The Real News Network has an interview with Larry Wilkerson.

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”

So you have to look at much more—a much wider array of very complex issues in order to understand why someone’s taking the negotiating position they’re taking. We call it empathy. We call it being—in the military, being able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and look at the problem you’re negotiating from their perspective. Paul, we simply have lost the ability to do that in this country.

I am glad to hear a confirmation of what I had always thought about why Saddam Hussein could not allow an unambiguous demonstration of his lack of weapons. He had to at least preserve some doubt in the mind of the Iranians that he might actually still have some weapons. That would keep them from attacking him. Unfortunately this very same ambiguity is what caused the Americans to attack him.

I had this figured out at the time this was going on. There does not seem to be anything that Saddam Hussein could have done that would have assured him that he wouldn’t be attacked by one side or the other. Maybe he consciously decided that an attack by the US was the least bad thing that could happen.

In the Presidential debate, Mitt Romney claimed that gasoline prices today are twice what they were when President Obama took office.

From gasbuddy.com I was able to learn the truth.

This graph shows that the gasoline prices dropped precipitously from $4.12 a gallon in August 2008 to $1.61 in December 2008.  If you remember, the economy was in free fall at that time.  People were cutting back on their gasoline purchases so that they could afford to eat.  Is this how you want Mitt Romney to lower the gasoline prices?  Or would you be willing to trade gasoline at $3.87 as opposed to $4.12 before the economic crash in order to have even a slow economic recovery?