The Senate’s bear

SEN. Franklin Drilon, who has been likened to a sleeping bear by some people after having been photographed several times napping in the Senate session hall, seemed to have woken up from his hibernation when he suddenly called the Duterte administration’s Build, Build, Build program a “dismal failure.”

(Others call him the Senate’s boar, but that’s another story.)

As most of us must have experienced, there is that brief moment when we seem detached from reality upon waking up from deep sleep ( That seems to be what Drilon was going through when he made that ludicrous statement.

Where has he been all time? Oh, yes, sleeping…

Surely, he must have noticed that not even one of his Yellowtard colleagues in the Senate echoed his preposterous claim.

Foreign troops and arms on PH soil

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Last August, President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, aka Digong, in a speech before Chinese-Filipino businessmen, again stressed that his opposition to foreign troops and arms on our land was not only directed at the United States but also at Russia and China because it is a violation of the Constitution.

“You have my solemn promise that I will never allow any foreign troops.

I will never allow them in my land… And there’s an item there right now sa newspaper that they are going to place some ballistics, mid-range. That can never happen. That will never happen because I will not allow it. It’s all — because it’s also a violation of the Constitution,” Digong declared.

That was music to my ears. It could only mean that he does intend to abrogate the constitutionally infirm Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement that allow the stationing of US troops in the Philippines, with the latter also containing a provision for “agreed locations” for troops and pre-positioned arsenal for US military hardware and weapons that could conceivably include missiles and nuclear warheads.

But the big question is when will he do it? He has been talking about getting rid of foreign troops and military bases in the country ever since he started campaigning for the presidency about four years ago but has not really done anything about it until now.

Will he ever do it? People are beginning to get the impression that he is not really serious about it. If not, he should just stop talking about it. He has barely two and a half years left before his term ends in 2022 and if he doesn’t start the process soon, he just might run out of time… and credibility.

Robredo as ICAD co- chairman

I will not speculate on how Vice President (under protest) Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo will ultimately fare in her role as co-chairman of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD).

But already, she has made a couple of miscues.

The first is when she, with nary a thought it seems, immediately consulted with the US and the UN on the drug problem. Both meetings were a sheer waste of time. Neither is really competent in helping us solve our drug problem.

Don’t forget, no less than President Donald Trump admitted that there is an ongoing opioid fentanyl epidemic in the US that

Neither has the US been able to contain after years of trying the