Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Merging elections has hidden costs

Pan Han-shen 潘翰聲

On Tuesday, the Central Election Commission (CEC) decided to combine the presidential and legislative elections next year. This violates the Constitution by depriving small political parties of their right to run for the presidency. It also increases tensions between the two main parties, while not really producing any cost savings.

Recklessly deciding the nation’s mid to long-term power distribution based on ill-considered responses to opinion poll results instead of rational communication and persuasion seriously hurts democracy. As the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) compete for the presidency, these two giant elephants are trampling on small parties, hampering the development of pluralist democracy.

The ugly face of misogyny

Taipei Times Editorial

It’s often hard to feel sorry for politicians because one day’s victim can turn around and be equally offensive to someone else the next. However, it has to be acknowledged that female politicians the world over have a tougher time than their male counterparts.

If they are not married, their sexual preferences are queried or they are ridiculed for not being able to find a partner. Married or not — and with or without children — their maternal instincts are mocked, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, among others, can attest. Either way, they are challenged as men rarely are for putting their career over or before a partner and family.

Government starts to sound like PRC

Taipei Times Editorial

Western academics being told they deserve condemnation for interfering in a country’s internal affairs after they criticize what they believe might be an abuse of power by the government is something that is usually associated with China. When US government officials or professors accuse China of abusing human rights by arresting dissenters or squelching opposition with supposedly “legal” means, Chinese authorities either refer to them as ignorant foreigners who don’t understand the specific requirements of running the Middle Kingdom, or they accuse them of seeking to denigrate China for political purposes.

Is the Ma Government Blowing Smoke to Cover its Tracks? What is it Hiding? Part 1

Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

With less than a year to go before elections, the Ma government is claiming that there are some 36,000 missing documents that are unaccounted for between the Chen turnover of administration in 2008 and the present time 2011. They claim this is not political but their explanations are lame. Picture the following.

Let us say you work for the government or even for a major corporation and you leave your office or position in 2008; now some three years later you are facing accusations, not that you have, but that you may have not adequately accounted for all documents, classified information etc. from 3 years ago. When would the natural time have been to bring this up, three years ago when matters would be fresh in the mind of both you and your staff or three years later?

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