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• Sixteen companies announced dividend increases, most of them relatively small.
• HAL beat estimates by one cent. Oil will trade below $100 today.

ObamaCare: predictable. It appears the program has begun its death spiral. There are so many story lines here, I don't know where to begin. These are some of the story lines:

• ObamaCare will define the Obama presidency, his legacy
• it was fortunate that the Tea Party was not successful in defunding ObamaCare; the President and Congress own ObamaCare
• by the end of the year (2013), ObamaPhone folks will realize ObamaCare is not free
• folks now realize that ObamaCare will not cover the poorest of the poor; one must have income to qualify; 30 million will still be uninsured (or whatever the number might be)
• we will see the biggest act of civil disobedience in the history of the US as folks fail to enroll
• large health care insurers will report record profits by mid-2014; premiums doubled; little new care will be provided
• physicians will realize how bad things are by the end of 2014
• ObamaCare will not survive as it is currently laid out
• Sebelius has one month to turn things around
• from the Wall Street Journal:
  

  The Affordable Care Act's botched rollout has stunned its media cheering section, and it even seems to have surprised the law's architects. The problems run much deeper than even critics expected, and whatever federal officials, White House aides and outside contractors are doing to fix them isn't working. But who knows? Omerta is the word of the day as the Obama Administration withholds information from the public. 

  Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn't in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department's incompetence. The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. 

  Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.

  I don't know if folks caught "Saturday Night Live" a couple nights ago, but the ObamaCare debacle was the joke for a very, very long segment.  

The Bakken:
Wall Street has discovered "the Bakken" -- in this context:

At the time I truly had no idea where the Bakken was headed. Within a year or two it was obvious that "the Bakken" was more than a geographical location. In addition to being a laboratory for testing new ideas in unconventional oil exploration and production, "the Bakken" has now come to mean, for me at least, anything that has to do with horizontal drilling and completion (generally fracking) in unconventional shale and oil deposits.