Cocktalesblog’s Weblog

October 3, 2007

WHILE the Inquirer editors are embroiled in a pecking-order squabble and their columnists busy consorting with and stoking the fires of the oust-GMA opposition, the newspaper owners are quietly crying themselves all the way to the bank.

Make that buying themselves a bank.

According to banker S. Cuttle Butt, the Rufino-Prieto families that control the country’s biggest and most influential tabloid are now seeking Bangko Sentral approval to acquire a sizable stake in Malayan Bank, the Metro Manila thrift bank controlled by the Gozons of GMA Network.

RUFINO-PRIETO

Even before the Bangko Sentral approval, the Inquirer already has a foot inside the seven-branch savings bank in the person of Jay Luzuriaga, the newspaper’s chief financial adviser who is also the bank’s executive director. Read the rest of this entry »

October 3, 2007

The public posture of Code-NGO, the network of Black-and-White Movement and similar anti-GMA organizations, has been for transparency, human rights, and civil liberties.

It came therefore as a bit of shock to discover that the Ateneo-based non-governmental organization actually idolizes Singaporean Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, who is not exactly known for his civil libertarian and press freedom legacies.

In cooperation with the similar-minded folks at the Ayala Foundation, Code-NGO hosted a Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy function last Friday at the Ayala-controlled Hotel Intercontinental to help spread the city-state’s ideals among its target Filipino publics. Read the rest of this entry »

October 01, 2007

HAVING failed despite their arsenal of text and prayer brigades and peer pressure tactics to convince Romulo Neri to implicate Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the ZTE deal, the gays and the angry old maids comprising the politburo of the Black-and-White Movement have now resorted to wicked personal attacks against the former NEDA chief.

Go to the Black-and-White Movement website, and the click on the linked blogs of the different names listed there, and see what we mean.

Over the weekend, after Neri supposedly declined/or had been prevailed upon not to speak The Truth, out-of-the-closet columnist Manuel Quezon III passed off a chain of text messages that reached officials of a telecom company, claiming that the company CEO had donated P1 million to the UP School of Economics for the Diliman professors to sing anti-national broadband, anti-Neri tunes.

Even gay-basher and retired Supreme Court Justice Isagani Cruz set aside his lifelong judicial training, jumped to conclusions way ahead of the evidence — “I am no longer assessing testimonial evidence from the halls of high tribunal,” was his excuse — and pronounced Neri as the most believable of the congressional witnesses, “considering his clean living image.”

Read the rest of this entry »

October 01, 2007

THE editors of the left-of-center Philippine Daily Inquirer have been busy these days chasing after stars — themselves.

Just in the last week, the broadsheet changed its editorial staff box not once, not twice, but three times over new editorial titles and, more important, who gets on top of whom.

There’s more.

Read the rest of this entry »