Further Data Points For The Trend XI...

So, three things from the WSJ from today.

First this.

The proper answer to this is no, the Obama Administration has virtually no interest in human rights, as human rights don't help them in their search for power. If anything, you can clearly see the Obama Administration sacrificing human rights stances, even long-year ones, in the vainglorious search for temporally limited advantages. If the Obama Administration had been around in the late 1980s, the Berlin Wall would still be standing.

Second, this.

Duh: Michigan now has more government employees than it does people working in manufacturing.

Of course it does: that is how Democrats there get elected, by promising more and more to organized labor and ensuring that any jobs are then created in what are effectively closed union shops. Great way to get elected, really, really bad way to run a state economy. At this point, neglecting the state economy would be more benign than what Governor Granholm has been doing to the state economy.

Which is running it, at full speed, into the ground.

Third, this.

Those insisting on reducing emissions, ramping Co2 emissions back to levels below that of when George Washington was in office, are ignoring basic economics, and are henced doomed to failure.

Not an opinion: without understanding that you can't reduce emissions like that without reducing life styles to ones similar to the original colonists, you will run the current economy into the ground in due course. Unless, of course, you double - preferably triple - the number of nuclear plants providing electricity. Yep, that'll go over well with the environmentalists.

Cap-and-trade is a fool's delusion: foolish because it generates costs for political reasons; foolish because it is inherently open to fraud and abuse (and appears to be designed that way deliberately so that folks like Al Gore can make more millions); foolish because it penalizes those least able to pay for it (lower incomes will pay proportionately more, i.e. it's regressive) and, of course, delusional in that anyone can think it is anything more than a way of whitewashing the fact that even under a stringent regime of cap-and-trade, Co2 emissions will increase, rather than decrease; it is also delusional to believe that people will accept a major reduction in life style now to benefit future generations because politicians want it to be that way.


Ye gods, that's a lot. Suffice to say that the Obama Administration is rapidly shaping up to be the worst for human rights world-wide since at least the Carter Administration; that political stupidity is a major reason that we face the problems we do and, finally, when environmentalists ignore basic economics, their pet schemes and demands to protect the environment are doomed to failure.