[COLUMN] 3 curses and a blessing
My wife Gigi always causes eyebrows to rise whenever she gives her date of birth. 9-11. For years that date was celebrated (or cursed) as the birthday of President Ferdinand…
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[OPINION] Time to look at the glass half full
You could rant and rave endlessly over the return to power of the Marcos family and refuse to accept their victory – questionable in many aspects as it was. Or…
[Column] ‘We believe in Asia’
FOR over two months, I have been virtually half-blind and unable to do any writing. I’ve had my left eye treated by a cornea specialist for an infection. The last…
[OPINION] The way we were
ON October 2 at 8 a.m. Manila time (or October 1, 5 p.m., California time), alumnus of Advertising & Marketing Associates (AMA), the advertising agency where I worked for a…
[COLUMN] Guardian angels and good samaritans
A columnist will never run out of bad news to comment on — from acts of terrorism to hurricanes, floods, droughts or firestorms, and from the cruelty of men to…
[OPINION] The Pacquiao-Ugas bout – what goes around comes around
FOR some uncanny reason, I felt that Manny Pacquiao was going to lose to Yordenis Ugas, the Cuban substitute for WBC and IBF champ Errol Spence, Jr. last August 21….
[OPINION] The price of leadership and freedom
“Failure is an orphan while success has many fathers.” The blame for what’s happening in Afghanistan is being heaped on President Joe Biden. He has taken responsibility for it, declaring,…
[COLUMN] How to fight the infodemic
IT’S bad enough that the U.S. and the rest of the world have had to suffer a pandemic. But, along with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency and…
[OPINION] Aaaah-dobo!
IS there such a thing as Filipino cuisine? In the U.S., whenever a Pinoy reception is held, one can expect to be served pancit, lumpiang shanghai, fried chicken and adobo….
[COLUMN] Noynoying, Arroying and Duterting
The demise of former Philippine President Benigno Simeon Aquino III has opened the floodgates of platitudes even from those who didn’t think much of him during his incumbency. This has…
[OPINION] The first Pinoy cosmonaut?
FORMER President Donald Trump has been blamed for sowing distrust in mainstream media by tagging them as purveyors of “fake news.” But the harsh fact is that the press, including…
[OPINION] Public opinion fools?
If the Pulse Asia survey is to be believed, the next president of the Philippines will be another Duterte or another Marcos. And Vice President Leni Robredo has as much…
[OPINION] Tourists or tourrorists?
Congressman Andrew Scott Clyde, a Republican, is not stupid. He is a successful businessman on top of being the representative to the U.S. Congress for the 9th congressional district of…
[Opinion] Power corrupts…
AND absolute power corrupts absolutely! British politician Lord Acton may have been the first to state this truism in these words but he was not the first to apply it….
[COLUMN] To vaccinate or not to vaccinate
TO vac or not to vac, that is the question Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of coronavirus Or to give arms to vaccination…
[OPINION] Of course we will survive
THE latest Bloomberg news on the status of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines seemed to me like a doomsday report. I was, frankly, rattled and found myself asking knowledgeable…
[COLUMN] On dealing with racists, bullies and thugs
TWO instances of unprovoked attacks on elderly Asian women were featured on network TV in March — one in New York and the other incident, in San Francisco. The New…
[COLUMN] Put more czars on the job
MY favorite anecdote about “improving operations efficiency” is that one about the kid who overheard his engineer father tell his assistants to “put more men on the job” in order…
[OPINION] McCarthyism and Murphy’s Law
Sen. Joseph McCarthy conducted the infamous U.S. Senate anti-Communist inquiries in the 1950s that besmirched the reputation of many prominent Americans, particularly those in show business and the labor sector,…
[OPINION] It ain’t over till the fat duck quacks
Pardon the mixed metaphor but I think that the situation we now face in the U.S. calls for it. “It ain’t over till it’s over!” is attributed to Yogi Berra,…
[OPINION] Hello Garci Trump-style
“I…am…sor..ry…” With these words of contrition, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo hoped to cleanse her presidency of the grave sin of “influencing” the 2004 Philippine election, which she had just pulled from…
[OPINION] Missing Pasko
MY wife and I would have wanted to spend this Christmas in the Philippines, but unfortunate circumstances prevented a trip. First of all, there is COVID-19 and the quarantine protocol…
[OPINION] Trump’s plan A, B, C… and D?
The United States Supreme Court has twice denied the desperate efforts of Donald Trump to overturn the election of Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice president, respectively….
[OPINION] Wanted: A perfect president
TWO years before the end of the six-year term of President Rodrigo Duterte, social media networks have been ablaze with criticisms of Philippine presidential wannabes that people don’t like. And,…
[OPINION] Will Biden’s problems soon begin?
IF the four-year term of President Donald Trump was rocky, it looks like that of President-elect Joe Biden will be just as rocky. In fact, it could even be rockier….
[OPINION] The truth, told consistently enough
Adolf Hitler and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, are said to have developed the axiom that a lie, repeated often enough, will be taken for the truth. In the recent…
[OPINION] I won, I won’t, I want
Donald Trump, outgoing president of the United States, has 65 days left in his term as president (as of this writing), but knowledgeable quarters believe that he may have already gone on “bereavement…
[OPINION] Signs of desperation
There are so many things happening in America – shocking, scary, funny, ridiculous, unbelievable – that the usual single-topic format of Street Talk would be inadequate. We are, thus, breaking…
[OPINION] The lemmings
In the heat of the contest for the official Republican candidate for the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump boasted that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Manhattan and…
[OPINION] Wannabe dictators?
HAS President Donald Trump been fantasizing about becoming a dictator like his idol Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his favorite presidents-for-life China’s Xi Jingping and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un? In History…