Monday Morning Links, Views, And News -- Part I

Active rigs: 186

Futures (6:58 a.m. CST): Dow up 32; oil down 71 cents.

RBN Energy: seventh in a series -- can Canadian railbit crude compete with pipelines?

WSJ Links

Great article for couples in retirement who lead "parallel lives."  

Absence often does make the heart grow fonder; couples usually enjoy each other more after they have had some time apart. Whether partners live in different cities part of the time or just spend a few hours apart, they usually appreciate each other more when they are together. They take each other for granted less; they probably communicate better; and they usually have a stronger bond of both physical and emotional intimacy because they have a greater appreciation of each other as capable, separate, interesting people.

On the Missouri River in Montana:

Several years ago, I read "Undaunted Courage" by Stephen Ambrose, an account of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806. In his introduction, the author describes canoeing the upper Missouri River with his family. I was instantly intrigued. Our family has always been up for outdoor adventures, so the planning began.

We first found an outfitter in the little town (two buildings) of Virgelle, Mont. We flew into Great Falls, Mont., drove to Virgelle and, after getting familiar with our gear, put in at Coal Banks Landing. 

Over the course of four days, we worked our way downstream through the spectacular White Cliffs area of the Missouri Breaks, almost exactly as Lewis and Clark saw it more than 200 years ago. All that was missing were the vast herds of buffalo and elk, though we saw mule deer and some pronghorn antelope.

It's difficult to describe the feelings that surface during such a journey. I think wanderlust comes close. It's almost a spiritual experience: lost in the immensity of the landscape but still knowing you're part of the country. To share it with people you love is what life is all about.

Another long article on health exchanges and retirees. The headline: Time Warner joins IBM in health shift for retirees.

Yet while these efforts are just ramping up—and creating a good deal of anxiety in the process—hundreds of thousands of retirees are already using exchanges to pick Medicare plans, and many more are likely to do so in the months ahead as companies look for ways to fix their health-care costs by moving to the "defined contribution" model they adopted for pensions years ago. 

Although this is not an investment site, and folks should not make investment decisions based on what they read here or what they think they read here, the linked article provides investors some interesting ideas. 

By the way, Australia scrapped the "carbon tax." They threw out their "green" prime minister and elected a realist and pragmatist. Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol years ago; was the first signatory to do so. Just some idle rambling.

Op-ed: Obama's successful foreign failure. (I entertained this thought early on. "My credibility is not on the line. America's credibility is on the line.")

Summing up the net effect of all this, as astute a foreign observer as Conrad Black can flatly say that, "Not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and before that the fall of France in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a Great Power as we are witnessing with the United States."

Yet if this is indeed the pass to which Mr. Obama has led us—and I think it is—let me suggest that it signifies not how incompetent and amateurish the president is, but how skillful. His foreign policy, far from a dismal failure, is a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish. The accomplishment would not have been possible if the intention had been too obvious. The skill lies in how effectively he has used rhetorical tricks to disguise it.

The key to understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing statement he made in the week before being elected president: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." To those of us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original "community organizer."

As they say, if you are not outraged yet, you are not paying attention.