The Great Gatsby

My sister says that The Great Gatsby was a novel that had a real influence on her growing up, she and a buddy would observe a fancy house giving a wild, noisy party across the water and they'd feel like they were observing one of Gatsby's parties. And yes, the mix of 1920s music and modern hip-hop in the movie certainly makes the 2013 version timeless.

As to the philosophical question at the heart of the book, “Does wealth help you get the girl?” I had a serious crush, let's call her Brunhilde (She was of German descent), many years ago. She turned me down because she already had a boyfriend. He was wealthier, but that wasn't really the point. She felt that he was more mature than I was as I was still trying to get my degree whereas he was long out of college and progressing in his career. So I never saw Brunhilde or other women as gold-diggers or people who insisted on fancy dinners as the price of their company. They're looking for guys who are at least reasonably successful in material terms. Because of today's crappy economy, having a career or even just having money that's a bit beyond what I need just to get by on is a hard thing to have.

Do I pine after Brunhilde? Would I do as Gatsby did and go after her with money, however I obtained that money? Nah, her boyfriend was way ahead of me in maturity way back when and the two of them (Did they stay together? No idea) have probably only gotten more so over the years. I don't think my attraction to her was something that was irreproducible, I don't think it was a one-time thing. There aren't very many women that I'll develop a similarly strong attraction to, but they're out there. If I ever get to a comfortable level of wealth, I'll then proceed along Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to the point where I'm ready to move up to romance.

TV Shows

My shows generally fall into three categories, news, historical-type fiction and outlandish fantasy. Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow are news shows that I don't tape, I watch them in an “Appointment TV” style, that is, I get to the TV when the show starts, watch the program, often channel-jumping during commercials, then at the end of the show, I turn off the TV and go on to something else.

The Good Wife and The Client List are historical-fiction type shows. Good Wife covers various aspects of the legal profession from within a fictionalized context. The individual, specific actions, the details, are pretty trustworthy. We can be sure they're based on real institutions and events. It's the overall framework , the personal details about the characters and the context that's fictionalized. In one episode, our protagonist Alicia (Julianne Margulies) is sulking because she was appointed as a partner in her firm to fulfill a financial need on the part of the firm, not so much because she was an amazing lawyer. Her senior partner Diane (Christine Baranski) tells her to get over it because Diane was appointed as a partner for similar reasons. The lesson here is to take promotions for whatever reasons they're offered. Don't get so pure that you get in the way of your own career. Client List covers massage parlors that “give their customers a little extra” and cover all sorts of issues that arise from being a sex worker. A continuing, recurring problem is “What does one do with all of that money?” Obviously, that's problem a lot of us would like to have, but the show demonstrates that it can be a real logistical problem to deal with piles and piles of cash and to still maintain a cover. Our protagonist Riley (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is speaking with some policemen about her husband's legal problems and one of them loudly notes that the clothes she wears are not exactly of the standard for those of modest means. He notes that they're a bit more expensive than one would expect from an ordinary housewife. Riley gets through the encounter, but the point is made, that someone with a lot of extra, illicit money, has to be careful how she spends it. In both cases, the show are generally successful at being both informative about their subjects and good dramas.

Grimm, Merlin, Nikita, Beauty & The Beast, Vampire Diaries, Once Upon A Time, Lost Girl and Being Human are outlandish fantasies. They all have explicitly stated rules for what their characters can and can't do, but all of those rules go well beyond what regular people can do. Being Human is a show where a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost all share a house in the city. One of the premises is that if a vampire drinks werewolf blood, it gives him what essentially amounts to an immediate and really bad case of food poisoning, so a young werewolf (Lydia Doesburg) who was staying in the house decided to temporarily disable the vampire (Sam Huntington) by putting some of her blood into the vampire's usual refrigerated supply and to then attack him when he was weakened. Our vampire prevails, of course, but it's a real challenge for him to do so.

Now, I think I can be reasonably certain that this is a problem that will never occur to me. That's the fun of it. Someone once said the whole point of watching disaster movies is to compare the problems of the characters there with those of your own life and to comfort yourself that “Well, at least I don't have to hide my magical abilities from my king (Merlin) while trying to defend my kingdom from all manner of mystical foes.” The show Two Broke Girls doesn't interest me because I'm far too often actually broke myself, so it's far too real to me to be of any interest to me as a TV show. It's more amusing to follow storylines like those of Nikita's secret organization that undertakes covert missions in the manner of a superhero team or Vampire Diaries that examines the many problems of vampires, witches and werewolves that regular people aren't even aware of (A marvelous scene occurred when the werewolf (Michael Trevino) comes to the conclusion that a young woman he's sweet on is more than human “You're a werewolf, too!” She (Candice Accola) replies that, well, uh, sort of. She's actually a vampire, but yeah, he's right, she's not human). By the way, it seems to me that Grimm, Once Upon A Time and Lost Girl all more or less take off from the idea presented in the comic-book series Fables, which also freely pulls in characters and storylines from a wide variety of fables and legends near and far. Of course, that also borrows from a lengthy tradition of freely plundering the past to get stories, as Beauty & the Beast is a direct continuation of an old legend, just as the comic-book Thor is a direct continuation of old Norse legends.

Update: Very interesting! Grimm and Vampire Diaries both improved their ratings this past season.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Quite good! Lots and lots of close calls. Kirk succeeds in bringing everyone back alive time and again, but he has to cut a few corners and ignore a few orders to do so. Villain is quite formidable and takes quite a few really hard punches from 

Kirk (Played by Chris Pine) without much reaction. We immediately recognize him once he's named, of course. As with any other prequel, we know that certain things will end up a certain way, so my reaction at one point was “Oh, man, how are they gonna fix THIS one!?!?” Interestingly, Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Spock (Zachary Quinn) appear to have a romantic relationship, a relationship that we know doesn't survive into the series, so that's a story we know we'll see in a  sequel.

The Independent blanches at the tacky capital city of the Federation. The reviewer remarks on the London of the film: “Our capital in the 23rd century now resembles Dubai on steroids – thank God we won’t be around to see it.” I always wondered, seeing the original series, how the citizens of the Federation related to the Enterprise and its crew. The movie doesn't add much to what very little we know.

