03/12/2010 7:03 PM
MANILA, Philippines – Most Filipino voters would choose presidential candidates who openly support a national family planning law, according to surveys released on Friday by 2 major polling firms.
The surveys were commissioned by 2 different groups advocating family planning.
In the survey on family planning conducted by Pulse Asia, more than 6 out 10 (or 64%) of respondents said they would vote for candidates who promote the use of contraceptives.
In Congress, the provision for government funding for contraceptives has been the most divisive part of the reproductive health bill, which lawmakers failed to put to vote in almost a decade.
Now, an election year, Pulse Asia’s survey also shows that about 75% of the voters  deem important that family planning be included in a candidate’s program of action.
Only 6% of the respondents in the February 21-25 survey, said that they will not support candidates backing modern family planning; 30% are undecided. The survey interviewed 1,800 respondents, and has ± 2% nationwide margin of error.
via Voters to go for candidates who promote contraceptives –surveys | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.

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rePost::Mind your own business | Filipino Voices

You know what their arguments sound like? The arguments of The Best And The Brightest against letting Vietnam fall. Letting Vietnam fall would lead to the fall of most Asian nations to communism. This reeks of the small mindedness and ultimately wrong headed infallibility approach to policy making.

Mind your own business

via Mind your own business | Filipino Voices.

March 2nd, 2010 by Manuel Buencamino

“The ratio of tolerance of our bishops towards the excesses of the Arroyo regime is directly proportional to their intolerance for condoms and contraceptives.” – Philip Gilmore
Health secretary Esperanza Cabral decided to distribute free condoms “to those who cannot afford it” because HIV/AIDS cases are spreading at an alarming rate. That earned her the ire of the Catholic Church.
One bishop denounced her timely intervention as immoral and warned her that, “she already has one foot in hell and many more might suffer the same fate” if she did not stop what she was doing.
“It’s very immoral for someone in a government position to support the distribution of condoms which we know, do not really reduce or stop the spread of HIV-AIDS. It’s scary because it’s the morality of our society, especially of our youth, that is at stake. We only wish that Cabral would change because she already has one foot in hell. People might suffer the same fate,” the bishop said.
Another bishop refused to accept the fact that Cabral’s primary duty as the secretary of health is to safeguard the public’s physical wellbeing, not their spiritual health and salvation. He wanted her fired for reasons that would make sense only if the Philippines were a theocratic state like Iran or an Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
“Secretary Cabral should not continue serving until June because the culture and morality of society will be endangered under her. First, she does not respect the big number of Catholics in the country who oppose the distribution of condoms. Second, is she Catholic? I doubt that she is. Because if you are a Catholic and in the government, you should be living the teachings of the Church. But she is doing the opposite.”

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rePost::Bronte Capital: In which Paul Krugman proves he is an academic snob who argues from his prejudice rather than the data

People want news that confirms their world view. The few people who wants news to inform their worldviews is in the minority, or if not in the minority they are the silent (read not that media consuming) majority. And as Edmund Burke has said “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”

What sells the news?
Paul Krugman gives his view of what sells the news.  It is a view that fits the vision of the Gray Lady quite well: a clear distinction between news pages and editorial pages, facts supported by data etc.  That is also how I want my news presented.  However the evidence that that sells the news is quite thin.  Whatever Rupert did to the WSJ Journal (that which Felix Salmon and Brad Delong rail against) appears to be working.
More generally opinion dressed up as news, especially when it panders to the prejudice of your readers or viewers works seems to sell really well.  A while back I gave a quarterly series of operating profits (in millions) for Fox Cable Networks – a business dominated by Fox News.  Here they are again: 197, 262, 211,194, 249, 275, 282, 284, 289, 337, 330, 313, 379, 428, 429, 434, 495.
There are few businesses with growth in operating profits without substantial capital expenditure that look anything like that.  Well Fox News gets even better (at least from the perspective of a News Corp shareholder).  The latest number is was $604 million operating profit for the quarter ended 30 December 2009.
via Bronte Capital: In which Paul Krugman proves he is an academic snob who argues from his prejudice rather than the data.

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rePost::To the young writers of Cavite – HINDSIGHT By F Sionil Jose | The Philippine Star >> Lifestyle Features >> Arts and Culture

Read the whole thing!

This past is littered with the detritus of contradictions, some of them very sad because they expose a dangerous fault in our character. Our loyalties circumscribed by ethnicity, family and ego obstruct the making of a nation. And this is what we still are this very day — Caviteños, Warays, Ilokanos — we are yet to be a nation. Our institutions of nationhood in themselves are hollow as evidenced in the corruption in the highest precincts of power, in our continuing poverty, not only the physical kind but the most damning of all — which is the poverty of the spirit.
In that tumultuous event in Tejeros, General Artemio Ricarte turned his back on his former leader. If Bonifacio was betrayed at Tejeros, Aguinaldo himself was, in turn, betrayed later on in Palanan when the Macabebe collaborators tricked him into his capture by the Americans.
This is all water under the bridge; now we must realize how our leaders today have betrayed us, too; they used the slogans of nationalism, the enduring ties of kinship, of patronage to assume power and colonize us.
Aside from these painful contradictions, our past also informs us how empty our country is of the hoary civilizations of Asia, the great temples, the classical arts and particularly literature, which our part of the world has in abundance.
Must we then, particularly those of us who write, feel inferior to our neighbors with their ancient cultural achievements, their great pre-colonial art?
via To the young writers of Cavite – HINDSIGHT By F Sionil Jose | The Philippine Star >> Lifestyle Features >> Arts and Culture.

