Here we go again: GOP criticizes Obama inaction on Syria | The Cable.

Two GOP senators opened another line of criticism of President Barack Obama‘s approach to the Middle East on Thursday, this time calling on the administration to more strongly criticize the Syrian government for its deadly crackdown on popular demonstrations and begin engaging the Syrian opposition.

Government violence against protesters in Syria is escalating, with security forces reportedly killing 15 people on Wednesday during a raid on a mosque in the southern city of Deraa. Some reports put the night’s death toll at 37 or more. The State Department put out a statement condemning the deaths and issued a 90-day travel alert on Thursday that warned Americans about the violence surrounding the protests.

Take a deep breath before you read this next part, and sit down if your hypocrisy meter exploding makes you dizzy…

“The Syrian people must know that the United States stands with them against the brutal Assad regime.  We can ill afford another timid embrace of a democratic uprising,” the senators said in a Thursday statement. “We urge the President, Secretary Clinton and Ambassador Ford to publicly condemn the murders committed by the Assad dictatorship and to demonstrate their support for the Syrian people.”

By invoking Ambassador Robert Ford, Kyl and Kirk are calling for the administration to make good on its argument that the United States needed an ambassador in Damascus to have maximum influence with the Syrian government. Kyl and others Republicans held up the Ford nomination for 10 months because they saw the appointment of any ambassador as a reward to the Syrian regime, and they wanted the administration to more clearly spell out its Syria policy.

The president used a recess appointment for Ford to circumvent the Senate confirmation process. Kyl and Kirk now want Ford to use his perch to condemn the Syrian regime’s crackdown.

“Ambassador Ford should begin a sustained campaign of outreach from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to the Syrian opposition movement,” they said.

[full story]

So now that they gameplan is laid out (and Newt probably did it best, with a complete turnabout in two weeks time), here’s round 2….

BTW, did you catch that overload…stall the guy getting appointed, complain how the President did it, then quickly turn around and demand he be more effective at his job, which now seems to have turned from Ambassador to active Revolutionary.

I doubt Obama will do much on Syria at this point.  The international support won’t be there as quick, nor as obvious, and it won’t be a case where someone who was working toward democracy recently (Qadaffy [sp] and his brood  had been playing relatively nice since 2003) suffered such a dramatic backlash into violent oppression.

People ask a lot, “why not doing everything all the time?”  I really hope this isn’t a serious question, or that people realize there are very good and simple answers to it (the question is not the rhetorical genius many who use it think it is).  There are always limits on what one can do and what one can accomplish and what resources are on hand to accomplish it and how much time one has to work with.

In the Libya case, it seems pretty evident that the committment/reward ratio is relatively high (one would hope..at this point it appears that way…the rebels want democracy badly enough to fight and die for it and Khaddaffi’s [sp] forces can be stopped with little risk).  In Syria it looks far more like the Iraq version of the equation, requiring a much larger committment against a fully armed and ready foe, not a country already torn asunder by a people’s movement.

We’ll see how it plays out, but if these guys really want to go to war with Syria, how about playing it straight and sticking to your guns, if you will, for more than a fortnight?

This is a good one, as it can be a potential game-changer in a business that needs some serious game changing.

Google announced the news, hot on the heels of a Sprint Nexus S 4G rumor, in a blog posting that starts by putting the move in context: “Over time we’ve worked to bring an integrated Google Voice experience to your mobile device by building mobile apps, introducing Google Voice Lite, and most recently number porting. But we felt that ultimately, the most simple solution would be to partner with carriers to seamlessly integrate Google Voice with your mobile phone.”

Then Google revealed the killer news: “Today we’d like to share that we’ve teamed up with Sprint to do just that.”

How can this be? Existing cell phone operators make money by owning (some may say “nickel and dime-ing”) the entire space that their consumers operate in in terms of mobile communications: They own the cell towers, they organize how your phone calls get connected, they charge you for SMSs (which effectively cost them nothing, and return huge profits), they tell you when peak call rates apply, they decide how much you’ll pay and how much mobile data you can access at what speed. AT&T is even getting clever right now with people who jailbreak their iPhone to sidestep an exorbitant “tethering” fee that’s incurred if you want to use your officially un-jailbroken iPhone with its new Wi-Fi hotspot powers.

Google’s Voice system threatens this entire business ecosystem.

via Sprint Embraces Google Voice | Fast Company.