Update: The Rachel Maddow blog compares Admiral Marcus to Dick Cheney. Has some mild spoilers.

The Benghazi situation

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Jon Stewart's Daily Show covers the Benghazi "scandal" where no one has ever identified what was being covered up or what the Obama Administration ever hoped to achieve with it. As this piece reviews the three events, Watergate, Iran-Contra and yes, even Whitewater, all had some discernable motivation behind them. In each case, there was a good reason for the Nixon, Reagan and Clinton administrations to want to carry them out. In the case of Benghazi, the actions took place in early September of last year, here it is May and no one has yet defined exactly what the Obama Administration was attempting to achieve. Rachel Maddow covered the Benghazi hearings from the perspective of general Republican/right wing craziness (Her specific comments on Benghazi start at the 12:50 mark). She states straightforwardly that she can't "reverse-engineer" why and how Benghazi was supposedly a positive for Obama.

Daily Kos examines various questions: "Why wasn't the Special Forces unit sent to the scene of the fighting?"

...they weren't some fully outfitted Delta Force unit ready to obliterate the men who had dared attack American facilities. They were just four guys in all, no doubt brave and eager to go. But they weren't combat ready, being armed solely with 9mm sidearms.

"Why weren't jets sent?"

They couldn't have gotten there in time, something examined in full by the Accountability Review Board's independent report.

"There was a '40-man Special Operations CIF [Commander's in-Extremis Force] unit in Europe at the time of the attack,' why weren't they sent?"

     The nearest airfield where the 40-man team could have landed was 30 kilometers away from where the incident took place. Yes, they had a plane that could have carried vehicles that could have gotten them there on time, but it  takes time to load those appropriate vehicles onto a plane. By the time that could have been done, the fight would have long since been over. No, there was no realistic way that the team could have gotten to the fight in time to make a difference.

In short, there was really no conspiratorial explanation for why the personnel in the Benghazi diplomatic compound could not be saved. There simply wasn't time to do much. There were too few forces, too far away, to have made any difference.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked all three expert witnesses at the May 8th "whistleblowers" hearing if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's name at the bottom of all of the relevant cables meant anything. All three witnesses replied that it is standard protocol to credit all cables to having been written by the SecState whether she had anything to do with them or not. So no, Clinton's name at the bottom of all the cables meant nothing. Did the House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) learn anything from the hearing? His own statements indicate that the hearings were a complete waste of time and that nothing was learned. Heck, even Fox News was cutting away from their own coverage because there was so little that was new and interesting coming out of it.

So what's the point? Why are Republicans putting so much time and effort into the story? Daily Kos figures it's "The GOP's Benghazi investigation, aka the Stop Hillary 2016 campaign." After all, President Obama was mentioned 29 times whereas Clinton was mentioned 71 times.

Update: And did anybody truly think that Republicans would be embarrassed into silence? Ha. Ha. Ha.  Not Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK)!

“Of all the great cover-ups in history — the Pentagon papers, the Iran-Contra, Watergate and all the rest of them — this … is going to go down as the most serious, the most egregious cover-up in American history,” Inhofe said during an appearance on The Rusty Humphries Show.

Obviously, Inhofe just speaks for himself, but it seems pretty clear that there will be some never-say-die fanatics on this. 

Iron Man 3

This is one of those stories that I wish I had read in a comics form so that I could flip back through and get a better sense of how all of the parts fit together. I finished up the story of Sif in Strange Tales and they ended up the story with a cool twist ending/revelation, so I was able to go back and read all of the issues in the story from start to finish and ended up with a much better understanding of what the authors were trying to convey.

It helped that I was able to get a detailed review of Iron Man 3, as the review went through many of the various threads and details that I wasn't fully able to recall from Saturday night. The “thinking/feeling drone” aspect is a very interesting one as that fantasy very clearly comes out of stories like this July 2002 piece on a bombing that allegedly had a ground observer in place to confirm that the plane was actually hitting a target that was really a hostile. It was a wedding party and it makes sense that it came to the attention of bombers because you had a large group of people and weddings in that region often involve shooting off guns into the air at certain points during the ceremony. 30 people in that party died. In Iron Man, James Rhodes as Iron Patriot/War Machine comes into a sweatshop where women in chadors are busy sewing garments. Had Iron Patriot not been a human in a metal suit, had he been an actual drone, the entire shop would simply have been blown to bits.

Tony Stark/Iron Man apparently suffers some PTSD from the Avengers movie, not a debilitating case of it, but it recalls his “Demon in a Bottle” storyline in his comic in the late 1970s. The studio nixed the idea of having this Iron Man battle alcoholism, but a bit of PTSD was apparently okay.

Nikita: Black Badge

Hmm, very interesting. A few intriguing similarities to the movie “Fair Game,” a movie I've referenced a few times, with the episode “Black Badge,” from the TV series Nikita. The show introduces an athletic, in-shape CIA agent with long blond hair who goes by the name of Naomi. Naomi Watts played an athletic, in-shape CIA agent with long blond hair, Valerie Plame Wilson, in “Fair Game.” Naomi Ceaver (Played by Amanda Schull) is a conspiracy theorist who can't quite locate the proof necessary to prove her cases in a satisfactory manner. Wilson's husband uncovered a dastardly plot by President G.W. Bush to blame Iraq for something it didn't do and the Wilsons were never able to follow up his whistle-blowing to get to the proper conclusion.

Astonishing Chechnya

Guest post by Deena Stryker.

RT is airing an incredible documentary on the Republic of Chechnya, known to the outside world for having been practically destroyed by repeated separatist wars with Russia.

According to Wikipedia, the Caucasus mini-state  is returning to sharia law and all its accoutrements, with some resistance to Russian rule still remaining in the mountains.

The RT documentary  presents a very different picture which does not necessarily contradict this information. It describes a Muslim society deter-mined to appear ‘modern’.  With the help of Qatar, which is the most visible of the Gulf monarchies (think Al-Jazeera), the capital Grozny, has been rebuilt to resemble Doha, with illuminated skyscrapers, shopping malls, fancy restaurants, glitzy spectacles and fireworks – Putin’s version of war benefitting construction investments. But the skaking rinks are sexually segregated.

A new fashion industry is dedicated to luxury wear for the head-scarfed woman and eager to attract wealthy clients from other Muslim countries with strict female dress codes. The models parading gracefully down the catwalk will soon marry, after which they will be expected to remain at home, according to Islamic custom.  Unmarried women cannot travel abroad.

If this all sounds terrible, note that the brand of Sunni Islam practiced in the Caucasus is Sufism, which is accompanied by much rhythmic singing and dancing.

However some families are still sending their sons to madrassas where they are taught the Koran, wrestling and boxing (sports in which it is prohibited to attach the adversary’s head under Islamic law), and Dubai made an exception by sending some of the Prophets personal items to the Russian Islamic republic that boasts the world’s largest mosque.

Putting these pieces together, what emerges is a picture entirely in keeping with what I described in a previous blog as Putin’s cultural policy.  (“March 18th: …the Russian leader appears to also hanker after an era when ‘fun’ was ‘clean’ and families were intact.  The Pussy Riot trial is less a defense of religion than the belief that all freedoms have limits, in contradiction to Washing-ton’s unqualified commitment to the First Amendment.”)

Putin’s cultural policy as practiced in the Russian Republic of Chechnya seems intended to assure Muslim populations that a) their religion is entirely respectful; b) while practicing it they can be part of the modern world; and c) that ‘clean’ modernity is better than vulgar modernity.

In centuries past, Chechen Sufi leaders were already dreaming of a vast califate. With the Kremlin’s help, their modern descendants are busy creating a ‘modern’ Islamic society. Putin is shrewdly betting that if the larger mainly Islamic states on its periphery (the ‘Stans’) bring ‘modernity’ to their masses, they will be less of a threat than if they maintain them in a feudal time warp. It will be interesting to see whether the young women of Chechnya and other Islamic societies will long be willing to sacrifice their independence for the sake of Western glitz.  In any case if Putin’s policies can displace dour Wahab-bism from Saudi Arabia, that will be a good thing.

Gun bill “fails” with 54 in favor and 46 against

There are two methods of fixing the Senate rules, there's the “Constitutional Option,” where the rules are changed at the beginning of the two-year session and then there's the “Nuclear Option,” where the rules are changed mid-session. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), opted for a really mild, watered-down Constitutional Option this last January in order to deal with the filibuster (Note: the filibuster is not in the Constitution and the first filibuster didn't occur until 1837). We saw today with a vote on an already weakened and watered-down gun safety bill that the Constitutional Option produced an insufficient safeguard against an out-of-control overuse of the filibuster, where a minority of the Senate opposes a measure supported by around 90% of the American people.

Wonkette replies to a disgruntled conservative with a scathing, NSFW (Not Safe For Work) commentary (The conservative whined and moaned about former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords “bullying” people), which expresses my mood about Harry Reid and the filibuster quite well.

Update: Excellent reaction by President Obama. Hear! Hear!

The CIA “Hollowed Out”

Bill Keller writes about the CIA and covert ops people versus intel people and the following passage jumped out at me:

"The C.I.A., having been hollowed out in the ’90s after the end of the cold war, failed to see the signs of what would be 9/11. Then the C.I.A. got the ostensible Iraqi weapons threat terribly wrong, drowning out more skeptical voices..."

There are three charges here: 1. That Bill Clinton permitted the CIA to be so underfunded and understaffed that it couldn't do its job while under George W. Bush, 2. that the CIA missed the signs that 9/11 was about to occur and 3. that the CIA thought there were WMD in Iraq when there weren't. The first charge is proven or disproven by the second and third charges. If those other two charges stand up, then we may presume that the first charge is true and vice-versa, if the two charges are not true, then the first is not true, either.

So how do the two charges stack up against the evidence? Not very well. Ron Suskind relates in his book “The One Percent Doctrine” that “Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: 'All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.'” And from The National Interest:

Kurt Eichenwald, former New York Times reporter and Vanity Fair contributing editor...”the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed.”

As to the third charge, that the CIA failed to see that there were no WMD in Iraq, the movie “Fair Game” tells the story of Joe and Valerie Plame Wilson, drawing heavily on the book by Valerie Wilson and shows that, yes indeed, the CIA did do its assigned job by presenting the President with all of the information that was available to them and that, in fact, there was significant doubt that Iraq had WMDs. The CIA and their buddies across the pond, MI6, were both informed that Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who was Iraq's head of intelligence, told them that Iraq had no WMD. Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, is also said to have claimed this, although Sabri has denied saying so.

Now these claims of Bill Keller's really bother me as Keller joined the NY Times in 1984 and was the Executive Editor from 2003 to 2011, so this is no amateur, wet-behind-the-ears, fresh-outta-J-school, eager beaver cub reporter. This guy's been around and knows full well what he's saying.

To be fair, there were indeed people in both MI6 and the CIA who credited claims of WMD “even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball,” so it's incorrect to say that the CIA was united in casting doubt upon the Bush Administration's justifications for going to war, but there's certainly no justification for claiming that the CIA as an agency failed either before 9/11 or before the Iraq War.

By the way, neither former President George W. Bush nor former Vice President Dick Cheney have any regrets or second thoughts about having plunged the nation into an unnecessary war.

[Bush] reflected on the “realities of the situation 10 years ago”: that the Iraq invasion had bipartisan support and that seeking regime change in Iraq had also been the policy under Clinton.

“It’s easy to forget what life was like when the decision was made,” Bush said.

Yes, the invasion had bipartisan support, but that was because Bush was manipulating the intel. And as I pointed out here, Clinton did indeed send Madelaine Albright to get a read on how motivated Americans were to fight a war against Iraq, but found that there simply wasn't anywhere near enough enthusiasm to even attempt to launch such a war.

As to Cheney, his old company Halliburton made $39.5 billion from the war, so he obviously has no regrets.

