Who needs soap operas when we have Senate hearings?

My teenaged granddaughter was watching the afternoon soap operas on the TV: No, not the Korean dramas, but the Senatorial hearings.

Much of this is in Tagalog, so I didn't watch, but my granddaughter related this:

The witness was giving testimony on the President's many hit jobs. Like a previous LATimes article that quoted a hitlady who had a lurid story but no proof, the guy claimed he had killed 50 people himself... but when he was actually questioned, he got confused and seemed ignorant and easily confused. He must be the dumbest hitman in the Philippines.

When he got confused, DeLima, an opponent of the president, would interrupt and even coach him to answer. This annoyed the president's allies.

The Inquirer now notes that DeLima has been removed from her chairmanship.

DeLima has been on this from the beginning, and the president has already hinted at some of her secret life to shut her up. from the Manila Times:

Duterte claimed the driver-bodyguard, whom he alleged had collected money from drug traders for de Lima’s senatorial campaign, could not have acted without her knowledge. The two were intimate, he said, based on recordings of their “lovers’ talk” over the phone.

DeLima makes Hillary Clinton look like a beauty queen, so everyone laughs at the president making out that she is a seductive vixen, but hey, this is the internet savvy Philippines, so her sex video is on line for your watching pleasure.


The US press is doing hit jobs on the Philippines, and here people believe that the embassy and the US NGO's associated with the US Government are exaggerating the extent of the "murders" is  not making US/Philippine relations better.

This is especially true at a time the US thinks legalizing Marijuana is okay, while ignoring that the same folks selling marijuana are now into meth and heroin.

One only has to see the situation in Mexico that has been taken over by the drug cartels now that Colombia has kicked them out. And the Philippines, like Mexico, is at risk for becoming a similar narco state..

We saw a similar elite/left wing outcry in Colombia for years against those trying to destroy the drug gangs, until the ordinary people started demonstrating by the millions against the narco gangs. And the election of President Duterte is a similar populist attempt to stop the criminals who run the country.

Remember, here in the Philippines, almost half the hits are payback vigilante stuff, by people frustrated by the slowness of the justice system, which is seen as easily manipulated by those who have money.

and the hit jobs are not being put into perspective: before this happened, every day there were bodies found after they were tortured to death, murders in robberies, or murders by hopped up boyfriends, not to mentions suicides.

The elite and college kids are up in arms, taking their cues from the international elites and the US, but the taxi drivers still are backing the president.

to understand this, read the CSMonitor article from 2015 about meth abuse in rural China.

or this VICE article about the spread in the Philippines.