Friday Morning News & Views

Active rigs: 188 (down a bit)

Wells coming off confidential list have been posted. Not much to look at.

RBN Energy: US condensates to international markets. Conclusion to the 3-part series.

Was he or wasn't he? The State Department now says the SecState was yachting during the Egyptian revolution; he was on the boat for just a brief moment. Hillary: "what does it matter?"

CBS News had initially reported that one of its producers spotted Kerry boarding the boat at the Nantucket Boat Basin on Wednesday afternoon, within hours of the removal of Mohamed Morsi from power in Egypt. But the State Department denied that Kerry had been there.

WSJ Links

This is interesting (but I doubt I will read the article): "blending country hooks with rap phrasing -- plus some help from Wal-Mart -- an enterprising group of Southern artists have created a fast-growing new musical genre." -- I've always said country hooks were incredible (in fact, I think I blogged about that not too long ago) but I never would have used hip-hop and country in the same paragraph. So, we move on. But unfortunately nothing caught my eye in the Arena section.

However, on the way up to Starbucks I heard a reference to a new movie -- I missed it but googled the key words: "new movie Jolie Coen brothers" and found this: Jolie teams up with the Coen brothers. This came out last February, but I don't remember seeing it:
a film about Lou Zamperini, a former Olympian who was captured by the Japanese Navy while serving as an Air Force pilot in World War II. Jolie will direct
Now, back to Money & Investing.

This is not good news, overheard on the Street:

International Speedway Corp., owner of the Daytona International Speedway in Florida, plans to widen seats at its flagship racecourse by up to 3 inches. ISC aims to keep pace with race watchers' growing waistlines. "American food science has very successfully enlarged the size of the American consumer over 40 to 50 years," said ISC President John Saunders.

With the promise of 316 more food, beverage and merchandise points of sale, 40 new escalators and 10 more elevators at the new and improved speedway, Nascar fans' spare tires won't be in any danger.

As noted: this is not good news. The airline industry has to be watching with alarm: fewer seats; more weight. Not a good formula for airlines.

So, what's an airline to do? Increase fees.

Aside from the now-commonplace fees for baggage, changing reservations and better seats, fees will include items such as onboard Wi-Fi and speedier security screening.

Wow, talk about a slow news day. It looks like the news out of Egypt is already pretty ho-hum, but it did make the top story in the Front Section. No links, the story is everywhere. The most important bit of trivia: US law prohibits sending any money to any country run by a military dictator. This means Egypt does not qualify for the annual $1.8 billion the US sends the country. Of course, I assume the president can ignore this law also, just as he ignores his own ObamaCare law and delays implementation of the the "employer mandate."

Delay, delay, delay. Delay the employer mandate on his own law, his only "success" as president. Delay the permitting process in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic. Delay the decision on the Keystone. The only thing not getting delayed: the next Michellian vacation. But I digress.

It is only a matter of time before I join the crowd.

A growing number of Americans are getting permission to carry firearms in public—and under their clothes—a development that has sparked concern among some law-enforcement authorities.

Applications for "concealed-carry" permits are soaring in many states, some of which recently eased permit requirements. The numbers are driven in part by concern that renewed gun-control efforts soon could constrain access to weapons, along with heightened interest in self-defense in the wake of mass killings in Newtown, CT, and Aurora, CO.

One word of advice: before buying a handgun, stock up on ammunition. That appears to be the way the government will attempt to "manage" this phenomenon. Note:

Since July 1 of last year, Florida has granted more than 173,000 new concealed-carry permits, up 17% from the year before and twice as many as five years ago, for a total of about 1.09 million permits in the state.

Ohio, meanwhile, is on pace to nearly double last year's total of 65,000 new permits, which would be nearly three times as many as in 2007. And Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming and Nebraska all have nearly matched or surpassed last year's totals with half of 2013 still to go.