As to Keller's larger thesis, that the “cowboys” of the CIA were an undue influence on the “eggheads” (i.e., that the covert ops people had too much influence on the gathering-of-intel people), I doubt that. I read a few books on the CIA during the 1980s and got the impression that, despite the CIA being a single agency with a single Director, that the intel and ops people perform different tasks in different places and don't interact much.

Oz, the Great and Powerful

Saw the original 1939 Wizard of Oz many times as a youth as an annual event on TV. In the early 1990s, I read a really neat piece in the paper (Believe it was the Washington Post) about Glinda the Good Witch being the manipulative mastermind behind the events in Oz. Consider the ending. At the end, Glinda's rivals, the two evil witches and the Wizard, have all been dispatched or have left town due to that young woman who has that elusive x-factor, good luck combined with youthful initiative. Glinda is the “Last magician standing,” so she makes the Scarecrow into her Prime Minister, gives positions to the Tin Man and Lion and then proceeds to rule Oz as a benevolent monarch, with of course an iron fist, with her devious, manipulative cleverness being hidden behind a deceptively nice, well-mannered exterior.

Read the book “Wicked” a few years later. Pretty good, but the author clearly got all sentimental about his character halfway through and Elphaba (His name for the Wicked Witch of the West) ends up being just misunderstood as opposed to really evil.

Saw the original film during a cruise in 2002. Really cool to see it all in one sitting and without interruption so that I was able to fit it all together in my mind.

So saw “Oz, the Great and Powerful” last night. I explained to a store clerk that the story takes place before the 1939 film, so it's a prequel as opposed to a sequel. It introduces all three witches, Evanora, the one who dies very early on in the 1939 film (Played by the only actor in the 2013 film that I recognized, Rachel Weisz), Elphaba and Glinda. Elphaba again has a rationality behind her actions that makes her more misunderstood than evil and Glinda and the Wizard both have a bit of a harder edge than in the original film. There's a bit of Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” to the film as the Wizard has to make do with what he has and must battle a truly evil army of trained warriors and flying monkeys with farmers and shopkeepers.

AQ & AQI

Excellent piece from FireDogLake on a WaPo columnist who makes several serious errors in history right off the bat. Jackson Diehl claims that the "United States faced down al-Qaeda and eventually dealt it a decisive defeat” Uh, no, it didn't Al Qaeda proper (AQ) was not al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI started as a separate organization under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who populated it with members of his old group and with jihadists who started migrating to Iraq in mid-2003 to join the fight against the American invaders of that country. Right-wingers in the US claimed that the US was following the "Flypaper" strategy, the idea of attracting jihadists from all over the Mideast and then successfully killing them in Iraq.


Problem was, most of the jihadists who went to Iraq would most likely have just remained in their home countries and most probably would not have done much of anything had the US not presented them with such an inviting target. There was simply never any evidence that anybody, neither already-active jihadists, nor members of AQ proper, were drawn into the "flypaper." Did AQ suffer any sort of defeat in Iraq? No, because AQ stayed out of Iraq. Sure, okay, AQI was defeated, but had the Iraq War never occurred, AQI would never have existed to begin with.

Diehl mentions that the Balkans under Clinton and Libya under Obama were successful interventions. True, but in both cases, there was a strong consensus as to the need for action and the US had many allies going in. Neither condition exists in Syria today, so I would be very considerably warier than Diehl is about going into Syria.

Audiobooks

Now finishing up working a redacting job. When a journalist receives a document that has words, phrases and sometimes whole paragraphs blacked out, that's called a redacted document. So I black out the information on documents that could allow people to take money from our customers. Decent job, but it allows all sorts of time for the mind to wander, so I purchased, took out and downloaded a whole set of audiobooks. I find that the type of attention that redacting requires and that the type of attention listening to an audiobook requires are two completely different types of attention, so I'm easily able to do both at once. Reading any sort of narrative and watching a TV show that has any sort of plot, on the other hand, requires the same type of attention, so I can't do both at the same time. While at work in the Navy, some of my shipmates wanted to watch a football or soccer game while I worked. I had zero problems with that as sports matches don't have narratives in the same way that a Personnel documents do.

The first audiobook I picked up from the library after “Cleopatra” was “Attack Poodles” by James Wolcott. Written in an attempt to influence the 2004 election, it's a good run-down of right-wing pundits. The saddest one is Dennis Miller, who switched from left-winger to right-winger. As Wolcott points out early on in the book, switching sides is a no-no. It's much better for a pundit to pick a side and stick with it through thick and thin.

Just as early movies tried really hard to always find a way to get a chase scene in, superhero comics have to get a fight scene in, soap operas have to get dramatic confrontations in, etc., detective stories want to tell us about the social and physical context in which the detective operates. Accordingly, my major window into how the Navajos live today (Hopis show up in these books from time to time and white people are generally represented by the FBI) is through the Tony Hillerman books. They focus on two characters, Navajo Police Sgt. Jim Chee and retired NP Lt. Joe Leaphorn. The audiobook I listened to was “The Wailing Wind.” The books have a relaxed pace and emphasize the wide open country out there on the Great Plains of New Mexico.

Another series I've enjoyed for a long times has been the Jeeves books (The author P.G. Wodehouse put out about a hundred of these). The one I listened to was “Stiff Upper Lip.” A foppish, excitable and not-terribly-bright young aristocrat named Bertie Wooster has adventures with his pal Gussie Fink-Nottle and the wise and sensible butler Jeeves bails them out all the time. The audiobook clearly designs itself on the PBS Masterpiece Theater “Jeeves and Wooster” series, which is set in the 1920s and Jeeves has a very particular way of pronouncing some phrases.

And yes, neither series has much to do with sex. None of the heroes in these two series has a whole lot to do with women.

