The KNP opposition’s ‘stonewalling’ in the canvass has become obnoxious and ridiculous

Would you believe? The mountain not only labored – but belabored – and didn’t even produce a mouse. In an entire day of frustrating debate, deliberation and exchanges of accusations, the 22-member Congressional "canvass" committee yesterday managed to count only ONE Certificate of Canvass (COC). What a cocked-up situation.

The stonewalling, nitpicking, endless questioning and silly argumentation of Senators Edong Angara, soon-to-depart Senator Tito Sotto (Sus, the ASO Gang missing one member), and the still hoarse nagging of the eternally discontented filibusterer Senator Aquilino "Nene" Pimentel, plus Sorsogon Congressman Francis "Chis" Escudero – who’s plunged into the annoying fray – has become obnoxious to most of the Filipino public.

And television doesn’t help matters, indeed exacerbates the people’s disgust, by continuing to telecast the Congressional follies. Let’s just finish the darn counting.

Pimentel has even demanded that co-Chairman Francisco "Kiko" Pangilinan "resign" from the chair because he didn’t allow their tail to wag the entire dog, i.e. the electoral committee. Kiko, in fact, last Tuesday had to bang the gavel so hard to try to bring the undisciplined shouters and barkers of the Opposition "to order" that the gavel broke.

What’s being broken is our nation’s self-esteem and faith in democracy. We’ve become the laughing stock of the rest of the planet. Enough is enough!

Why doesn’t the Opposition simply carry out their threat to "walk out", so we can conclude this demented canvass and get on with the life of the nation?

Go on, I’m tempted to say at this exhausted juncture: Those resentful and discontented should go ahead and rally the touted street mobs, and try to mount EDSA CUATRO as they’re ominously hinting in a so-called Oplan "Three Kings", so we’ll know whether the people are behind those plotting to overthrow the government.

I suspect nobody may come to the "revolution".

Surely "Three Kings" has nothing to do with Da King. Why, Jojo Binay doesn’t even look like King Kong.

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While we’re on the subject, is it true that (if she wins and is "proclaimed" of course), President GMA plans to disperse the Cabinet to the four winds?

Under the blueprint under consideration, La Presidenta is thinking of relocating the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) to Muntinlupa – which is not so far, really. But outside or inside the National Penitentiary there?

Next, GMA has already said she will put the Department of Tourism in Cebu City – where, incidentally, she intends to hold her Presidential inauguration on June 30th.

What’s interesting – and worrisome – is that the tentative "move" has the Department of National Defense (DND) being installed in Zamboanga City – literally, it seems, to put our Defense officials on the "frontline" of our war against Islamic terrorism and rebellion, and infiltration by the Jemaah Islamiyah which has training camps in Mindanao. Then, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) will be transferred to Iloilo – why on earth this geographic location is being contemplated escapes me entirely. The Department of Agriculture is going to be placed in Davao City. Et cetera.

Sanamagan. All that moving of furniture, not to mention transfers of officials and personnel, their dispersal to the provinces, and the "local hire" of indigenous employees, will cost billions of pesos – which we don’t have.

Is this outlandish move some sort of "bringing the government to the people"? It will be instead be giving both financial headaches to the airlines, and security nightmares. This is because our Cabinet members – i.e., Secretaries and their innumerable USECs (Undersecretaries) – will be flying to and from Manila all the time to report to "The Boss" in Malacañang then return to their far-flung department headquarters in the distant provinces. Since government VIPs are expected to demand "non-revenue" or free-on-board tickets, or at least upgrading to first class if available, this will cost our domestic air carriers already flying revenue-losing "missionary" routes a bundle in lost income.

Worse, our Cabineteers and decision-makers will be up in the air most of the time, in their ceaseless shuttle, that they won’t have the time to meet with their staffs, listen to problems and complaints, think out and solve problems. They’ll become, in a way, air-heads, if not space cadets.

I think (again the caveat, if she’s re-elected – but it looks that way), GMA ought to rethink this plan. Weigh the pros and cons. It sounds nice to "bring government to the people" but that may not be the way it turns out.

