Saturday Morning: Just The Wall Street Journal -- Nothing On The Bakken

The Wall Street Journal

Health site likely to miss Saturday deadline. That's the least of their problems.

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Local minimum wage laws creates a patchwork across the nation; time for the Feds to intervene?
Some examples:

Colorado: $7.78
Florida: $7.79
Arizona, Montana: $7.80

 How do lawmakers even come up with these numbers?

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OPEC rift developing over Iraq output; possible return of Iranian production; never mind US shale.

In Appalachia, coal struggles to compete with natural gas.

CNOOC seeks to export LNG from Canada's Pacific Coast. Good luck.

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Book review:  Queen Anne by Anne Somerset

Queen Anne, who reigned over England from 1702 to 1714, was not the stupidest of the Stuart monarchs—that was her father, James II—but she was certainly not of sparkling intelligence. Nor was she in any way glamorous. In many respects, her life was wretched. By 40, she could scarcely walk. She had endured at least 15 pregnancies, and perhaps a couple of phantom ones, but only one of her children survived infancy, and he died just after his 11th birthday. Anne Somerset, in her biography of Anne, suggests that she was suffering from Hughes syndrome, which is linked to disseminated lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease.

Yet Anne was indeed not only a sovereign but one who attended to business diligently and whose opinions were never discounted by her ministers. Though she has now little in the way of a public reputation—certainly as compared with Elizabeth I or Victoria—her reign was one of the most momentous in English and British history. 

For the first time since the Middle Ages, English armies were consistently successful on the Continent. The Duke of Marlborough's four great victories—Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet—broke the power of Louis XIV's France. It was in Anne's reign, moreover, that the United Kingdom came into being, as a result of the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland. The crowns had been united since James VI & I inherited the English throne in 1603, but, though sharing a monarch, the two states had remained formally independent of each other. 

If Anne could claim no credit for the success of her armies, apart from the support she gave to Marlborough, she was a prime mover in the accomplishment of the union, something she had called for in her first speech from the throne.

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