Went to Librivox, a service that offers voice recordings of works in the public domain. Listened to “The Japanese Fairy Book” compiled by Yei Theodora Ozaki in 1908. Two interesting contrasts between mythology then and now. The first is that legends and tall tales today are told in specific formats. Movies are generally about 90 minutes long, comic books are generally around 20 pages an issue (though a single story can stretch over multiple issues), novels are 200-300 pages long (again, novels can come in a series), etc. Stories back in the day didn't have to be a certain length. Today, we have the movies “Tangled” and “Jack the Giant Slayer,” both of which take the old tales of Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk respectively and bulk them out by adding lots of elements that were not present in the originals. 

In one of the Japanese fairy tales, a man, his wife and their daughter are living happily. The wife passes away. The man remarries. The stepmother makes the daughter's life miserable and then tattles on her. The daughter pours out her heart to her father. The stepmother overhears and apologizes. And they all lived happily ever after. The story is bulked out so that it takes 15-20 minutes to read, but that's essentially the plot. A lot of the stories are similarly cut-and-dried, but fortunately, there are many more complex stories in the collection. Also, some of the stories resemble Rudyard Kipling's “Just So Stories,” where tales are used to explain how certain animals took on the features that they did and how other natural phenomenon got to be the way they are. Did you know that jellyfish used to have hard shells and legs? Neither did I, until I listened to the Japanese tale of how a jellyfish got outsmarted by a monkey and so was punished by having all of his bones and shell removed. 

The modern comic book story of Sif, the Norse goddess of beauty and frequent companion to and lover of the god of thunder Thor, is killed and the ravens explain how “There were the White Mountains fashioned from her bones and there the night sky from her hair and her blood ran down and filled the mighty seas.” The wolf who is with the ravens growls irritatedly and insists “That is not how the story goes.” 

The ravens agree and get back to how the story was supposed to go, but that is very typical of the romantic, elevated sort of language that mythology uses. 

@Marvel Comics 2013 Journey into Mystery 648

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Another difference is that the superhero world is highly integrated. Everybody knows everybody else. In this sequence, Sif talks with Spider-Man. 

@Marvel Comics 2013 Journey into Mystery 649

 

Their dialogue here makes it clear that the two are not close friends, but they recognized each other immediately when they met and they know full well what their connections are and that they're on the same side. A number of characters clearly spend a lot of off-page time with each other, but these two are just acquaintances. To have an integrated universe like this, the comics need to keep their characters reasonably consistent from writer to writer and from artist to artist. That takes coordination, which clearly the mythology of yesteryear didn't need, though there are a few Japanese stories where characters appear in more than one story.

“The Princess & the Goblin” is an 1872 story. In progress. Will update when I've finished with it.

Update: Eh, it was okay. The female lead character was, I guess, about nine to ten years old. She was just getting to the age where, as a royal child, she realizes that she outranks the maid and can give orders instead of just receiving them. The male protagonist is, I'd say from 14 to 15. Some physical capability, quickness and initiative. The parents are universally wise, sensible and beloved. Have to say, I do kind of like the epilogue, where the villains are scattered and many that remain integrate themselves into the community. Makes for a nice, positive, forward-looking ending.

Ten years ago. The Iraq War in retrospect.

From WHYY Public Media.

One of Philadelphia's Gold Star Mothers, Celeste Zappala, was interviewed by WHYY on Tuesday, the 19^th of March and the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Zappala lost her son Sherwood Baker in 2004. He was the first National Guard member to lose his life in Iraq. During the Vietnam War, the National Guard was so safe a place to be that the future president George W. Bush signed up for a six-year tour (Notthat he even served the full six years), but in Iraq, the National Guard was a vital supplement to the regular armed forces. Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) charged in 2004 that by keeping National Guard troops in their billets longer than they had planned and by using them as regular forces, the Bush Administration didn't have to impose a draft or to increase the size of the regular armed forces, and thus that using the National Guard in that way amounted to a “back-door draft.” Recruitment for the military to keep enough troops fighting in Iraq was a problem. In 2007, the Army had to spend $1 billion in bonuses to recruit and retain the soldiers it had. The economic collapse at the end of 2007 made it a good deal easier to do keep the military fully staffed.

Why did the Bush Administration depend so heavily on the National Guard during the occupation of Iraq?

Much of the planning for the occupation of Iraq was improvised, last-minute and inadequate. The Bush Administration didn't appear to think that many forces or much money would be needed after Baghdad had fallen. The problem then was very ably sketched out by Colonel Harry G. Summers, who built upon the theories of Carl von Clausewitz concerning war and national determination. Colonel Summers' book was entitled “On Strategy: The Vietnam War in context” and it was written in response to the failure of the US to win over the Vietnamese people to the cause of America. The military in both Iraq and Vietnam did everything that was asked of it and it carried out its assigned task with enthusiasm and professionalism. In neither case can America assign any significant blame to the military for the inability of the US to win hearts and minds in the occupied country. The Iraqi insurgents certainly deserve a great deal of credit for making an American victory after the fall of Baghdad impossible. Had all gone according to the plans made by the Bush Administration and had Iraqis quietly accepted the American occupation, there would have been no need for Bush and his people to whip up American enthusiasm and support for the war.

As it was, the left wing was proven correct by the failure to find any WMDs and was thus completely uninterested in supporting the war and the right wing was perfectly happy to keep their activities in support of the war very sharply limited. The right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg was asked why he didn't join up and go to Iraq in uniform (Goldberg was at the very upper age limit for joining the military). He later apologized for this response, but it's worthwhile to remember what he said:

As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.

The point here is that Goldberg's attitude was quite typical for right-wingers. People who supported the war didn't feel the need to actually go over to Iraq and spend years in a foreign land actually getting themselves involved in learning a foreign language and dealing with a very different culture. Patriotism only demanded so much.

According to Summers, yes, any military or any country's political leadership can carry out short, brief military actions without getting broad-based buy-in from the country's civilian population, but any war that costs significant time and resources must get the civilian population emotionally involved. People must be absolutely convinced that the war is of immense significance and that it's worth great sacrifice to win it. Bush failed to get civilians from the right wing to go to Iraq as civilian reconstruction personnel, which explains why $8 billion of the money allocated to Iraqi reconstruction was lost. Without on-the-ground personnel overseeing projects and with Americans attempting to supervise projects from desks inside the “Green Zone” in Baghdad or from the US, it wasn't at all surprising that the US reconstruction effort was a complete flop.

