Piercing Pens

Some Findings from Pulse Asia’s April 2007 Nationwide Survey on Filipinos’ Party-List Preferences

• Around one out of every two Filipino registered voters (53%) has heard or read something about the party-list system at one time or another.
• If the May 2007 elections were held today, ten of the 93 party-list groups vying for congressional seats would have a statistical chance of sending at least one of their nominees (out of a maximum of three) to the House of Representatives.
• Three representatives:
  - Bayan Muna with an overall voter preference of 13.7%
  - Anak Pawis (9.4%).
  - Gabriela Women’s Party (6.0%)

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We’re starting a “Pierce the Candidates” series to help our readers get to know our senatorial candidates better. Each posting will be updated as we gather new information about a particular candidate. For our first piercing, we’d like to start with administration bet Prospero “Butch” A. Pichay, Jr.

Pichay was born on June 20, 1950 in Cantilan, Surigao del Sur. He has a son named Carlo, who is proud of his father.

Pichay, a Commerce graduate of De la Salle University, has been the representative of the first district of Surigao del Sur since 1998. Before entering the Congress he was a businessman. He was the owner of Carlo Commercial Printing and Carlo Publishing, which reportedly published the tabloid Remate. (more…)

From Prof. Danilo Arao of the UP College of Mass Communication via Bryanton Post:

This press statement released on March 20 (Tuesday) was signed by 18 faculty members of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication (UP CMC) led by Dean
Elena Pernia. For verification, please call the UP CMC Department of Journalism at 920-6852.

The undersigned faculty members of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication (UP CMC) condemn in the strongest possible terms the filing of multiple murder charges against Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo which resulted in his arrest and detention last March 16.

That the charges were filed during the election season is already questionable, especially since
Ocampo’s Bayan Muna Partylist group is running for representation in the House of Representatives and has been repeatedly accused by the powers-that-be as a communist front. The situation is preposterous as the crimes he allegedly committed happened more than
two decades ago while he was in detention. (more…)

Text messages protesting Manila Police’s plan to transfer Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo to Leyte woke me up this morning. One message said Ocampo’s wife, retired UP journalism Prof. Carolina Malay, was asking their friends to gather in front of the Manila Police District building where her husband was detained. Other text messages were invitations to a forum in defense of Ka Satur. (more…)

Ang Kapatiran or Alliance for Common Good, a lesser-known political party that promotes “politics of virtue” and “politics of duty”, appears to be popular in cyberspace. Its website was not functioning properly when I visited it yesterday. Today, it reports that it has “experienced a surge in members wanting to register, and have run into problems with our new website.” (more…)

Did you see GMA-7 reporter Tina Panganiban Perez’s interview with Imelda Marcos last night?

From that interview, we could conclude that in Imelda’s world, the following are inalienable truth:

• Martial Law gave us not only freedom, justice, and democracy but also dignity and identity.
• The dictator’s reign was peaceful.
• Imelda was never extravagant.
• Martial Law was one of the greatest periods in Philippine history.

On the other hand, these are fiction: (more…)