Which state was not mentioned: Texas.  The first state mentioned? Ohio. A blue state. Who wudda thought?

From the article:

Craig Steckler, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said he could remember only "one instance in which someone effectively defended himself" with a firearm during his 21 years as police chief in Fremont, CA.

He's missing the point.

O'BamaCare seems to be unraveling, line-by-line:

The big expansion of health insurance envisioned under the 2010 Affordable Care Act is now looking less sweeping.

The latest indication that the coverage net won't be as wide as initially expected came this week when the Obama administration delayed for a year a requirement that larger employers offer health insurance to workers or pay a penalty. The move means businesses with 50 or more employees that don't currently offer coverage—such as some retailers and restaurants—can continue on that track without penalty until 2015.

While the unexpected move received attention, it is at least the third time that a development since the law's passage has potentially limited the expansion of insurance.
The two earlier snags involve Medicaid, a federal-state program for the poor, and the new health-insurance exchanges where individuals can buy coverage. The law was supposed to expand Medicaid to include more of the poorest Americans, but a Supreme Court ruling last year allowed states to opt out of that expansion; at least half are poised to do so.

At the same time, analysts warn that hiccups are possible in implementing the exchanges after more than 30 states refused to set up their own versions, forcing the federal government to operate them on states' behalf. 

The headline doesn't seem to to with the story, but a great story on Egypt: 

The moment served to underscore the Obama administration's limited ability to steer events in a Middle East still being swept by political upheaval. A reconstruction of how the U.S. handled Egypt in recent months suggests that U.S. officials saw the standoff building but were unable to persuade Mr. Morsi to pull back. Similarly, well-established military-to-military channels, through which the U.S. delivered quiet warnings against a coup, proved inconsequential.

Instead, the U.S. was largely a bystander while Egypt, once one of its closest allies, was again rocked by political turmoil. It initially was encouraged by prospects of working with Mr. Morsi, then grew disillusioned with him and ultimately did little to stop his ouster, lacking the leverage to shape events.

In the end, the U.S. may have ended up with the worst of both worlds. Regime opponents thought the U.S. backed Mr. Morsi for too long. Islamists believed Washington tacitly backed a coup.

And it's a big loss for Hamas. Wow, how things can change overnight. And, again, not one article on Syria.

Not much left. The Op-Ed section. There's a book review on Jessica Wapner's book on the "Philadelphia chromosome."  I saw the book at the Harvard Bookstore; paged through it. It did not interest me. For some reason, books on medical research don't interest me a whole lot much more.

The EPA may have lost a bit of interest in regulating fracking, but the agency is by no means dead.

Activists are pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to take a drastic regulatory step that could have significant repercussions for the U.S. economy. I'm not referring to the Keystone XL pipeline or taxing carbon emissions. At issue is the Pebble Mine—a natural-resource project in Alaska that could yield more copper than has ever been found in one place anywhere in the world.

In addition to an estimated 80 billion pounds of copper, the Pebble Mine also holds strategic metals like molybdenum and rhenium, which are essential to countless American manufacturing, high-tech and national-security applications. Yet even before a plan to mine the deposit has been introduced by the Pebble Partnership, the group poised to bring the mine into production, the EPA appears all too willing to bend to the pressure of environmental activists. The EPA has conducted a hypothetical environmental assessment of the region that positions the agency to pre-emptively veto the Pebble project before the partnership even applies for a single permit.

Apparently some left-wing environmental groups, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthworks and Trout Unlimited are so worried that the project might make it through the permitting process that they're trying to stop it before it starts. As the NRDC put it in August 2012: "EPA's study (and intervention) is critically important. If left to its own devices, the state of Alaska has never said no to a large mine."

I guess like books on medical research, I've lost a bit of interest in the shenanigans of the EPA, as long as the agency leaves fracking alone. Smile. But it sure seems the EPA hates Alaska.

I guess this is enough for now.

So, what's the market doing in light of that great jobs report? Wow --