Monday, Monday -- A Good Day To Feed The Bears

Active rigs: 190 (steady)

RBN Energy: continuation of the series; looking at supply and demand; Permian oil field, Eagle Ford; Gulf Coast refineries

For all: some folks are anticipating huge volatility in price of crude oil this week; if economic numbers come in low, oil could fall as much as $10 in one day; a typical CNBC story (the market is all about fear and greed); and here's the first bit of bad economic news -- CNBC is now "breaking" this story -- existing home sales show unexpected sales decline (story not yet posted)

High gasoline prices? Blame it on ethanol. And it's going to get worse. Look at RINs.

Monday, Monday --

Monday, Monday, The Mamas and The Papas     WSJ Links  

Worried about that "crash flash" in crude oil this week? Headline story in Marketplace:  US growth outlook stuck in neutral. And, of course, it's even worse in Europe. Maybe better in Japan, but no one knows what is going on in China.  

Talk about an ill-timed story: rising rates won't stall housing. See linked CNBC story at the top of the page.  

So, what's the market doing at 18 minutes past the hour? The Dow is still down, but ever so slightly, and recovering quickly from the bad earnings report from McDonalds. Oil in a flash crash: down 6 cents. Below $108 now, to $107.99.

Back to the Journal.

Michigan governor accused of flip-flopping on Detroit. Was against bankruptcy before he was for it? What's this all about? Who even cares? This is an interesting story to be front and center in the WSJ.  I still think there will be a bailout. This can will be kicked down the road for another two or three years. The movers and shakers should have done what GM did: hammer out a union-favored bankruptcy plan BEFORE declaring bankruptcy; find a sympathetic judge; and get into/out of bankruptcy in less than 30 days.

In a series of speeches (oh, no), President O'Bama will focus on the economy. Hold onto your wallets; watch energy industry -- back to grants, subsidies, tax breaks for those sectors with promises of huge employment: solar and wind. LOL.

This is downright bear-zarre. But then when you see where this story comes from, it makes sense -- for its bear-zarreness. Minnesota researchers suggest that "we" need to feed bears to improve the human-bear relationship. This is either a bad dream or I am truly on another planet. Does anyone remember little Timmy Treadwell? He was born "Timothy Dexter." Obviously he did not tread well.

He was disappointed and went to live with the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska, USA, for 13 summers. At the end of his 13th summer in the park in 2003, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and partially eaten by a grizzly bear. -- from wiki

Whatever happened to Syria? Again, another day without a story on Syria. And just two or three weeks ago it was going to implode and take the whole region with it.

Op-Ed: yes, I love this one. Apple enters the e-Book market. The Amazon monopoly disappears, prices come down. And Apple is found guilty of "something." And it will be a win-win for Apple. It will eventually be seen that Apple was "right" and now Apple will see bigger profits from e-Books.

Here's a country that Detroit can emulate as it tries to get out of bankruptcy (or maybe it's not even in bankruptcy, now that a judge declared bankruptcy "unconstitutional"): Argentina. Of course, there's one big difference: Argentina has the money to pay. But it plans to stiff its creditors, and it appears there's not much anyone can do about it. LOL. What happens if a city declares bankruptcy, told it cannot declare bankruptcy, and then simply moves on? Social engineers will come up with a new word to describe this and very, very smart lawyers will test a new theory.

Some irony. Yesterday I mentioned the seemingly huge number of books on WWII coming out the past two years. Yes, the WSJ prints a review of yet another one.

Wow, wow, and another wow. See my note yesterday on the Zimmerman/Martin case. Wow, wow, and wow. The WSJ echoes in this story:

This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself—not because it was wrong but because it was successful.

Today's civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch. ["Make my day."]

And it continues. Look at my note regarding dog-bites-man. Then back to the Jouranl op-ed:

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason for being.

Pretty sad. Shadows of a great movement. A parody it has become.

[Later: another "wow." Carpe Diem also had the same take on the Zimmerman/Martin/civil rights story that I had. Wow.][Later: is the ACLU working for Al Sharpton?]

I'm not even going to read this next article. It's a waste of time. A CEO's-Eye View of O'BamaCare:
No wonder the employer mandate was delayed. It's hard to see how it will work.