Here at P+P, we are constantly re-thinking the best ways to organize content and deliver a reading experience outside the punditry and beltway-blogger echo chamber. As such, we’d like to offer up a new permanent Monday fixture that will throw out some hand-picked stories from the weekend for your reading pleasure, along with some brief news analysis for that tangy P+P twinge. Enjoy!

My wife recently endured the pharmaceutical gauntlet with a failed Yaz experiment and a system-ravaging run with the mega-antibiotic Cipro, so this skewering of Big Pharma that got a ton of run on Digg struck particularly close to home. Like any debate worth having, it’s complex and too easy to generalize. Sure, many people out there take many drugs that save their lives or keep them stable without any severe side effects. It’s no secret, however, that Big Pharma is rivaled only by oil, tobacco, and Israel when it comes to lobby power in Washington. No other country in the world markets drugs the way we do in the US. One has to step back and wonder, as noted in the blog entry linked above, how is it legal to market anti-depressants wide instead of administering only under strict psychiatric recommendation? Doesn’t that constitute baiting people who just may be having a bad week? When money changes hands between doctors, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies, aren’t the best interests of the patient lost somewhere in the capitalist shuffle?

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As I was reading the LA Times’ news analysis piece of Bush’s Middle East tour, a quote from Bush directed at Arab nations struck me as pretty preposterous, even by his standards:

“America is deeply concerned about the plight of political prisoners in this region, as well as democratic activists who are intimidated or repressed, newspapers and civil society organizations that are shut down and dissidents whose voices are stifled.”

He added, “I call on all nations in this region to release their prisoners of conscience, open up their political debate and trust their people to chart their future.”

It’s just really, really tough to listen to Bush as he parades around the Middle East in a last-ditch effort at affecting some sort of positive change in the region. There is factual basis to what he saying. But to say this to the faces of 1,500 people at the World Economic Forum in Egypt, shortly after he proclaimed “Happy Independence Day” in Hebrew before Israeli parliament, is rife with problems. There is the issue of preaching peace when you clearly show favoritism to a nation equally as culpable in the violence plaguing the region. There is the hypocrisy of demanding the release of prisoners of conscience when the US continues to operate Guantanamo Bay. And there is the continually misguided view of the Arab populace as a people ready, willing, and able to embrace Western-style Democracy with open arms and favorable results despite clear failures in Palestine and Iraq. To his credit, he said “we must stand with the Palestinian people, who have suffered for decades and earned the right to a homeland of their own,” but as always, actions speak louder than words.

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Meanwhile, Sen. Barack Obama, fresh off a too little, too late endorsement from Sen. John Edwards that (with the gift of 20/20 hindsight) could have ended this primary a long time ago in the blue-collar battleground states, defended himself against a not-so-thinly-veiled foreign policy attack by President Bush, the Washington Post reports.

Obama used a speech that was otherwise focused on rural issues to respond to Bush’s comments to the Israeli Knesset on Thursday. The president said that “some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” He went on to compare a willingness to meet with “terrorists and radicals” to the pre-World War II “appeasement” of Nazi Germany.

Of major significance here is not the current admnistration’s “who me?” denial that this was aimed squarely at Obama, but the fact that it sparked a debate between Obama and McCain that left one former first lady silent on the sidelines. Also significant in that media attention is finally shifting back toward the issues people actually care about, instead of the gaffe-ology of recent weeks.

Taking it back to the comment made by Bush, Chris Matthews does a much better job than I ever could dismantling the scenario:

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Over at CNET’s News.com, they present two dueling articles on the ever-popular social networking site Facebook (WhoseSpace?). First is a report from Santa Clara where the VP of Marketing for Facebook claimed that his employer is now the “cable company of The Net.”

His sell: Facebook is the next-generation platform of the Internet that can turn any ambitious entrepreneur (with the right application) into an overnight success. He rattled off the stats to back up the argument.

The average development time, he said, for an entrepreneur to build a Facebook application is between two and 15 weeks, according to a self-reported survey of its developer community. The average number of employees to make those applications: between one and five people. And about 33 percent of Facebook application makers reported profits of up to $500,000 a month. Finally, at least one-quarter of the applications running on Facebook have 100,000 active daily users.

Kind of bizarre to parallel yourself with the likes of Comcast and Adelphia, but the numbers are staggering nonetheless, backing up his claims of obliterating the barrier to entry for entrepreneurial minds.

The other entry has a decidedly different angle with the title “Amateur hour at Facebook. What gives?” In a nutshell: Facebook has decided to block Google’s Friend Connect software, which their way of integrating social network user profiles into search results. While Facebook’s VP of Marketing is doing a bang-up job selling them as virtual sliced bread, it seems their PR department is holing themselves away, pretending this whole mess will go away while Google paints a halo over its head. Growing pains are a bitch, eh?

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And as the last little roundup, a few nuggets of off-the-wall goodness. The NY Times ran a few pieces of Barack Obama original poetry from 1981. The dude wasn’t half bad! For all of you camera junkies out there, CameraPorn (it’s a benign site with very NSFW name…trust me) ran their “60 Photography Links You Can’t Live Without” to great fanfare.

And what would a roundup be without a little video mental floss:

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Tags: big pharma, egypt, george w bush, israel, photography, social networks, world economic forum