Windfall after windfall

Wotta life! No wonder so many want to become members of Congress. Other elected officials are just looking on longingly as the men and women reporting to the House of Representatives again got windfalls of P200,000 each as their Christmas bonus. It looks as if it is Christmas all year round for such people. Was it only last October when they also received from an unidentified Santa Claus, bags of money holding between P300,000 and P500,000? And that is without saying anything about the P70 million in the form of pork barrel. And that they get every year!

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What about the senators, how much is their Christmas bonus? Nobody has chirped yet about a similar largesse for them. Well, even if they don't get a centavo – their office can easily allocate as much as it likes for them being also, as the Budget secretary explained, “autonomous” – they get a much bigger part of the pork, which means an enviable P200 million per annum. All the while, the lowly government workers are gleefully content with a promised P10,000.

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What happened to supposedly pardoned convict, former sportsman and congressman Romeo Jalosjos, is what the late comedian Tawa Marcelo would call “Ay, mali (Oops, wrong)”. The official explanation is that somebody goofed in the computation of his commuted sentence and reported that he was eligible for release already. And so it was bruited about that he was leaving Bilibid prison on December 16. But public outcry, and the return of Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez promptly led to the discovery of the “error”, and that was it.

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Maybe the Prison officials did not use calculators or computers, maybe a brown-out occurred while they were working on the figures, hence the mistake in computation. I'm sure the report about the bonuses for congressmen added to the chagrin of Jalosjos. Had he not been convicted, he would have received the P200,000, too. And what a much merrier Christmas it would have given him and his folks. Now he is said to be readying charges against those who played the bad joke on him.

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The President is all praises for the officers and members of the Philippine National Police for their “success” in quelling the Trillanes caper late last month. Most people are only thankful that, despite all the ammunition and firepower, including the fearsome tank that mowed down the Peninsula Hotel door, there was no bloodshed. For that, I don't think the police should be credited at all. All right, I'm biased, but I believe my colleagues in the media were the ones who averted the bloodletting. Had they fled from the place when the cops were demanding that they did, that would definitely have happened. By the way, aside from giving him a medal, the President also complimented Gen. Geary Barias for his dancing prowess and compared him to Richard Gere. Ah, bright days are ahead for this guy, you wait and see.

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Last week, we were driving along Lacson Street in Bacolod City when we heard the wail of an ambulance behind us. Swiftly, our driver shifted to the side of the road to let it pass. But we noticed that several other vehicles continued to use the middle lanes without regard for the rushing ambulance which had to wait some time before it could go through. Who or what office is supposed to apprehend drivers who don't give way to ambulances, or, at least, try to educate them about the need to yield when one comes along?

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I remembered the incident because yesterday there was an item in one of the national dailies about a woman who had a heart attack and could not be saved because the ambulance carrying her was trapped in traffic and its radiator overheated. Her trip to the Heart Center was delayed about an hour, and it was only a Good Samaritan, the driver of a van, who offered help and rushed her to the center himself. By then, it was too late, nothing more could be done.

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I heard that Erap is sending out Christmas cards where he still calls himself the President of the Philippines . Can President Arroyo, or Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez sanction him for that? I'm sure the former movie actor and prisoner will take the matter to the Supreme Court since he and his followers still consider the right of GMA to the office debatable. This will not be the last of it, I'm sure.*

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