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I’ve just heard from our friend, Cebu broadcaster and journalist Cirse "Choy" Toralba, who’s on the mend in the hospital. Choy had two .45 caliber slugs removed from his arm and upper torso (while a third went through). He sounded both cheerful and more relaxed, when he revealed that his assailant, it turned out, had been a jealous young fellow, not the drug lords he had been so fearlessly exposing in his recent broadcasts.

Anyway, Choy, continue to keep your head down. Those drug czars are probably still after your neck, particularly since you made their names notorious.

The suspect, who was identified by witnesses to the shooting of Choy last June 8 (and who was finally "identified" by Torralba himself), was arrested and is being charged. It seems the love-struck young fellow, the suspect John Lloyd Murillo Cruz, thought Choy had taken his 19-year old girl friend away from him. The young lady in question had been working, as one of the youth volunteers, in the Loren-for-Vice President movement. Choy swears he had nothing to do with this lady, and there had been no relationship with her at all.

Wouldn’t that have been awful? To have been shot to death for a purported love affair with the wrong woman? I’ll have to admit that when Torralba – who’s been married, but is now a bachelor – was attacked by this lone gunman while he was getting into his car on Don Avila street in Cebu, we suspected not the narco-lords but a "love triangle". And at least partially, this turned out to be true. I’m certain Choy was innocent in this instance.

But look at what happened to Russia’s greatest poet Alexander Pushkin, who was slain in a duel when he challenged a never-do-well cavalryman named George d’Antes to a duel. The cavalryman had been making overtures to Pushkin’s wife.

We almost lost one of Cebu’s fightingest journalists owing to a similar contretemps – this time over the wrong woman.

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Ambassador Mohammed Ameen Wali of Saudi Arabia met with this writer yesterday to reassure us that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would stand firm against terrorism.

Ambassador Wali, who arrived here a month ago to take over his Manila post, commented that Crown Prince Abdullah was taking a tough position on the threat by suspected al-Qaeda kidnappers to "execute" an American, Paul Johnson, whom they had abducted a few days ago unless the government released members of their Islamic militant group now in jail.

My suggestion is that if those hostage-takers go on and murder their American hostage, the Saudi government take their militant "comrades" now in custody to a public place of execution and behead them, Saudi-style. That would send a message to the terrorists, who are anyway rampaging ruthlessly in Saudi, killing both Saudis and foreign technicians and workers, including Filipinos mind you, in an effort destabilize the kingdom and drive all foreigners, specially Christians and Westerners out of that country.

An American was gunned down in Riyadh, the capital, only last weekend, the third killing of a Westerner in the Saudi capital in just a week. (Kenneth Scroggs was shot in the back in his car, in his own garage, on Saturday. The Tuesday before that, Robert Jacobs had also been slain in his parking garage.

Ambassador Wali, who succeeds the popular former envoy, Ambassador Saleh Mohammad al-Ghamdi (who was transferred to New Delhi, India, some months ago after many years in the Philippines), has a colorful and distinguished record. He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1976, and has been Minister Plenipotentiary and Chargé d’Affaires in Tokyo since 2000, arriving here as Ambassador last May 12.

He presented his credentials to the President last June 8.

He has served in Singapore, in Ankara (Turkey), in the Royal Embassy in Tehran, Iran (where he was Minister/Counsellor) and in the home office in Riyadh. The Ambassador was born in Mecca (Makkah) in 1953 and holds a degree in Political Science, obtained in 1976, from King Saud University in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia’s importance in the Islamic world, as everybody knows, goes far beyond its oil wealth. The kingdom is the keeper of Islam’s two most Holy Mosques, the Sacred Mosque in Makkah Al-Mukarramah and the Prophet’s Mosque in Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah. It is the Makkah that the annual Haj draws millions of Muslims every year.

Saudi Arabia has half the world’s total oil reserves, with two of the largest oil fields in the world – the Ghawar field onshore and the offshore Safaniya field.

The majority of the 71 oil and gas fields that Saudi Aramco discovered by 1995 lie in the Eastern province of the Kingdom, where al-Khobar, the scene of the terrorist attack in which three Filipinos were slain, is located. Scores of thousands of Filipinos – from engineers, technicians, to doctors and nurses – work in that region.