Getting Americans motivated

The first step to getting Americans enthusiastically involved in the conquest/occupation of Iraq wassupervised by Madeleine Albright in February 1998. Albright brought several fellow war hawks to a town meeting in Ohio. It was a PR disaster as citizens vigorously questioned why Iraq was considered to be a threat and why that threat had to be neutralized via a war. Albright and her people were unable to answer these objections and the Clinton Administration didn't make any further attempts to whip up the public to supporting a war against Saddam Hussein and his country.

It's generally accepted among many former skeptics that no, President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney didn't arrange for 9-11 to happen, but the belief was based on solid facts. Bush and Cheney both had oil industry roots, there was good reason to believe that the US oil industry would profit enormously via an American occupation of Iraq and 9-11 occurred just a few years after Albright's failed attempt to get American citizen buy-in for a war against Iraq. Al Jazeera points out that safeguarding civilians was certainly not on the agenda of the invading Americans:

The Iraq invasion cannot be reasonably described as a case of "humanitarian intervention" for three reasons. The means used in the war - a "shock and awe" bombing campaign, including the use of cluster munitions in populated areas - were clearly not designed with the objective of safeguarding Iraqi civilians. Secondly, there was no evidence of the triggering mechanism for a humanitarian intervention, such as mass slaughter or crimes that shock humanity. Saddam had a terrible track record but, during the run-up to war, no such crimes were ongoing or imminent. Third, humanitarian motives were clearly not dominant, as the war would probably not have occurred in the absence of the issues of WMD and/or the al-Qaeda connection. During his February 2003 presentation to the UN, even Colin Powell's slides related to Saddam's human rights violations were labelled, "Iraq: Failing to Disarm". 

Even if regular people didn't buy that Iraq had something to do with 9-11, the Washington DC press corps certainly did. What we do know for certain is that Bush & Cheney manipulated the information suppled by America's intelligence agencies to make it appear that Hussein had something to do with 9-11. 

The deleted paragraphs in the summary called "Key Judgements" read:

"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war.

Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge."

Many on the right wing have made their defense of the Bush Administration center around the allegation that Democratic Senators had access to the same intel that Bush had and that they reached the same conclusion. No, Democrats had access to the intel that Bush edited to make it look as though Iraq was a threat.

The consequences?  

As documented below, by the most scientifically respected measures available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL [Operation Iraqi Liberation], saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5 million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to 4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in

World War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses.

The US absolutely must prevent anything like the Iraq War from ever occurring again. How are we doing on that? Unfortunately, not very well. The US leadership appears to greatly overestimate the effectiveness of sanctions, underestimates the usefulness of diplomacy and has far too much faith in our intelligence agencies. Also, people in Washington DC, both government officials and the press corps, appear to be talking about the deficit in much the same manner that they discussed Iraq in late 2002-early 2003. The good news is that US troops are very highly unlikely to go back into Iraq, no matter how badly the situation there deteriorates. The US couldn't do much there the first time and it seems our leadership knows that it couldn't do much on a return engagement. Could the US invade Iran? Certainly, elements want very badly to do so, but I think the public would be very highly likely to resist.

The 1934 movie "Cleopatra"

Listened to an audiobook on Cleopatra and re-watched Claudette Colbert in the 1934 Cecil B. DeMille “Cleopatra” movie. Most of the historical inaccuracies in it can be chalked up to dramatic license. Cleopatra ruled for 18 dramatic and event-filled years and the movie is only 100 minutes long, so there's a lot of compression involved. The only really startling, anachronistic, “Whuuh?” moment came for me when Colbert tries to convince Julius Caesar that Egypt was the stepping stone to India.

For Cleopatra to get to Rome, the audiobook tells us, her sea convoy traveled up the coasts of Israel, Turkey, Greece and Italy, stopping every night so the crew could sleep in buildings or tents on shore. It took a couple of weeks to make the journey of perhaps 500 miles. Now, getting from Egypt to India is well over 2000 miles. As the Suez Canal wasn't built until 1869, that added over 100 miles of land that ships had to be carried over. The point the book makes is that Egypt was a prize all on its own and Cleopatra was a royal personage well worth knowing as she was a highly attractive person (everybody who comes into contact with her strives to give her the benefit of the doubt and to make excuses for her and to stay with her as long as possible) who had a great deal in common with both of the Romans that she took up with.

The book doubts that Cleopatra had herself bitten by a snake, but agrees that she was researching various poisons to see how quickly and painlessly they worked. The only point where the book and the movie disagree is that the book concluded that she felt the end was near and she didn't want to be paraded around Rome as a captive. The movie concludes that she had agreed to dispose of Mark Antony with one of the poisons she had been researching. The book shows us that Cleopatra was a real sexual outlaw who did quite a bit of sleeping around, but whose goal was always a stronger and better Egypt. There's only one scene in the movie where she clearly has sex, but I guess that in 1934, that was enough to classify her as pretty wanton.

I was interested to see the parallels between this story and the story presented in “The Other BoleynGirl” with Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johanssen. In both stories, families try to make alliances through sex, through males being attracted to females. In both cases it works okay, for short periods anyway, but long-term alliances are best made for pragmatic reasons that don't need to be supplemented by sexual attractions.

Cleopatra played an important role in a tumultuous time and impressed pretty much all of the people she came into contact with. My regret concerning the movie is that she's presented as very passive and not nearly as assertive and nowhere near the goddess that she actually presented herself as in real life.

Jack the Giant Slayer

Quite good! Stirring stuff and, giving it some thought later, don't there were any glaring anachronisms, none that really stuck out for me anyway (That is, items and attitudes that could not have existed at the time the movie takes place). Naturally, the princess is a bit more rebellious than one would expect and Jack (The Giant Slayer) is treated quite well by his social betters, but all in all, it seems pretty true to the period.

