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Pact between Marcos, Duterte families shaped the vote Bongbong' Marcos didn't just win the presidential election in the Philippines this week. He won it by a two-to-one landslide, despite the fact that he is the extremely entitled son of a former president who stole at least ten billion dollars and a mother who spent the loot partly on the world's most extensive collection of designer shoes (3,000 pairs). Moreover, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, to give him his real name, has virtually no accomplishments other than that name. Yet his name and his inherited wealth, originally stolen from the parents of the...

Oakland - Mark Estrada, the man who pleaded guilty to killing a Hayward police sergeant in 2015, was sentenced to 50 years to life on Thursday. Sgt. Scott Lunger, a 48-year-old father of two daughters, was fatally shot by Estrada during a pre-dawn traffic stop

President Biden wants credit for nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. But here is the shameful irony: As a senator, Biden warned President George W. Bush that if he nominated the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, he would filibuster and kill her nomination. The story begins in 2003, when Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit is considered the country’s second-most important court, and has produced more Supreme Court justices than any other federal court. Brown was...

A Democratic candidate for a seat in the California state assembly blames Israel for committing genocide against the Palestinians and has offered her support for anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Maria Estrada, a candidate for California’s District 63 representing the southeast suburbs of Los Angeles, garnered the second most votes, some 28 percent, in a top-two primary on June 5 for the November election. She will run against incumbent and fellow Democrat Anthony Rendon, who also serves as Speaker of the California State Assembly. In an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Rabbi Abraham Cooper and...

MIAMI -- An ousted Filipino congressman pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of tax evasion and one count of election financing fraud. Mark Jimenez, 56, agreed that he owes up to $1.5 million in income tax for 1995 and 1996 and will serve at least 21 months in prison. He will be sentenced at a later day, federal prosecutors said. Jimenez was extradited in December to Miami, where he was charged with using money from his Miami company and a closely related one to reimburse employees for illegal donations to former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats. Jimenez made...

NEWARK, Sept. 12 - A Federal Bureau of Investigation intelligence analyst and a former top Philippines law enforcement official were charged in federal court on Monday with espionage. Arrested were the F.B.I. analyst, Leandro Aragoncillo, 46, of Woodbury, N.J., a naturalized United States citizen who was born in the Philippines, and Michael Ray Aquino, 39, of Queens, a former deputy director of the Philippines National Police under the government of the former president Joseph Estrada. The two men are accused of passing classified agency information to government officials in Manila in a case that appeared related to the Philippines' fractious...

The appeal Conrad Black is making from his jail cell at a federal prison in Florida is nearing a crucial stage. His appeal was rejected in June by a panel of the 7th United States Circuit Court of Appeals, but the panel's decision conflicts with others in the circuit, and Conrad Black is asking the circuit to hear it en banc. The question centers on how broad is the reach of the law of what is called honest services. If Conrad Black's conviction is allowed to stand, a precedent will be have been set that could leave thousands of executives...

The Justice Department had a losing average before the Supreme Court in the just-finished term because it was pushed to defend weak positions by a "crazy client," one-time U.S. Court of Appeals nominee Miguel Estrada said Monday. Summing up the term at a Federalist Society luncheon, Estrada, an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general from 1992-1997, slammed his former office for taking poor cases. "The office," he said, "did not do very well at the Supreme Court this year." Estrada, whose argued more than 20 cases before the Supreme Court, said the solicitor general´s office had a 12 win-15 loss

Gov. Susana Martinez has been crying foul ever since political opponents started trotting out emails sent to an old campaign account. The governor has long contended the emails — ranging from topics such as the controversial Downs at Albuquerque racino deal to an underwear purchase order — were illegally hijacked. Her political adversaries have said they were sure they had been legally obtained. Federal prosecutors weighed in Thursday, releasing an indictment accusing a former Martinez campaign manager with illegally intercepting the emails that ended up in the hands of a union-backed political activist, a lawyer who would become the state...

Although one can understand Estrada’s personal desire to be magnanimous in defeat, his letter is ill-advised. From a purely tactical stand-point, the implications of what Estrada is saying are obvious: If the Democrats block nominees on ideological grounds -- as they did with Estrada -- and the Republicans rely on traditional credentials, eschewing ideology, we will wind up with a court of well-credentialed liberals.

