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?

I just received my electronic version of Medicare & You. On the second page of the document, it says

Now available for e-Reader

Visit www.medicare.gov/publications to download a digital version of this handbook to your e-Reader. You can get the same important information that’s included in the printed version in an easy‑to‑read format that you can take anywhere you go. This new option is available for the iPad, Nook, Sony e‑Reader, Kindle, and all other e-Reader devices.

At the time of this posting in my blog, you get a run-around if you use this link.  The only thing you can get is the PDF version from which you clicked on the link.

I found out that the ebook version will not be available until mid-October.

I got this information by having an online chat with a Medicare agent.  She suspected that the version I sought was just not available yet.  She told me to call an agent on the phone to escalate the issue of the ebook version not being available.

The person on the phone did a little research after I described the problem again.  She was the one that gave me the mid-October date.

For all you software/website geniuses out there, how much effort do you think it would have taken to make the website tell you that the ebook version was not available when you clicked on the link to get the ebook version?  This feature would be as opposed to the current “feature” that you just get taken back to the same page that will give you the PDF version with no explanation of what is going on.

Now weigh the cost of fixing the web site compared to handling just my tying up an agent in an online chat and another agent on the telephone to get the answer that could have been put on the website.  Even if there aren’t thousands of people like me who will contact Medicare to find out how to solve the problem, the cost of handling just my call alone is probably more than the cost of making the website give out this information.

Caroline Kennedy gives a perfect description of some of the reasons why I support Elizabeth Warren. She could do so much in the Senate to help correct what has gone wrong in this country over the last 30 or so years.

Of course Elizabeth Warren cannot fix our problems of government by herself. It requires a President who is working to move the country in the same direction, more legislators who are pushing in the same direction, and it requires an active and vocal citizenry to keep reminding the opposition what the mandate is.

Here is a radio ad from the Elizabeth Warren campaign.

I guess that is the risk Scott Brown thought he could take. He thought he could lie and get away with it. His TV ad is very cute. It shows The Boston Globe article, and the ad highlights certain words that are actually in the article. However, the technique is just like cutting out words from a newspaper to create a ransom note. The words were never put together that way in the article to mean what Brown’s ad pretend that they mean.

The ethics Scott Brown is showing is about on a level of someone who would put together a ransom note from words clipped out of the newspaper.

When Scott Brown said during the debate that Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of her role in the asbestos case was laughable, I would have said to Brown.

“What is laughable is that a man who claims to be a lawyer could read the court documents and misunderstand them so badly that he would come away with an interpretation that is exactly the opposite of what is in the documents.”

When no one thought we could take on the big banks and win, Elizabeth Warren did it. She exposed the tricks in credit cards and mortgages, and led the fight to create a new consumer agency to hold the big banks accountable. President Obama calls her “one of the fiercest advocates for the middle class.” When everybody else backs down, Elizabeth stands up for people.

Then there is the other candidate who was a lawyer for banks who issued mortgages. Did he help create some of those tricks in the mortgage papers?

When asked to name his model Supreme Court Justice, Scott Brown named anti-choice conservative Antonin Scalia.

One measure of a debate outcome could be the fodder it provides for political ads. By this measure, perhaps Elizabeth Warren did a lot better than I gave her credit for.

CNN has the article Fact check: Are half of ‘green’ energy firms helped by stimulus out of business?

The Department of Energy proudly touts that the 2009 stimulus authorized $90 billion “in government investments and tax incentives to lay the foundation for the clean energy economy of our future.”

But not all that money has been spent, and not all of it — in fact, not even half of it — is being directed to upstart green businesses.
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It is fair to say that the 2009 stimulus authorized $90 billion for green energy, as Romney asserted. Whether or not one terms these as “breaks” is subjective, and one shouldn’t assume that all the funds went to specific businesses like Solyndra.

Most of the large projects that benefited from the Department of Energy loan program remain in operation — contrary to Romney’s assertion that “almost half” of them had closed.

This is another example  of Romney’s claims that just do not add up.  In my previous post, Romney’s Magic Plans, I pointed out why it is easy to have a plan that sounds great if you don’t insist that it be feasible.  Another analogy is that Romney is more like the snake oil salesmen that used to travel the country with their medicine shows – a little entertainment and then a hard sell of fake cure-alls.

I must admit, Romney is pretty good at it.  He did build himself a quarter billion dollar fortune selling his medicine to the “investment” world.

Remember that Mitt Romney made his private sector fortune by promising to take over a company, cut its expenses, improve its profits, make fortunes for its investors, and  save the company from bankruptcy.

His secret plan that he applied almost every time was to borrow money to take over the company, strip out and sell all its valuable assets, fire the workers, steal from the pension funds, steal from the health care funds, load the company with all the debt that the temporarily improved cooked books showed, and walk away with a fortune for himself.

The employees lost their jobs and their pensions and their health care, the people who lent the company money lost everything when the company went bankrupt, and all the investors that bought shares to buy Romney’s stake to take the company public again lost their shirts.

Romney’s whole career is about selling people magic solutions.  Magic solutions always sound nicer than real solutions.  The reality in life is that there is no magic.  In the end, the books have to balance, the math has to work out, and when someone steals, someone else loses.

I accidentally discovered that when I tried posting this comment on Politico, that it was secretly  accessing your Facebook account.  It never occurred to me that Politico was doing that.  I thought that signing into my Politico account was enough.  This time I accessed Politico before I separately logged into Facebook. That’s when I discovered that you could not post a comment without also being logged into Facebook.  I guess Politico will just have to do without my brilliant insights.

I may also have to be more careful about logging out of Facebook before I leave a Facebook page and navigate to some other place.

Women’s Voices – Join Women for Obama.

It’s up to all of us to make sure women’s voices are heard in this election. Watch women speak about what’s at stake and why they’re supporting President Obama, then help spread the word by clicking on your favorite graphic below and sharing this video with your friends on Facebook.