2 PACKAGES. There’s a quip going around about Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s protest against the invitation of President Assistant for the Visayas Michael Dino to youth council (Sangguniang Kabataan) presidents to a Malacañang tour and an audience with President Rodrigo Duterte and Presidential Assistant Bong Go.
And it’s this: Why doesn’t Tomas also arrange a tour of City Hall and an audience with the mayor?
In other words, a competition of lures and baits from each competing camp to the young leaders who’ll choose the SK chairperson who’ll sit in the City Council.
Dino has thrown in Bong Go to the package tour. Whom can Mayor Tomas include in his tour?
Where women ‘cannot be’
DISQUALIFIED. President Rodrigo Duterte says women cannot fight actual wars in the battlefield. They cannot stand threats and intimidation, he said. “You’re women, so what’s the problem?” he asked.
The problem is that the appointing power, which Duterte happens to be as president, wouldn’t want women to head offices that may be subjected to threats and intimidation, such as, in his view, the next ombudsman and the next Supreme Court chief justice.
And to the President, they cannot be carrying and firing guns, which a battle requires.
Where’s the tripwire?
STOPPING THE TRAIN. Check out the metaphor the author of the Train Law, Sen. Ralph Recto, has used to stop the wreck the “train” is going to make on people’s lives through their increase in the price of oil.
Recto said the U.S.$80 per barrel Dubai oil price is the “tripwire” or “circuit breaker.” It automatically stops, he said, the increase in the excise tax on fuel if oil reaches that $80 mark.
But, aha, that needs a separate IRR or implementing rules and regulation from the Department of Finance, which they still don’t have. What kind of a tripwire or circuit breaker is it if it’s not there yet and still has to be drafted and put into effect?
Just like the “train” metaphor of the Train Law. Would the price increases automatically stop after the vehicle is already derailed with the people trusting the law riding in it?
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