The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) recently ridiculed the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) legislative nominees for seeking to play down ties with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), implying that Ma had perhaps become a dead weight on votes.
On Thursday, each KMT legislative candidate received a notice from the KMT Culture and Communications Committee about subsidizing nominees putting up outdoor billboards — under the condition they have a picture of both Ma and his running mate, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義).
To tie the legislative and presidential candidates together and create a winning atmosphere, the KMT has asked its legislative nominees to put up billboards with pictures of Ma, Wu and the legislative nominee, sources said.
Photo: CNA
According to sources, the legislative candidates should primarily focus on large billboards and use double-sided canvas ads as follow-ups, but the ads should be at least 200 cai (才), about 300cm by 600cm in size, and placed in highly populated areas, areas with high traffic volume or in other prominent places.
The sources said the advertisements and billboards should be set up prior to Nov. 30.
The subsidy standards state that every billboard or ad between 200 cai and 500 cai would be subsidized NT$5,000 and billboards or ads larger than 500 cai would be subsidized NT$10,000, the sources said, adding that after the billboards or ads go up, they have to be photographed as evidence by the local KMT headquarters. The request for subsidies must then be stamped and verified, and sent to the KMT Culture and Communications Committee for review.
After the application passes review, the committee would then pass it to the party’s Administration Committee, which would then disburse the funding to local party headquarters to give to the nominees, the source said.
DPP Legislator Pan Men-an (潘孟安) said that although the KMT was using its party assets as incentives for candidates to back Ma, many of the legislative nominees in central and southern Taiwan were not going to take up the offer and would take their chances own their, rather than be pulled down with Ma.
The KMT nominees were cutting ties with the president, as Ma’s failing policies have become dead weight on voter confidence, Pan said.
This marks a vast difference from when KMT legislators fought over who would get to have their pictures taken with Ma and having him canvass for votes with them for the 2008 legislative elections, Pan said.
The KMT nominees even then had raised doubts over the legitimacy of opponents using photographs with Ma who were not within the pan-blue camp proper, Pan said.
The election campaign this year is different, as the Ma administration tying the presidential and legislative elections together was a ploy to get legislative candidates to root for Ma while campaigning for themselves, Pan said, adding that the pan-blue camp is worried that if the candidates purposefully keep their distance from the president, it would go badly for Ma’s re-election bid.
Sources within the KMT said that the party’s efforts to consolidate the presidential and legislative elections were not viewed upon favorable by certain candidates in central and southern Taiwan, or other areas where the DPP has an advantage.
The party should let the nominees have their own space and not sacrifice individual legislative candidates for the presidential election, the sources said, adding that nobody wanted their hard work in the local areas to be overshadowed by the central government.
TRANSLATED BY JAKE CHUNG, STAFF WRITER
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching