China factories boom in Dec, demand lifts Korea exports | read this item
BEIJING/SEOUL (Reuters) – China’s economic growth looks set to accelerate into the new year, with booming factories driving a December manufacturing survey to a 20-month high while South Korea’s exports to the country surged on strong demand.
China's official PMI hits 20-month high in Dec | read this item
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s manufacturing sector steamed ahead in December as strong rises in new orders and output drove a key economic survey to a 20-month high.
All Nippon mulls taking JAL's overseas flights: report | read this item
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese airline All Nippon Airways is considering taking over the international routes of struggling rival Japan Airlines Corp, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said on Friday.
Welcome to the last Diary Rescue of the year and (maybe) the decade. Your all-volunteer ranger gang includes dadanation, ItsJessMe, HoosierDeb, YatPundit, vcmvo2, and jlms qkw, who also thought about editing.
Remember, this is the best of the under-noticed writing of the day. Show the diarists some recommends, comments, and mojo.
Capitalism Fingered as Fiend of the Past Decade -- By: Jonah Goldberg | read this item
On the last day of 2009, that awful year, I was listening to a report on National Public Radio (yes, I’m a listener). Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by-now-familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff. It was a depressing slog of greed, venality, and theft. When the report was over, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep summarized the report with a tart: “The decade in capitalism.”
I don’t want to single out Inskeep, since he was doing what pretty much the entire media establishment has done, particularly of late: reducing “capitalism” to its alleged sins.
And that’s the point. There are few areas of life where a thing responsible for so much good gets so little credit for it.
Imagine if I were to collect the most infamous deeds of African Americans over the last decade — say, Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal and O. J. Simpson’s most recent criminal exploit — and then put a bow on it with the phrase “the decade in black America.” What if I did the same thing with Jews? Bernie Madoff, the face of Jewish America! Do the scandals of Rod Blagojevich, Charlie Rangel, and John Edwards define the Democratic party from 2000 to 2010? Do Abu Ghraib and the balloon boy sum up America?
Consider NPR. As a brand, it claims to be standing athwart capitalism because it’s “public.” What that means exactly is a bit unclear, since it still allows corporations to fund its programming in exchange for audio endorsements none dare call commercials and relies on the kindness of listeners to keep it afloat — listeners who, one way or another, make their money from you-know-what.
Indeed, speaking of the decade in capitalism, National Public Radio failed to mention that Joan Kroc, widow of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, left more than $200 million to NPR in 2003. Mrs. Kroc’s generosity of spirit was her own, but the wampum is all capitalism’s, baby.
In a similar vein, the decade of capitalism saw one of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffett, pledge more than $30 billion to a foundation created by another offspring of capitalism, Bill Gates, for the purpose of aiding the world’s poor. Surely capitalism should get some of the credit, since the book on philanthropy in non-capitalist systems is shorter than the guide to cities without Starbucks.
Capitalism doesn’t just create generous wealthy people, but generous poor people, too. Americans give twice as much to charity as the most generous European nations, and the most generous Americans are, in fact, poor Americans.
But forget philanthropy. Since 2000, hundreds of millions of people in China and India — home to a plurality of the world’s poor — have lifted themselves out of poverty and illiteracy thanks to capitalism.
China started to embrace markets as a last resort in the late 1970s. And by last resort, I mean last resort. First they tried murdering tens of millions of their own people through collectivism and oppression. When that didn’t work, they embraced markets, and the poverty rate dropped from 64 percent to around 8 percent today.
As it always does, capitalism drove innovation over the last decade. The BlackBerry was introduced in 1999, but the iPhone didn’t exist in 2000, nor did the iPod. YouTube was a fantasy, and no one could even imagine why you’d ever need something like Facebook or Twitter (in fairness, some people still ask that question). iTunes was launched in 2003, and five years later it was outselling Wal-Mart as the No. 1 music retailer. Government-funded basic research in medical science deserves some credit for breakthroughs, but it’s worth remembering that lots of countries invest in basic research. America, with its markets, stands alone as the leading, arguably sole, source of medical innovation. Breakthrough drugs are as American as apple pie.
Every good thing capitalism helps produce — from singing careers to cures for diseases to staggering charity – is credited to some other sphere of our lives. Every problem with capitalism, meanwhile, is laid at her feet. Except the problems with capitalism — greed, theft, etc. — aren’t capitalism’s fault, they’re humanity’s. Socialist countries have greedy thieves, too.
Free markets are in disrepute these days, particularly by the people running Washington. For them, government is the solution and capitalism is the problem. If they have their way over the next decade, they won’t cure what allegedly ails capitalism — people will still steal and lie — but they will impede everything that makes capitalism great. And that will be bad for everyone, even NPR.
Whose Fault Is It? -- By: Mona Charen | read this item
It may not be President Obama’s fault that our multi-billion dollar homeland-security apparatus is more Keystone Kops than 24, anymore than it was President Bush’s fault that city, state, and federal agencies failed to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina. The federal government is (alas) a vast, ungovernable enterprise. And the bigger it gets, the less effective it will become.
Still, the entire Democratic party — led by Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid — swarmed over President Bush like piranhas as the waters rose in 2005. “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” entered the lexicon as one of the most ridiculed commendations in history. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s declaration that “the system worked” after every relevant homeland-security agency drunkenly nodded cash-paying, one-way-ticket-purchasing, Yemen-visiting, no-baggage-carrying, father-warning Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab onto Flight 253 deserves, but will not receive, at least as much scorn. In 2005, Democrats expressed outrage that it had taken Bush two days to cut short his Texas vacation. “He has to get off his mountain bike and back to work,” declared then Rep. Rahm Emanuel. Somehow, if a Republican were to voice the identical sentiment now, demanding that “Obama has to get off his surfboard and back to work,” the establishment would declare it a grievous breach of civility and possibly racist to boot.
I hope no Republican makes such a suggestion, though, because it contributes to the childish idea that the president must govern the nation at all times from the White House — deploying Marines, structural engineers, tax assessors, and derivatives analysts as required. Ridiculous. Any emergency orders a president must issue can be issued from Texas, or Hawaii, or the space shuttle, for that matter.
President Obama is not wholly responsible for the pathetic incompetence of the security agencies. But their “catastrophic” (his word) failure to perform the minimum functions assigned to them should give him pause. More than most Americans, even more than most Democrats, the president is in thrall to the illusion of a skilled, paternalistic government, able to handle the fortunes of car companies, the proper running of banks and insurance companies, the more equitable and cost-effective delivery of health care, and the exact calibration of the world’s climate. Could the new New Deal just get airplane safety right first?
Even taking into consideration the failings of the CIA, the Department of State, and the Department of Homeland Security, some of this is President Obama’s fault. He has guaranteed that we will get far less intelligence from this terrorist than we would have under the Bush administration. Because the highly successful Clinton law-enforcement model has been reintroduced to the War on Terror, no sooner was the fire in Abdulmutallab’s pants out than he was read his Miranda rights and provided with a taxpayer-financed public defender.
Under the terrible ancien regime, when the world hated us, and the terrorists were inspired to attack us because Guantanamo was not listed in Fodor’s Guide (except, gosh, they seem not to have gotten the memo because they persist in attacking), Abdulmutallab would have been hustled down to Guantanamo to be interrogated. Yes, interrogated. Not tortured. Not waterboarded (that happened to only three detainees), but interrogated about his contacts, his experiences in Yemen, his explosives training, and so forth. If he wanted better treatment — dessert, videos, music — he could purchase these with cooperation.
Not now. His lawyer, Miriam Siefer (who has represented terrorists before) will advise him to stay silent. We will learn nothing of other plots Abdulmutallab might have provided leads to, and nothing of the whereabouts of his supposed mentor, American-born Yemen resident Anwar al-Awlaki — the imam who also incited the Fort Hood killer, had contact with two of the September 11 terrorists, and who has been described by Al-Arabiya as “the bin Laden of the Internet.”
Speaking of Yemen, in the mad scramble to close Guantanamo by Obama’s self-imposed deadline, just this month the administration released six detainees to#…#Yemen, with the promise of 34 more to come. Well, didn’t the Bush administration release two Yemenis to Saudi Arabia who later moved to Yemen and continued jihad? Answer: Yes. Here’s another question: Why didn’t the Obama administration study that failure?
And here’s one more question: How does an overgrand, overreaching, would-be messiah learn the humility to at least put first things first?
War? What War? -- By: Charles Krauthammer | read this item
Janet Napolitano — former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security — will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: “The system worked.” The attacker’s concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son’s jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.
Heck of a job, Brownie.
The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration’s response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism “man-caused disasters.” Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management.
And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term “war on terror.” It’s over — that is, if it ever existed.
Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term “asymmetric warfare.”
And produces linguistic — and logical — oddities that littered Obama’s public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as “an isolated extremist.” This is the same president who, after the Ford Hood shooting, warned us “against jumping to conclusions” — code for daring to associate Nidal Hasan’s mass murder with his Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the bomber acted alone.
More jarring still were Obama’s references to the terrorist as a “suspect” who “allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device.” You can hear the echo of FDR: “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Obama reassured the nation that this “suspect” had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant — an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians — and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point — surprise! — he stops talking.
This absurdity renders hollow Obama’s declaration that “we will not rest until we find all who were involved.” Once we’ve given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed, and sent him.
This is all quite mad even in Obama’s terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.
The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator — no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.
The president said that this incident highlights “the nature of those who threaten our homeland.” But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as “extremist(s).”
A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali, and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and they are openly pledged to wage war on America.
Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy — jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon — turns laxity into a governing philosophy.