As I was getting some coffee for the movie (the local theaters carried coffee for a bit, so they've told me I can carry a cup of coffee in), the salesperson at the convenience store commented on movies plundering material from the past. Yeah, Jack is an adaptation of the old Jack and the Beanstalk tale, but yes, plundering the past for story material is hardly new.

The Golem was a 1921 movie that was based on old Jewish legends. When I saw it, it immediately brought to mind The Hulk from Marvel Comics. Thor, of course also from Marvel Comics, derives directly from Norse legends. The DC Comics series Fables (Started up in 2003), very directly and explicitly takes characters and situations from past stories and adventures and the TV series Once Upon A Time appears to have derived directly from Fables.

So the only question for me is, does the latest appropriation of the past do a good job of re-telling the old story? I think Jack does indeed do the job quite well.

So long, PhillyIMC!

PhillyIMC is now no more. For a long period, members of the group that maintained the site and contributed stories had been going off to do other things and moving on in their lives one by one. The real problem was that the Philadelphia Independent Media Center never came up with a way to recruit new members, so when people left, there was just one less member to do the work of maintaining the site.

So it's largely been just me maintaining the site for the last several years. I was finally told by my employment company that they'd lined me up for a job, but that the job would not involve being at a computer all day. I feared that this meant that the spammers (People who post unwanted, commercial articles and comments) would eventually figure out that the site was unguarded for a certain number of hours each day and every day when I came back to it, that the site would be overrun with still more spam.

I wrote a note to the fellow who had previously agreed to upgrade our open source content management system from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 and asked him to shut the site down. He did so and there's now nothing in its place.

I'm very happy that I worked on it. Got to know a number of good people and had some good times.

Wouldn't say “Great” Minds Think Alike, but certainly “Some” Minds Think Alike

Two right-wingers have come to the same conclusion at the same time. Ted Nugent, the aging one-hit wonder of the late 1970s and really, really enthusiastic gun advocate, tells us about black people voting for the Democratic Party:

The truth is that the Democratic Party has been the engineer of the destruction of black Americans, and everyone knows it except the very people who need to know it the most - black Americans. The turbo-destruction will continue for black Americans until they realize that dirty Democrat politicians are their true enemy, not their salvation. Fortunately, some are beginning to embrace this self-evident truth.

And, at the same time, Herman Cain, the marvelously entertaining gaffe-machine of the 2012 Republican primary, says about Americans in general that President Obama is continuing his campaign even though the election is over and he's been reelected and Cain and Bill O'Reilly agree that Obama has not been able to solve all of America's problems (Gee, an obstructionist House majority and a constantly-filibustering Senate minority wouldn't have anything to do with that, would they?), but the real problem is that (selected excerpts) “51% of the voters were...misled enough to vote for him.” O'Reilly: “How dumb are they?” Cain: “We have a severe ignorance problem.” So yeah, I guess we liberals are just too stupid to know what's good for us.

Funny how, when the “smart people” were in charge, we ended up getting into a completely unnecessary war and the Great Recession. Hmm, strange how that works out!

Review of "Hubris"

Showed on 9:00pm on Monday 18 February. Rachel Maddow previewed it a few days beforehand. Real Clear Politics presents all of the ten-minute segments of it. I agree with David Swanson, the show has some flaws, but I'm very happy that it was shown. As I've related to many people, I had read appeals before President George W. Bush's UN speech (Made just after the first anniversary of 9-11) to give Bush a chance to make his case for war against Iraq and to not dismiss his case out of hand, so I got the NY Times the day after and read his case from beginning to end. I immediately concluded that Bush was lying and that he had already made up his mind to go to war. I made it to what I believe was the first demonstration opposing the Iraq War.

At the demonstration, it was clear that everyone had reached the same conclusion that I had, that there was no point in even trying to persuade Bush to not go to war. Our protest was instead aimed squarely at the general public. One item that Hubris mentioned, that I remember well, was that President Bill Clinton had, in 1998, decided to bomb Iraq to make a point and to force compliance with American edicts. Not wanting American weapons inspectors to get hurt, he ordered the inspectors to be withdrawn. The annoyance and aggravation came on the American side when the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had refused to let the inspectors back into Iraq after the bombing.

In August of 2002, Bush declared that Hussein had kicked out the inspectors. I knew immediately that this wasn't true as I had been following the story in 1998, but also because back then, Clinton was undergoing all sorts of trouble from Republicans with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and for Hussein to have treated Americans with such contempt would have driven Clinton to declare war right off the bat. Sure enough, Fair.org published a piece in October showing the media headlines in 1998 and how the same publications discussed the same event in 2002 with very different headlines. So yes, when Bush made his speech at the UN to gin up enthusiasm for a war with Iraq, the press treatment of Bush's inspectors claim really sealed the deal to convince me that the traditional media was hopelessly in Bush's pocket.

Maddow does a good job in allowing the Colin Powell spokesperson Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and Douglas Feith to get plenty of screen time to make their cases, but the Powell case is fatally undermined by the demonstration earlier in the show that all of Powell's major points were debunked many months before he made his speech at the UN. He made his speech shortly before the February 15th march. It was the largest protest in history and was especially important as it was scattered all over the world. I didn't watch Powell's speech myself, but asked my brother-in-law about it later. He said "Yeah, it was convincing to people who didn't know anything about the issue beforehand. As someone who was pretty informed on the issue, it wasn't convincing to me at all."

It was clear to me, though I admit things may look different from inside the Washington DC bubble than it does to ordinary citizens out in the country, that Bush's evidence for the need to go to war with Iraq was all quite vague and very heavily dependent on taking the word of government officials for it all. We common citizens were asked to simply trust that what those government officials were saying was true. Valerie Plame Wilson was shown in Hubris, speaking about how she and another CIA person were reacting to Colin Powell's "revelations" that had been obtained from the highly unreliable "Curveball." A scene in Fair Game, a movie based in part on Wilson's book "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," made it clear that there were quite a few people in the CIA who felt that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were very eager to go to war and quite willing to say whatever it took to convince Americans to support that effort.

Update: Colonel Wilkerson takes exception to David Swanson's accusation of knowingly lying. Swanson explains his conclusion and adds that the honorable thing for Wilkerson to have done was to have resigned rather than to participate in a lie. 