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rePost::You’re So Vain – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com

As I’ve said in the past this is what irks me with the presidential forums. More on fluff , less on substance. More on gimmickry, less on actual policy.

I had, I have to admit, hoped that the nation’s experience with George W. Bush — who got within hanging-chad distance of the White House precisely because Al Gore was punished for actually knowing stuff — would have cured our discourse of this malady. But no. Why not?
Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)
Inevitably, then, such people react with rage when they’re shown up on their facts or basic logic — it’s an attack on their sense of self-worth.
The truly sad thing, though, is the way much news reporting goes along with the condescension meme. That’s Waldmann’s point. You really, really might have expected that the Bush experience would give reporters pause — that they might at least ask themselves, “Isn’t it my job to ask whether a politician is right, as opposed to how he comes across?”
But NOOOO! [/Belushi]
via You’re So Vain – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.

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rePost::A first in RP: 23,000 inmates to vote in May polls – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

This is great. How can the presumption of innocence be maintained when the government is party to the prevention of these people from doing something that is both their duty and right.

SAYS COMELEC
A first in RP: 23,000 inmates to vote in May polls
By Anna Valmero
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 12:06:00 03/01/2010
Filed Under: Prison, Elections, Human Rights
MANILA, Philippines—The Commission on Elections (Comelec) said that over 23,000 inmates nationwide will vote for the first time in the May 10 automated elections—with some to vote in special polling places inside detention facilities.
Elections Commissioner Rene Sarmiento, who also chairs the committee for detainee registration and voting, told INQUIRER.net that the poll body resolved that detainees—who reside and have registered as voters in the district or municipality where the detention facilities are located—could vote in the country’s first attempt in automating the elections.
At least 23,657 detainees or 43 percent of the total 54,866 detainees eligible to vote in 414 facilities of the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) have registered with the poll body between July and October 15, Sarmiento said.
“Under the law, a person can vote in the elections if he has resided in the municipality where he intends to vote six months prior to the elections and at least a year in the country. Detainees who are not convicted of any crime or punished by the Revised Penal Code, penal laws, or regulations are still presumed innocent of their accusations and retain their right of suffrage,” said Sarmiento.
via A first in RP: 23,000 inmates to vote in May polls – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

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rePost :: It’s really bad and frightening | Filipino Voices

Whilst the whole media is happily covering the election fever, the suffering that our countrymen in the north is experiencing is heart wrenching. This is why countries like the US and Japan have extensive agricultural insurance. The practice of agriculture is especially dependent on many factors that are beyon the control of the farmers. This is a humanitarian problem in the making. This may not end well. I pray my fear are just that fears.
READ THE WHOLE THING.

The current ENSO and its agricultural effects has environmental scientists worried. On the human health side, many Filipinos have no experience of prolonged hot and dry weather. This is revealed that for many of us, the experience of extremely hot weather is limited to “Holy Week” and that really only lasts for 4 days! Extended periods of having 38 C or more temps in Metro Manila may result in a higher death rate among the elderly and those with cardiovascular health problems similar to what was experienced in the European summer heat wave of 2005, when an estimated 10,000 people or more died. The Europeans were not used to having prolonged spells of temperatures above 33 C. While PAGASA may forecast Manila to have 34-35 C temps, our heat island research points out that the real temps due to the effects of a built -up environment can be 3-4 C more than the forecast temperature. So we can have extended periods of having 39-40 C temperature. People living in desert climates are used to this and have behavioral adaptations to cope with this, but I doubt if we Filipinos have these adaptations.
But as a wag told me, we Filipinos are particularly adapted to talking about politics. (FV posts are a supreme example!)
But seriously, the food security situation is beginning to look dire and it is just the end of February. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo may turn over the presidential palace to her successor on June 30 with a famine on her train. Ask any of your grandparents who lived through World War II. They would tell you that the Filipino people experienced famine within the last century only during the Japanese occupation and that was not due to climate change but to colonial master change!
The next President of the Philippines should now be aware that even as a candidate poverty or corruption are not the immediate problems but food security. Surely these are problems but their solutions will take more than one presidential term. Food security can be immediately addressed at the start of the term.
via It’s really bad and frightening | Filipino Voices.

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Elink Video :: "You are entitled to your opinion, but not your own facts"


In response to Republican Senator Lamar Alexander’s contention that premiums will go up under reform, the President cites the Congressional Budget Offices report that his proposal will lower costs for individuals by between 14 and 20%. President Obama cites some of the Republican ideas he’s included in his proposal and makes it clear that he welcomes additional Republican ideas to contain costs.
angol here :: People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Saying you don’t believe something will not change the fact that it is true! Hope is back!

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Elink Video ::"It's a good talking point, but it doesn't actually answer the underlying question"


In a discussion of insurance market reforms, President Obama asks Republican Senator John Kyl to move away from talking points and focus on finding common areas of agreement. The President responds to Kyl: “Any time the question is phrased as ‘Does Washington know better?’ I think we’re kind of tipping the scales a little bit there, since we all know that everybody is angry at Washington right now it’s a good talking point, but it doesn’t actually answer the underlying question, which is do we want to make sure that people have a baseline of protection?'”
angol here: I believe that what’s mostly said in Presidential forums can be classified as ”

“It’s a good talking point, but it doesn’t actually answer the underlying question”

“