Gross mismanagement under Pres. Aquino

No interviews will be shown this week on our talk show Straight from the Sky in deference to the start of the Holy Week. As a substitute, my creative director and editor Albert Dajab has prepared a Holy Week special video presentation that we made while we were in the Holy Land last October. We were together on this trip but how he pieced together everything that took place while we were inside the walls of the old Jerusalem surprised me.

So this video presentation is the Way of the Cross inside what is called the Via Dolorosa, the path that our Lord Jesus Christ walked carrying his heavy cross all the way to Golgotha or Calvary. Of course many things have already changed after two thousand years. Calvary is no longer a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem. It is now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher where the hole that the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ was inserted when he was raised up as prophesied in the Scripture.

Just a few meters away was the stone slab where the body of the lifeless Jesus was cleansed and prepared for burial. Then a few meters away from here was the slab of stone where the Lord was laid in the unused tomb that was owned by Joseph of Arimathea. Indeed, when our Lord Jesus Christ came to this earth, he was born of the  Blessed Virgin Mary and as he left his earthly life, he was laid in a virgin tomb.

So please watch this very interesting show of Straight from the Sky’s Way of the Cross in Jerusalem so we could help you with your Holy Week reflection. You can watch it on SkyCable’s channel 61 at 8:00 tonight with replays on Wednesday and Saturday same time and channel. We also have replays on MyTV’s channel 30 at 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. M-W-F.

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I got a lot of emails in reply to my Philippine Star column when I took potshots at Al Vitangcol, general manager of the Metro Rail Transit, who was accused by no less than Czech Ambassador Jose Rychtar for allegedly trying to extort US$30 million from the Czech Railway firm Inekon Group for the MRT. This issue has been in the rumor mills since Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino, III came to power three years ago. But this was one smoke that would not dissipate and as we’ve always believed in that dictum, “Whenever there’s smoke, there is a fire.”

Now this case has been blown wide open and Amb. Rychtar has voluntarily waived his diplomatic immunity and accepted the invitation by the Office of the Ombudsman to shed light into this case. At this point, delicadeza dictates that Mr. Al Vitangcol should at least take a leave of absence. But apparently delicadeza is not practiced by the cohorts of the Aquino regime.

But there are more reasons why Mr. Vitangcol should resign or be fired by Pres. Aquino because of the way he has mismanaged the MRT where today the long queues have now gone down into the streets. Whenever I need to go from Makati to Quezon City, I usually take the MRT because it is the quickest way to travel the route where EDSA is notorious for its traffic jams. But the long queues to the MRT have become so frustrating.

What we cannot understand is why Pres. Aquino will not fire Vitangol? Is he scared that Vitangcol would capitulate and admit to that extortion attempt and implicate presidential sister Ballsy and her husband? But there are no queues at the original LRT 1 & ll. Therefore keeping Vitangcol in the MRT is our best proof that Pres. Aquino is an “awful manager” because he would rather keep this incompetent manager in MRT rather than fire him.

Today, the people in Mindanao are suffering from pesky 10-hour brownouts, incessant attacks by the New People’s Army in company strength (a company composes a hundred men) and problems still with the Muslims because his peace deal was only done with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front casting away the Moro National Liberation Front. Last week we met with the top Mindanao journalists and all of them without exception weren’t happy about the peace deal with the MILF.

So the long queues at the MRT stations should scare Malacañang into swift action because we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of irate MRT passengers who might just wake up to the realization that the mismanagement under the Aquino presidency has prevented them from going to work on time and returning home in time for dinner with their families.

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