A prominent Republican lawyer whose failed judicial nomination during the Bush Administration became a cause célèbre for conservatives, Miguel Estrada, is urging the Senate to confirm President Barack Obama's newest nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan. In a letter Friday, Estrada touted Kagan’s qualifications, calling her views “firmly center-left” and “well within the mainstream of current legal thought.” “Elena possesses a formidable intellect, an exemplary temperament and a rare ability to disagree with others without being disagreeable,” Estrada wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). “If such a person, who has...

Even before she became the swing vote that forced consideration of Obamacare onto the Senate floor, two-term Arkansas senator Blanche Lambert Lincoln had a dubious distinction: "For 2010, she may be the most endangered Democratic senator in the country," says Public Policy Polling head Dean Debnam. Political handicappers began to note her vulnerability last summer when, in the face of the tea-party movement, Lincoln refused to hold town hall meetings with her constituents. In a conference call with Arkansas reporters, she called tea-party confrontations with politicians "un-American," and ever since, even though she relented and held a few town halls...

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Sarah Palin begins to build her network of advisors Politico's Ben Smith reports: Randy Scheunemann, has emerged as an advisor to former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as she attempts to build a serious public profile and begins to build a network of aides and advisors typical of a national politician. Scheunemann confirmed this evening that he's with Palin in Hong Kong, where she is delivering a paid speech at a conference hosted by the brokerage house CLSA, which has in the past heard keynotes from Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Rich Lowry recounts how the McCain...

The 31 Republican senators who voted against Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation deserve credit for standing firmly against a nominee who has an unsound judicial philosophy and who failed to testify candidly about it. Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation was a virtual certainty from the moment that President Obama nominated her. The easy path for Senate Republicans — the path they took in 1993 and 1994 on President Clinton’s nominations of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — would have been to cave to that political reality and to jump on the Sotomayor bandwagon. Indeed,...

Under the country's Constitution, the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya was legal. Honduras, the tiny Central American nation, had a change of leaders on June 28. The country's military arrested President Manuel Zelaya -- in his pajamas, he says -- and put him on a plane bound for Costa Rica. A new president, Roberto Micheletti, was appointed. Led by Cuba and Venezuela (Sudan and North Korea were not immediately available), the international community swiftly condemned this "coup." Something clearly has gone awry with the rule of law in Honduras -- but it is not necessarily what you think. Begin with...

Unless something entirely unforeseen happens, confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will be a lovefest for the Democrats who run the Senate Judiciary Committee. There will be much talk about Sotomayor's historic opportunity to become the first Hispanic on the Court, about her inspiring background, and about the sterling qualifications she would bring to the job. Sotomayor will have the majority party strongly on her side, and odds are things will end happily for her. For some Republicans, however, it will be hard to avoid thinking back a few years, to a confirmation hearing that didn't end happily...

We are told by the likes of Schumer and Obama that to oppose the nomination of Sotomayor is to "spew nonsense." As if asking the right questions of a nominee is not responsible, patriotic and vital. Miguel Estrada was a talented Hispanic nominee for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals who was opposed vehemently in 2003 by these same Democrats, in part because he was Hispanic, and {shudder} might have someday become the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. But is not a flaming liberal! { At Estrada’s confirmation hearing, Schumer called him “a stealth candidate, flying under the radar, heading...

Credit Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal for knocking the wind out of Barack Obama and his cohort of empathetic Democrats. In probably the most damaging essay to appear regarding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the high court, Strassel reminds Americans that Obama and the Democrats opposed Bush judicial appointments for the same reasons they are now supporting Sotomayor. For example, Democrats like Chuck Schumer recently warned that Republicans opposing the Hispanic Sotomayor would do it “at their peril.” Chuck Schumer, however, vilified Miguel Estrada, President Bush’s 2002 nomination to the D.C. Circuit court, and called him "a...

Estrada's nomination for a federal judgeship set off alarm bells among Democrats. There is a group of left-leaning organizations -- People for the American Way, NARAL, the Alliance for Justice, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the NAACP, and others -- that work closely with Senate Democrats to promote Democratic judicial nominations and kill Republican ones. They were particularly concerned about Estrada. In November, 2001, representatives of those groups met with Democratic Senate staff. One of those staffers then wrote a memo to Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin, informing Durbin that the groups wanted to stall Bush nominees, particularly three they...

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Wednesday failed for a fourth time to break a Democratic filibuster thwarting a vote on President Bush's nomination of Miguel Estrada for a federal appeals court. Republicans need 60 votes to end the filibuster and then a majority to approve Estrada for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Their latest effort again fell short, this time by a 55-44 vote. snip Republicans have accused Democrats of treating Estrada unfairly because he is a conservative Hispanic.