As this is being written (hours before the State of the Nation Address), a massive protest rally is being mounted to denounce President Rodrigo Duterte for failing to fulfill his campaign promise to put an end to contractualization and “endo.”

It was the first-ever formal one-on-one summit between a US President, Donald Trump, and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, held July 16 in Helsinki. At the joint news conference afterward, the final question from the US went to Jonathan Lemire from the AP (www.washingtonpost.com, July 16, 2018, transcript courtesy of Bloomberg Government):

After two years in power, the Duterte administration, its economic team, and its policies can be considered as fair to the poor. Here are five reasons why I say this.

The Philippines faces an urgent task.

The shift to a federal form of government will surely be among the contentious issues taken up by President Duterte in his state of the nation address today.

A previous piece identified one serious flaw in the DoE’s Philippine Energy Plan (PEP) 2016-2040: the DoE still assumes that baseload plants will retain their 70% share in the electricity mix until 2040.

“The aim, therefore, of patriots was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.” -- John Stuart Mill,
“On Liberty” (1859)

Some 21.9 million Filipinos, notes the National Anti-Poverty Commission’s Reforming Philippine Anti-Poverty Policy (Manila: NAPC Secretariat, 2017), are officially considered poor.

This Monday is Apolinario Mabini’s 154^th birthday. This year also marks the country’s 120^th as a Republic. Not a bad time to revisit the life of a man many kids today seem baffled as to why he’s always sitting down.

“I think the saddest people always try to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.” -- Robin Williams, US actor

I WAS very surprised about the final output of the Consultative Committee to Review the 1987 Constitution. The resulting proposed constitution is not federalism at all!

In September 2017, the President expressed the opinion that the Road Board, a government agency, must go. This was seconded by House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, who had noted that the board had lost or misused about P91 billion in public funds from 2001 to 2012. Unsurprisingly, by May this year, the House of Representatives approved a bill to abolish the board.