Thursday: On Deck -- The Fake Unemployment Numbers; The Lost Decade (The Obama Legacy And It's Not ObamaCare); Apologizing In Triplicate; UN Climate Meltdown An "Epic Fail"

Active rigs: 185

RBN Energy: Part 2 -- MRO's strategy for the Ohio Utica.

Increasing production of naphtha range material such as condensates and natural gasoline in the southeastern Ohio section of the Utica shale will soon exceed the capacity of local refineries to process such light hydrocarbons. Midstream logistics companies like MPLX are developing infrastructure to transport condensate, natural gasoline and the more limited supplies of crude produced in the Utica to refineries further afield. There is also demand for condensate and natural gasoline to be used as diluent to reduce the viscosity of Western Canadian heavy crude bitumen. Today we describe MPLX and its sponsor Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s (MPC) recently announced long term takeaway transportation plans.

The Wall Street Journal

With all my cross-country traveling, I've always wondered about these toll roads. Today TWSJ has an article on these roads are doing. Not so well.  

Global investment firms such as Australia's Macquarie Group Ltd. and Spain's Ferrovial SA assembled toll-road deals, often financing them with heavy debt based on assumptions that rising toll receipts would cover payments.

But the financial crisis and recession defied assumptions. U.S. driving peaked at 3 trillion miles in 2007, then started on its largest decline since World War II, federal data show. The housing bust crimped development plans along new roads, helping render traffic forecasts inaccurate.

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Health insurance policy roll backs are not going to happen. No matter what the president promised. Period. Do. That train has left the station.

Many people whose existing health-insurance policies were canceled due to the new federal health law won't be able to extend them, despite President Barack Obama's request that insurers allow them to do so. Some carriers say they may not or won't reinstate canceled policies because of a lack of time to make changes and other obstacles. Others say the one-year extensions would come with higher rates. At least five states—New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Rhode Island—have rebuffed Mr. Obama, meaning insurers can't reinstate policies there even if they do so elsewhere.

The states are tracked here.



The fact that the president even suggested this (and that journalists lapped it up) tells me that neither (the president, nor the journalists) know how the insurance industry works nor what the insurers have learned from the roll out debacle.

Meanwhile, small firms are going to get killed with ObamaCare. I've been blogging about this from day 1.

When Patrick Norris renews his small business's health-care plan in March, he'll need to switch to a costlier plan that complies with the Affordable Care Act.

But that isn't the only reason why Mr. Norris, co-owner of a manufacturing company in New Iberia, LA, expects the premiums he pays on behalf of his 100 employees to be significantly higher in 2014.

Starting next year, small businesses are among those poised to bear the brunt of a little known tax created by the Affordable Care Act that will impose an annual "fee" on health-insurance companies. The fee is expected to bring in a total of $8 billion next year and as much as $14.3 billion by 2018, according to the legislation, and will be spread out among insurers based on the percent of the market they cover.

But the Congressional Budget Office and industry experts say the expense will largely be passed on to small businesses and consumers who buy their own policies in the form of higher premiums.

Well, duh, of course, the insurance companies are going to pass this "tax" on to the consumer. This is not rocket science.

But small businesses will listen to their CPAs and cost-shift their employees to the individual mandate. Doing so will solve several problems, as I've posted before.

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Update on Devon deal in Eagle Ford here.

Folks are missing the diesel export story. It's a huge story.

Op-Ed from TWSJ:

The ObamaCare train wreck is plowing through the White House in super slow-mo on screens everywhere, splintering reputations and presidential approval ratings.
Audiences watch popeyed as Democrats in distress like Senators Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor decide whether to cling to the driverless train or jump toward the tall weeds.

The heartless compilers of the Washington Post/ABC poll asked people to pick a head-to-head matchup now between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Mitt won. This is the most amazing spectacle of mayhem and meltdown anyone has seen in politics since Watergate. No question, it's tough on Barack Obama. But what about the rest of us?

For many Americans, the Obama leadership meltdown began five years ago. In fall 2008, the U.S. suffered its worst financial crisis since the Depression. That wasn't Barack Obama's fault.

But five years on, in the fall of 2013, the country's economy is still sick. Unemployed middle-aged men look in the mirror and see someone who may never work again. Young married couples who should be on the way up are living in their parents' basement. Many young black men (official unemployment rate 28%; unofficial rate off the charts) have no prospect of work.

Washington these days kvetches a lot about what Healthcare.gov is doing to the Obama "legacy." Far worse than ObamaCare, though, is that the 44th president in his second term presides over a great nation that is punching so far below its weight that large swaths of its people have lost heart.  

Time Magazine: Piling On

From Time:

A good President needs a big comfort zone. He should be able to treat enemies as opportunities, appear authentic in joy and grief, stay cool under the hot lights. But humility doesn't come naturally to those who decide they are qualified to run the free world. So the sign that the Obama presidency had reached a turning point came not when his poll numbers sank or his allies shuddered or the commentariat went hunting for the right degree of debacle to compare to the rollout of Obamacare.

It happened when he started apologizing. In triplicate. For not knowing what was going on in his own Administration. For failing to prevent his signature achievement from detonating in prime time. For not telling the whole truth when he promised people that Obamacare would not touch them without permission: "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."

Obama's supporters can decry a "feeding frenzy," but this is a critical moment for a President whose agenda for a second term amounted to little more than being not as lame as the other guy. The HealthCare.gov website may or may not get fixed on deadline, the senior staff may be booted and rebooted, but it is already too late to avoid a pageant of media scrutiny, Republican merriment, a rebuke even from Bill Clinton and a host of existential questions: Can this policy be saved? What is left of Obama's second term if it is consumed by fixing an unpopular policy from the first? How could a White House appear so confident and incompetent at the same time?

Catching Up From Yesterday

UN climate meltdown yesterday. Ends in disarray. The Daily Caller reports "epic fail."

Poor countries pulled out of the United Nations climate talks during a fight over transferring wealth from richer countries to fight global warming.

The G77 and China bloc led 132 poor countries in a walk out during talks about “loss and damage” compensation for the consequences of global warming that countries cannot adapt to, like Typhoon Haiyan. The countries that left claim to have the support of other coalitions of poor nations, including the Least Developed Countries, the Alliance of Small Island States and the Africa Group.

Poor countries have demanded that the developed world give them $100 billion annually by 2020 to prepare for the impacts of global warming, such as heat waves and droughts. Brazil even put forward a proposal last week that would have made rich countries pay for historical greenhouse gas emissions.

$100 billion annually. What a scam.