By BEHN FER. HORTALEZA, JR.

HE STRIKES you as a lovable, kindly bespectacled grandfather, the kind who would be playing with the apos and the little ones in the living room and at the yard and not a sage of the law who will be taking on an entire Establishment, if need be, to champion the rights of the downtrodden and disadvantaged.

But he is the Chief Justice of the Land, no mistake about it, sitting right there before a local group of journalists making his legally-spiced comments almost effortlessly and with a rather marked tone that left no doubt he will, like Voltaire, defend to the death anyone’s right to say his views whether these be pleasant or unpleasant.

Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno, looking sprightly for his age, was characteristically deliberate with his words in the earlier minutes of the press conference yesterday. But as the questions and discussions warmed up, he gave the local press boys a good glimpse of how the top administrator and dispenser of justice in the country will take his stand – firmly – when it comes to choosing between human rights over any establishment’s right.

Friend Jun Velasco of Bulletin Today, who had the foresight of texting me earlier to pose a question to the CJ because he couldn’t make it on time to the presscon, may have struck the right chord in Justice Puno when he asked (thru me) why the Supreme Court under the man’s watch has taken on an “activist stance” especially in the matter of the rash of extra-judicial killings in the country.

The Chief Magistrate was soon outlining a treatise on the right to life as a primordial right to be upheld at any time and under any clime. He argued his “case” so convincingly we knew that no external force on earth, however powerful and well-connected, can sway him ever from pursuing the light.

The country is proud to have such a man in its bosom.

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Sometime back, we heard this first-term Congresswoman Rachel Arenas on radio, lamenting, almost plaintively, how some bureaucratic figures at DILG and at the DBM have practically “robbed” her of her prerogative to use her congressional pork barrel the way she sees fit.

She gave us the impression she was lost in the labyrinth of the bureaucracy

This was soon after some “unkind news” circulated especially in her district, that she had favored Calasiao (in her own third district) over the other towns in her constituency by supposedly pouring out funds in the millions for some hand-held radios (she called these “walkie-talkies”) in Mayor Roy Macanlalay’s turf. This was over and above some rather nasty observations that she had not been seen around the district for quite a long time since her election victory.

It appears the neophyte congresswoman, for all her woes, has only herself to blame because, by her own admission, in that interview, she had left it to an assistant to follow things up about her projects with the DILG and DBM. As a result, if we got the story right, the money which was supposed to be used to pay for those ordered hand-held radios, got reverted to the general fund at the end of the year as a matter of course under accounting and auditing rules.

Now, aside from having been practically “prevented” from using her allocated funds for her own projects, she hasn’t a penny to pay for the Calasiao two-way radio sets that costs quite a fortune (did I hear P10 million?) and which may have already been delivered by this time. A double whammy, from the looks of it.

She’s in a tight fix, the lady.

Maybe, just maybe, that is why she’s been tailing GMA in her trips to Spain and now Switzerland to help her find a solution to her, uh, district headaches. Here’s wishing Ms. Rachel all the luck.

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Someone had better help the city jail in Bonuan – and fast – before Nature provides a natural escape route for the inmates and no one would end up to be blamed about it.

Newly-returned city jail warden Roque Constantino Sison III who was plucked from his San Carlos City post to replace sacked former city jail warden Nisperos here is facing a big challenge with the disturbing state of things at the beachside jail building.

Sison had enumerated a whole slew of security problems but the most disturbing of these is the heavily scoured portion of the jail wall at the rear that could result in its sudden crumbling. Now, everyone knows what that means to any group of people locked behind high walls and perhaps praying everyday for even the slimmest chance, either thru wily maneuvers or thru divine intervention, to be free.

If those inmates have ever read the Bible, why, they’d probably be trying to shout their lungs out to bring down the walls of Jericho when the guards aren’t looking or are sound asleep. Now, all they need to do is wait and pray that the waves batter the wall’s foundation more heavily till it collapses — and at long last, freedom!

Their “relief” of course will be Alipio’s and Alvin’s woe!

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By the way, whose funny idea was it, anyway, to build the city jail on sand and as close to the beach as it was back then?

He must have never reckoned with the power of the waves. Either that or he thought the city would be saving on bath water for the inmates, duh?

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SAID AND DONE: Pare Diony Espiritu of Alpha Press, that cool and unassuming exponent of entrepreneurship this part of Luzon (he owns the Alpha Printing Press) staged an amazing feat of sort when he was able to bring to Dagupan the Chief Justice, Reynato Puno, no less, to speak before his group of Full Gospel Businessmen. Every association imaginable, including those of lawyers and judges have always cherished having the Chief Magistrate as speaker for their occasions but none ever managed to bring him in.. How’d Diony do it? The answer to that perhaps is, quite simply, this: A good man deserves (to have) another. That is, in the matter of social invitations… I myself thought he was pulling my leg when Diony sought my help in the conduct of a press conference for the visiting Supreme Court chief and said he was having a big man for a guest. After last night’s successful hosting of Justice Puno, Diony proved himself that silent waters really run deep… We might just miss the traditional courtesy call on Guvnor Amado T. Espino tomorrow; January 28 — ; too early (at 7 a.m.) for a Sunday presswork-beaten editor to rise and shine. But we wish the province’s father all the best as he tries to give flesh to his avowed ambition to be the “best governor the province ever had.”…Present group of city mayors in the country have all the reason to cry unfair over the move in Congress to set aside the qualification provision in the grant of cityhood to aspiring municipalities. Their song, to corrupt the title of a popular ditty in the late ‘70s, is “My IRA keeps getting smaller every day.” The move to disregard the requirements on population and income as prequalifications for a town to become a city will result in what League of Cities president Ben-Hur Abalos described as “a tsunami of overnight cities” that will further shrink the sharing of the IRA pie A disaster to the current cabal of cities.