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• Legislative Speaker Wang wants ECFA to be reviewed by the Legislative Yuan but the first step is drawing up criteria for its supervision. Premier Wu also recently claimed that the Legislature would be able to reject the deal but I'm skeptical that the formal powers to do so will be implemented in time ..

• Meanwhile, MAC and SEF are busy asking Taishang in China to act as ECFA cheerleaders for the Doubting Thomas crowd back home .. and so it is that business leads the way. If a policy makes the CEOs money then it is 'good' and if not it is 'bad', the public or any political or social or moral principle standing in the way be damned.

• President Ma again promotes absentee voting, though now more insistently - the rationale being that it is to protect the constitutional and human rights of Taiwan's electorate, something he has been renowned for since his police snatched and destroyed the ROC flag to please Chen Yunlin.

Interior Minister Jiang Yi-huah said the ministry has adopted a "more stable, fair" approach on absentee voting and intends to implement it gradually.

The government's plan would allow "transfer voting, " enabling election workers, military personnel, students and inmates to cast ballots in constituencies in which they are working, studying or serving sentences instead of in the electoral districts where their households are registered.

The ministry hopes to implement the proposal for the 2012 presidential election, Jiang said.

Jiang stressed, however, that absentee voting by mail will not be allowed, meaning Taiwanese businessmen in China and other citizens living abroad would still be required to return home to cast their ballots.

This is a potential double edged sword which I'm guessing the KMT is hoping will always fall in their favour ... but could equally as not fall against them.

• Great editorial from Taiwan News on Ma's rewinding of the clock on Taiwanese popular sovereignty and democracy by calling Taiwan a region under the constitution. Fact check for Ma: the 1946 ROC Constitution doesn't mention Taiwan. It is only a mere statute that claims Taiwan as such and it is one the could be easily repealed by a Legislature with sufficient intent. Here's the money quotes:

Frankly speaking, the presidential office's position that the ROC government has sovereignty over the China mainland, presumably including both the PRC and Mongolia, because their interpretation of the ROC Constitution says so crosses the border between the ludicrous into the sphere of the self-delusional.

Ironically, former president Lee devoted considerable efforts over his 12 years in office to gradually weaning the KMT from the myth imposed on Taiwan by the late KMT dictator Chiang Kai-shek that the KMT-ruled ROC was the "sole legitimate government" of all "China," a fiction that provided the ideological pillars for 38 years of martial law rule.

Ma's shift from "two countries" to "two sides" is not merely an ideological reprise to the authoritarian Chiang era but deliberately aims to blur the lines of distinction between Taiwan and the PRC as legally constituted states whose sovereignty does not overlap.

• Apple Daily rips into President Ma again, this time for claiming to have learnt about the resignation of Taipei Magistrate Chou Hsi-wei from the newspapers:

We are worried about whether the president is indeed stupid, or whether he thinks it is everyone else who is stupid. We would prefer it to be the latter, because if not, then it means he is being kept in the dark.

If a president rules the country by reading the newspaper, then it would be better to seek a newspaper chief to serve as president.

Some have mocked Ma on the Internet that he only knew he was elected president after reading about it in the paper and that the first step when China invades Taiwan will be to destroy all newspapers so that Ma will know nothing about it.

• Native Hawaiians to establish their own Government. Good news except that it will be a government whose membership is based on race - and we know where that can go. Better still would be an entirely free and independent Hawaii.

• Australian aboriginal programme to cure social ills known as 'the intervention' gets harsh condemnation from the United Nations special rapporteur on indigenous human rights, James Anaya.

• Mike Turton on Taiwan's recovering economy.

• Now it appears that the Atlantic also has a growing repository of floating plastic waste. The Earth: a giant human rubbish tip.