GV is a good step as we move from the POTS (plain old telephone system) into a largely IP based one, and get the cost savings, efficiency, and innovation that come along with it.    Being able to make “phone” calls on your [insert mobile device name here] should be trivial as long as you have decent bandwidth.

The s0-called “browser” war heated up again, with the release of Firefox 4 and IE 9.   So far Firefox is blowing IE out of the water, and for a very good reason (bolded below)…

Firefox, in contrast, continues to support Windows XP. Mozilla knew coming in that it would have a built-in advantage, based on Microsoft’s choice to support only the newer Windows Vista and 7.

“That’s a decision that they get to make, but it sure did surprise us, because the best metrics that we’ve got say 40 to 50 percent of the web is still on XP. That’s too big for us to just leave them behind,” said Johnathan Nightingale, the Firefox engineering director, in a recent interview.

Why no IE9 on XP? Microsoft’s reasoning is that browsers “should require the modern graphics and security infrastructure that have come along since 2001.” The company says in a statement that “Internet Explorer 9 is intended to be run on a modern operating system in order to build on the latest hardware and operating system innovations.”

via Technolog – Firefox 4 soars, thanks to Microsoft’s Luddite customers.

Got that?  XP is not a modern operating system, with modern graphics or security infrastructure…which is true…when running IE.

Running Firefox or Chrome on XP is not only faster than IE, but much, much safer.    As a long-time MS OS user, there has been no real reason for me to upgrade from a patched and fully functional XP box.

Bad juju on MS for making a silly decision, with even worse logic behind it.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday favored investors seeking to sue companies for failing to reveal adverse information about their products in a 9-0 ruling against a drug company that did not disclose its cold medicine was linked to a loss of smell.

The case involved Matrixx Initiatives and its over-the-counter Zicam Cold Remedy, which had been sold as a nasal spray and gel, and, according to the high court, had accounted for about 70% of Matrixx’s sales.

via Court sides with investors on disclosing drug reactions – USATODAY.com.

I know, I know, I was pretty flabbergasted too.  So now investors can sue to get information about companies are hiding, corporations do not have a right to “personal privacy”, and drug companies can continue to pay generic manufacturers not to compete against their blockbuster drugs.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Supreme Court let stand a ruling that drug companies can pay rivals to delay production of generic drugs without violating federal antitrust laws.

The justices refused to review a federal appeals court ruling that upheld the dismissal of a legal challenge to a deal between Bayer AG and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd’s Barr Laboratories. Bayer paid Barr to prevent it from bringing to market a version of the antibiotic drug Cipro.

..

The Federal Trade Commission has opposed such deals, saying they violate antitrust law and cost consumers an estimated $3.5 billion a year in higher prescription drug prices. It has supported legislation pending in Congress to prohibit such settlements, which it says have increased in recent years.

[full blurb]

So it looks like two steps forward and one step back.   I had always figured that competition from generics couple with the expiration of patent protection and mixing in twenty years would factor heavily in solving the “medicare crisis” (which is largely based on cost, which is increasingly coming from drugs).   Generics usually cost a small fraction of what the name brand drugs do.

Now the SCOTUS has essentially put its blessing on the idea that you can pay people not to compete with you…and that it’s not an anti-trust violation, despite the fact that a patent is itself a government approved monopoly (pretty much by definition).

I was hoping to see this business practice end  (since it seems very reminiscent of organized crime), but now I’d expect it to expand.

This started back here. {and continued here} You can read the back story on the who and the what there.

What happened since then…well…your humble host here on RPN is somewhat of a geek.    He’s pretty good with computers and what-not.   One of his part-time gigs, in college…now remember…this was back in the late 90’s…was doing what came to be called “SEO” for a small, very forward thinking firm.   It’s the concept of making certain websites appeal to search engines for certain search terms.    A couple years later, I blogged about a new search engine Google (this was right after a post about that new music search tool…Napster).  Later “SEO” and google became intertwined as a billion-dollar industry grew up around the practice.   Many of them PR firms…

Now…considering that RPN is something of an anti-PR firm, this is going to be a fun fight, should it continue.   Currently that first post I linked to above and the video which accompany it are the first non-b.s. pages (i.e. ones not done by the astro-turfing campaign) returned for search for their chosen astro-term on the bing/yahoo and the google respectively.  Note to others: bing/yahoo link to my blog post, google finds the youtube video a more compelling search result, take that with a ‘no evil’ grain of salt, if you will.

