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 Edralin Marcos. Then came the attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington DC. These would supplant Pearl Harbor America”s Day of…
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 you could assume a philosophical attitude and view the recent presidential election as a glass half full instead of half empty. It was, in fact, …
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 three weeks, I have been wearing an eye-patch. This week, thank God, Dr. Shaley Shah, my eye doctor, promised to remove the eye-patch. It was in…
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 total of 26 years – 13 of them as President and CEO – will pay tribute to co-workers, from our late Chairman Antonio R. de…
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 fellow humans, to the scourge of nature and a deadly pandemic. But, this time, I would rather write about acts of human kindness and concern,…
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. Pacquiao was supposed to fight the 32-year-old Spence for his titles. But the bigger, taller Spence, considered a favorite among odds-makers, had to beg off…
“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, “I am president of the United States and I accept full responsibility and stand by my decision.” In fact, the decision to get the U.S….
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 as a result of his failure to win a second term, America is now suffering what the media and pundits call an Infodemic—an epidemic of…
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. The combination has become so predictable that non-Pinoys are of the impression that these are our national dishes. In fact, these are simply variations on…
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 prompted me to comment that among us Pinoys, perhaps because of our Christian upbringing, even the devil incarnate would be showered with lavish praise at…
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 the leading dailies in Manila, have been perfectly capable of gaining notoriety on their own, without the help of the Hyperbolero AKA the Lying King….
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 chance of winning the presidency as a Pinoy basketball team would have to become NBA champion. Pulse Asia, as is well known, is a professional…
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 Georgia. Clyde has impressive academic credentials, having graduated cum laude from Bethel College and having earned a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the University…
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. The Roman emperors were so corrupted by their powers that they began to believe they were gods. Brutus and members of the Roman Senate felt…
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 And with the serum, end it. With apologies to William Shakespeare for my paraphrasing of Hamlet, this should be a no-brainer for desperate folks in…
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 folks to give me the facts, “sans political spin.” But the facts can be as reassuring or as worrisome as one’s perspective – one either…
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 York attack was so brutal. I’ve only seen that kind of cruelty in movies, inflicted by Nazis on prisoners of war (POWs). The 65-year-old Filipino…
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 to fast-track an infrastructure project. The kid, being an only child, also wanted his parents to give him a baby brother. When his father replied…
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, among them, Hollywood legends Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles and composer Leonard Bernstein. It took an official censure by the Senate, following a stinging rebuke…
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, a legend not only in baseball but also for mangling the English language. “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings!” is credited to Dick…
“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 under the feet of Tagalog movie action king, Fernando Poe Jr. Arroyo had just emerged victorious in a bruising contest for her first full-fledged presidential…
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 being strictly enforced by the government. Secondly, U.S. citizens now need a visa to enter the Philippines – President Rodrigo Duterte’s tit-for-tat response to the…
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. Even before the elections, Trump had warned, without any basis, that the only way he could lose to Biden was if the Democrats cheated. Thus,…
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, in the U.S., a few weeks before President-elect Joe Biden assumes office, Trump fanatics are grieving over the loss of their “greatest president since Lincoln,”…
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. First of all, Biden will have to deal with a Trump out for vengeance and a Republican Party wanting to keep control of the Senate…
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 U.S. presidential election, we have seen how effective this axiom has been, even among ostensibly intelligent people. The most vicious practitioner of this Nazi principle…
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 leave – the kind of leave people take when someone in the family dies. Trump probably feels that he has lost something more precious to…
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 a pattern of over three decades of column writing by discussing several hot topics in this piece: Schadenfreude This is a German term that literally…
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 not lose a single vote. He subsequently went on to win in the Republican Party primary and then, the presidency. In almost four years of…
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 News Network, author John C. Waugh, wrote an article with the eyebrow-raising title, “Trump – A Wannabe Dictator in Training.” “In a view shared by many,…