Les Misérables

I think this movie was done as well as it could have been, but it hasn't aged well at all. I can see Javert (Played by Russell Crowe) chasing Jean Valjean (Played by Hugh Jackman) all over, hither and yon if Javert was really bored and his case file was really thin and he just had nothing better to do or if Valjean's crime was so monstrous that Valjean was a real danger to public safety, but Valjean's crime was so petty to begin with (It was revealed very, very late in the film) that when I finally learned what it was, I was like “Wha-a-ah?!?! THAT's what this whole, long chase has been all about?”

The siege in the later part would have made more sense if I understood what the rebels were planning to do to improve things in the event that they were successful, but that detail got lost in the the hazy, romantic, rebelliousness and bravery, etc. I guess they would have started something “New” and “Bold” and “Different,” yada, yada, yada.

Now, Madame Thénardier was another Helena Bonham Carter villain and she's gotten quite good at doing those roles. She played a very good villain in both Sweeney Todd and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. She's very good at being believably human, but also at arousing the desire to boo and hiss and throw things at the screen. Anne Hathaway did a good job as Fantine. She was very pretty with long hair and good clothes. After her hair had been shorn off and she had been degraded, abused, defiled and was dressed in rags, yeah, she looked pretty darned haggard and worn out.

Parsing the questions - Politifact and Jeep

The Weekly Standard is outraged, outraged, I tell you!, the Poltifact apparently stretched the truth when it said that Mitt Romney lied during the closing days of the 2012 campaign. They give us a general description, based on Politifact's statements, of what Romney allegedly said:

"It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign -- that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China."

Now, to me, the word "moving" is extremely critical. That doesn't just suggest that Jeep was planning on opening up factories in China, it suggests that Jeep is letting Americans go and re-locating American jobs there. Here's Romney's statement as quoted by The Plum Line:

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio, home to a General Motors powertrain plant. “I will fight for every good job in America. I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair America will win.”

Sounds to me as though that's exactly what Romney is saying. The Weekly Standard goes on to show that Jeep is indeed opening up factories in China to serve the Chinese market and flourishes this fact as though it proves their point that Politifact is being dishonest. But the WS quotes a Jeep executive who says:

"Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China," Ranieri wrote..."

Again, the question for me is not whether Jeep was opening up a factory in China, it was, but whether it was doing so at the expense of American jobs. Could Americans have been producing Jeeps in the US and then shipped those cars to China? As WS says:

To recap, Jeep Patriots—oh irony, you capricious sprite!—that were heretofore exclusively produced in America and sold overseas are now going to be made and sold overseas. [emphases in original]

Probably, but let's keep in mind that Japan makes Japanese cars in the US for the US market, so it would be hypocritical for Americans to complain of Jeep producing cars in China for the Chinese market. From a Forbes piece that makes it sound as though the US is fast becoming the Mexico to Japan's US (A country that is assembling products for the wealthier market), Forbes states that:

The Japanese carmaker [Honda] has invested more than $2.2 billion in its North American operations over the past two years, enabling it to increase production capacity in North America from the current 1.63 million to 1.92 million units per year in 2014.

Now, what precisely did Politifact condemn Romney for?

PolitiFact has selected Romney's claim that Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs as the 2012 Lie of the Year.

WS correctly points out that, yes indeed, Jeep is indeed producing Jeep models in China for the Chinese market, just as Japan is producing Japanese cars in America for the American market. So yes, Politifact goofed up and accused Romney of the wrong thing. Why did Romney's statement draw so much fire at the time? My own "ruling" is that Romney suggested that Americans would lose their jobs and that those jobs would be moved overseas. So yes, Romney's statement that "Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” [emphasis added] is very clearly false and Romney very clearly had good reason to know that it was false and that his statement richly deserved condemnation.

So, when it comes to fact-checking, an endeavor that's worthy and something all reporters should do, Politifact demonstrates that it's far from an exact science or...well, that they're really not very good at doing it. I feel that Romney was rightly condemned for making an inflammatory statement that he knew full well was false, or at the very least highly misleading, but that Politifact deserves condemnation for making a statement that they, in turn, also had reason to know was false. Yes, Jeep was indeed planning to set up factories in China and yes, they condemn Romney for saying just that, but Romney deserves condemnation for suggesting that Jeep would do so at the expense of American jobs.

Update: These two posts were on PhillyIMC.org:

Notice how Romney said that

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 7:07pm 

 

Notice how Romney said that Jeep was "thinking of moving" Jeep manufacturing to China. The fact is they were and the story in Reuters proves it. Romney said nothing about moving manufacturing to China "at the expense of American jobs." You and Politifact tried to put words into Romney's mouth that he did not say and you are getting smacked for it. This is probably the most clear example of left-wing "journalists" using the Logical Fallacy of the Straw Man in their analysis. Had Romney said the words that you and politifact tried to insert into his mouth, he might be culpable of lying but he did not. He might not have stated other pieces of the story but there is a big difference between withholding information and lying.

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Are you saying that The Plum Line quotes him inaccurately?

Submitted by Rich Gardner on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 8:49pm 

 

Romney's words, as quoted:

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio, home to a General Motors powertrain plant. “I will fight for every good job in America. I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair America will win.”

If you can show me that Romney didn't actually say these words, and he's quoted very specifically as saying "Jeep...is thinking of moving all production to China," [emphasis added] then please feel free to supply me with the correct quote (With source, please) where Romney doesn't lie. My reading of that quote is that Jeep was planning to move production to China. That means to fire American auto workers and to replace what they were producing with a factory in China.

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Anonymous never responded.

Today, I saw a piece on Daily Kos on the issue and it says that a fellow asked on behalf of Romney for the Washington Post factchecker to please reconsider the "Four Pinnochios" (The worst ruling possible) that he awarded for Romney's lie. The WaPo fatchecker responds:

With all due respect to Stevens, the claim that Romney turned out to be right is simply not accurate. [...]
We reaffirm our earlier ruling of Four Pinocchios.