Which brings us to the whole “A-Hole” thing I mentioned in the title.   It’s a widely known fact that “random disinterested persons” on the internets are rarely that.  Especially on obscure blogs only the most enlightened of humans are barely aware of, if that.   But when one pops right up in the middle of the ointment like a nasty fly, things like this pop up to neutralize it.

Comment by Jack on March 21, 2011 6:20 pmRPN, you’re an a-hole. It doesn’t matter WHO is sponsoring the pushback. Eliminating the ability for credit card providers to charge decent rates on debit and credit card networks will result in rippling surcharges for consumers. Whether or not credit networks are making billions, they will always be seeking to increase their profits. If you cut their ability in one arena, they will seek to make it back in some other area, like the elimination of free checking (mostly at smaller banks). So basically, it’s governmental interference in a place where it’s not needed. The only “nutjob” in this arena is you.

Ouch, that one hurts “Jack”.   Curious points you’ve made here.  They all seem eerily similar to what the official Don’t Make Us Pay website says.

Let’s analyze this in detail, like I learned how back in the day (I’m like a Jedi that went Dark…only in the PR/Advertising world, those roles are reversed).

 It doesn’t matter WHO is sponsoring the pushback.

Yes, it does quite a bit.  ESPECIALLY when the word “us” is in the title.  Most PR campaigns want to set up an “us vs. them” dynamic, because “we” are always the good guys  (psychologically).

Eliminating the ability for credit card providers to charge decent rates on debit and credit card networks will result in rippling surcharges for consumers.

One PR firm’s “decent rates” are one RPN’s “obscene usury”.  How does it makes any sense at all to charge the same PERCENTAGE of a debit card transaction that is completely digital when the only difference between a $1,000 charge and $10 charge is the number of bits?   Yet nowadays, one of those nets the banks $10 and the other one $0.10.

That makes no sense.   Banks needs to play fair.  Not only that, but the current rates currently result in a “rippling surcharge for consumers” of about $450/family year, that proverbial “dollar a day”.   This is expected to double in the next five years as a rapidly increasing percentage of our economy goes digital, and people only want to spend their own money (debit) and not someone else’s (credit) money (a big and very important distinction).

“Rippling surcharges” will now reflect something close to the actual services offered by the banks.  Banks shouldn’t be trying to make billions of dollars just for giving you access to your own money.  That’s what they do as a bank, they aren’t a bank if they don’t do that.   Banks should be making money by making good loans, and good investments.   This is like a supermarket charging you more for charging you, having nothing to do with the service they actually offering (selling food/loans).  

 Whether or not credit networks are making billions, they will always be seeking to increase their profits.

Well, they currently are…making billions.  About $18 of them a year…in pure profit, just by charging people three times as much as it costs to access their own money.   Why do you think they keep paying out those huge bonuses?   They can lose a billion dollars a month on risky investments and still make a yearly profit.   Why do you think they were so willing to risk it all?   They had guaranteed profit.   A 1-2% tax on people accessing their own money.

If you cut their ability in one arena, they will seek to make it back in some other area, like the elimination of free checking (mostly at smaller banks).

It’s called “competition”.   Businesses offer varying services, and charge for them.   Giving you access to your own money is not a service banks should be charging for.  It’s highway robbery.  

So basically, it’s governmental interference in a place where it’s not needed.

No, this is “governmental interference*” precisely where it is needed.  As I’ll mention a third time, making billions of dollars by charging people to access their own money is not a sound, fair, or hopefully very soon legal practice.

—

* for those technical wonks, the Frank/Dodd Financial Reform Bill included a clause that ordered the Fed (of Ron Paul “End the Fed” fame) to set these debit interchange rates to something reasonable.  Seems some folks wanted banks to stop ripping them off, so that’s how it technically works.  BTW, the Fed also gives these same banks large loans from time to time, so they follow the rules, when told to do so.

In the totally improbable yet amusing match-up, Palin takes only 36 percent of independents to [Charlie Sheen’s] 41 percent, according to a Public Policy Polling survey out Thursday.

Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of Republicans — 84 percent — would choose Palin over Sheen if given the choice. But the poll underscores just how polarizing Palin has become, as she now sports astonishingly high negatives in most surveys.

President Barack Obama also has polarizing numbers, but would still swamp Sheen 57 percent to 22 percent among independents.

via Poll shows Charlie Sheen over Sarah Palin: Winning, duh! – Andy Barr – POLITICO.com.

I was *almost* hoping Palin would stick around long enough to make for some great lulz during the primaries, but now it looks like even that isn’t going to happen.