Election round up

Doctors urge public to forgive Villar

After getting the ire of Filipino nurses, senatorial candidate Cynthia Villar is invoking the Lenten season and the help of doctors to salvage her sagging popularity.

The Philippine Medical Association (PMA) on Saturday urged the public to forgive Team PNoy senatorial candidate Cynthia Villar for her remarks about Filipino nurses for which she was roundly criticized.

PMA vice president Leo Olarte called for compassion and sobriety in the matter, especially after Villar,  apologized for having offended nurses.

“I truly am sorry for having offended the feelings of your members. It was never my intention to belittle anyone, least of all the valiant members of the nursing profession,” Villar had said in a letter to the Philippine Nurses Association.

Villar got into hot water after she was asked by former Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Solita Monsod in an election forum about her alleged intervention in favor of nursing school owners that resulted in substandard nursing schools being allowed to continue operating back in 2005.

She told Monsod that nurses did not need to finish their course since they only wanted to become “room nurses” or caretakers. Her comment was swiftly criticized on social networking sites.

“What I was trying to say was that nursing students affected by the CHEd closure order several years ago deserved concrete and better career and academic options other than just the abrupt closure of the institutions that they were enrolled in,” Villar said./Inquirer.net

New  Commissioner told to prove critics wrong

After reviewing its records, the Commission on Elections found an existing case against MakabangkitLanto for alleged coercion of the Board of Election Inspectors in Lanao del Sur, Comelec Chair Sixto Brillantes Jr. said yesterday.

“The pending case cannot stop him especially since his case is still in the investigation stage, wherein [his] guilt has not been established yet,” he said.

UNA senatorial bet Cagayan Rep. Jack Enrile is keeping an open mind on the appointment of Lanto for his alleged ties to Senator Franklin Drilon and a 1994 election fraud case.

Sardillo has declined her appointment, posing yet one more complication in President Benigno Simeon Aquino III’s race to fill up two vacancies in the election body ahead of an election ban presidential presidential appointment that kicks on March 29.

“It’s up to the new Comelec commissioners to prove their critics wrong. They should be beholden to the people and not to the appointing authority who named them to their present posts,”  Enrile said in a statement sent to Cebu Daily News.

Questions on Lanto’s integrity surfaced after  news reports about the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal unseating him as Lanao del Norte congressman for election fraud.

While incoming Lanto is fending off in public a so-called “orchestrated move” to discredit him because of a 20-year-old poll fraud case against him.

After the Palace said Friday that it was reviewing its vetting process in light of the Lanto controversy, it announced on Saturday that it accepted Sardillo’s declining her appointment.

Sardillo and Lanto were to assume the two Comelec posts left vacant by the retirement last month of Commissioners Rene Sarmiento and Armando Velasco. Inquirer