Shopping in HK
is good therapy

The Court has granted former first lady Imelda Marcos permission to travel to Hongkong for medical treatment. Well, it is a well-known fact among women that shopping is one very effective therapy for all kinds of ailments, and where else but in Hongkong can one find the best shopping malls? How many of us females would also love to undergo such therapy, but can't have it even if we don't need permission from any court to go?

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As for La Madama, the Imeldific One, she has to put up some P320,000 as bond for her to be able to get out of the country. We all know that such amount will not even make a dent in her shopping money. The bond is for the 32 court cases she is still facing in connection with the money allegedly plundered by her dear departed husband's administration. But what ailment did she cite for the Court to grant her the privilege? She says she has a dry cough and ailing knees. I bet she is not the only 77-year-old lady who has those complaints, but they are not Imelda, the lady who always gets her way.

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What? Now even the PET, or Presidential Electoral Tribunal, has gotten into the act. The gagging act, I mean. It has ordered the two vice presidential contenders, one declared winner and the other loser, from talking or making comments about the case involving them now being handled by the PET. The reports say that they are being made to clam up so they cannot influence the resolution of the protest that has been filed by Loren Legarda, who is providing evidence that the winner, Noli de Castro, did not win fair and square over her.

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But I thought that protest involved only the counting of the ballots cast, because Legarda believes they were not added accurately, or that some padding had been done to ensure the victory of the former newsreader of ABS-CBN, who used to be her colleague? So why should comments from the protagonists, or even the public be able to influence the outcome? That is, unless the PET counters or reviewers are doing the addition manually?

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Maybe we are getting paranoid, but this Executive Order 464 has really frightened us, especially because we are now finding out that it is expandable. What I mean is that the gag on officials giving testimony or disclosures in aid of legislation has been extended to those invited to disclose what they know to the committees deliberating on the budget, or on the approval of the appointments made by the President. My dear friend Maurice Arcache used to call his column "My lips are sealed…sometimes". Now the lips of officials are being sealed "all the time".

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I had already expressed my own thoughts on EO 464 in yesterday's editorial and some people have conveyed their agreement with them. But yesterday's press conference arranged by Nene Rojas with Senator Ed Angara, another dear friend, confirmed everything that we had noted, and more. Angara pointed out to us how disastrous it would be if no incumbent officials of any government agency can be questioned on the performance, or the actual need of his office. Will Congress then have to approve the budget for that office blindly?

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Not only that, the former president of the University of the Philippines and Senate President added, where now is the principle of check and balance that is supposed to be adopted by this government? We are supposed to have separation of powers, but acts like the imposition of EO 464 are making the executive, i.e. the President, more powerful than the two other branches - the Legislative and the Judicial.

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Another disclosure Angara made was that it is only agriculture and money from overseas workers that are propping up our economy. Without these, he said, it would have collapsed already. Well, maybe there was good reason to shell out those pre-election fertilizer funds? Maybe they did help to prop up the economy, even if the releases were made in what could be called, mildly, an unorthodox way.*

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