Wednesday -- February 25, 2015; Huge Earnings Report For Target

This is really quite amazing, concerning all the headwinds: the DOW, S&P, and NASDAQ are all trading at or near new highs. Target is particularly interesting among the companies reporting today. 

Reporting today:

• Babcock and Wilcox (BWC), forecast 44 cents; beats by 21 cents; press release here;
• Chesapeake (CHK), forecast 24 cents; huge miss, 11 cents; beats on revenue; shares slump 10%;
• Halcon (HK), forecast 0; beats by 5 cents; press release here;
• Oasis (OAS), forecast 57 cents; huge miss, 35 cents; press release here;
• St Joe (JOE), forecast a loss of 16 cents; after market close;
• Target (TGT), forecast $1.46, huge beat; $1.50; sales grow at fastest rate in 3 years;
• Transocean (RIG), forecast 77 cents; after market close;
• Whiting (WLL), forecast 50 cents; misses, 44 cents; shares rise; press release here; 
• CLR: forecast 55 cents; big beat, $1.14 (due to one-time items); 

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A Note to the Granddaughters

Back on May 6, 2014, I mentioned that I was reading / had almost completed Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist, c. 2013. Ms Morgan was one woman among 901 employees at North American Aviation (later renamed Rocketdyne). She was the inventor of hydyne -- the rocket propellant that boosted America's first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit. Her invention helped rescue America's tarnished reputation in the wake of Russia's launch of Sputnik 1 and 2.

I happened to pick the book up again this morning, for something to read while waiting to pick up the granddaughters for school. It's an incredible book.

Her story stands in stark contrast to President Obama's veto of the Keystone XL.

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Speaking Of The Veto

This is kind of interesting. Generally the number of comments to any business article run from none (0) to maybe 20. Occasionally there maybe 50 comments but it's rare. Don told me to look at the number of comments to the AP article after President Obama vetoed the Keystone XL. Within the first few hours, the number of comments exceeded 14,000. Today, the number is up to over 17,000. The general gist of the comments decried the short-sightedness (and other words to describe) the president's veto, especially coming just days after that horrific railroad derailment in West Virginia carrying highly explosive Bakken crude oil.

This is from the Fiscal Times:

The bipartisan nature of the vote (in Congress) represented, and perhaps underrepresented, the broad approval of Keystone XL among the American electorate. A CNN poll in January showed that 57 percent of Americans wanted it approved, while only 28 percent opposed it. ...

With this level of general agreement on a significant issue, one might think that a president who wants to find ways to “work together” with Republicans on bipartisan initiatives, as Obama repeatedly promised, would have signed the Keystone XL bill. That, however, assumes that Obama wants to “work together,” and actually supports moderate and bipartisan initiatives. This veto shows clearly that Obama, as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said in his response to Obama’s action, is “a pawn of the radical Left.”

Obama has talked about generating jobs in America. The Keystone XL project would create tens of thousands of direct and indirect good paying jobs for the duration of its construction phase, and would continue to support job creation in Louisiana, a point Jindal emphasized in his response as well.

The Obama administration has been dismissive of this claim, pointing out that the jobs would be temporary. That’s true – but the mythical “shovel-ready jobs” from Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan were just as temporary, if not more so, being mostly generated in public-infrastructure maintenance that only lasted a few months to a year. Plus, this project did not require massive government spending, as the companies that benefit from the pipeline would have funding most of the effort. It would cost Obama almost nothing to create those jobs other than the ink it took to affix his signature to the legislation.

The statement that Obama issued with his veto fumbled through excuses and hypocrisy while failing to give any good reason for blocking the project. He accused Congress of “attempt[ing] to circumvent longstanding and proven processes” for approving cross-border pipelines. Congress intervened, though, because Obama sat on the project for the entire six years of his presidency rather than allow those processes to come to a conclusion.

Obama insisted that he wants to wait for the existing process, through the State Department, to be complete before making a decision on Keystone. A decision now “cuts short through consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest,” Obama states, as though six years isn’t sufficient time to consider anything.

We fought and defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan simultaneously in less than four years. In this case, State issued a finding over a year ago that the pipeline project would be neutral on climate change and would not have a serious impact on the environment. That was actually the second time in two years the State Department reached that conclusion. Congress didn’t attempt to circumvent the process; they want Obama to quit stalling.

I don't think the president has done one thing in his administration on his own; he has always let others run the show. Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Baucus ran the ObamaCare show. And now with the Keystone, he says he wants the State Department to take the lead.

President Obama: leading from behind. Actually not even leading; most golfing. Enjoying the good life, along with Michelle.

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Another Note To the Granddaughters

One of the pleasures I often share with our older granddaughter is stargazing. I keep a huge, circular star map in the back of the car just for that purpose. Growing up in Williston, I remember that whenever walking home late at night -- especially during the winter -- I would look for the North Star, the Big Dipper, and Aurora Borealis. It appears that down here in Texas, the constellation Orion is the easier one to find, and then, of course, one can find the rest.

A reader sent me a link to a story on other stargazers: Forbes is reporting --

A mission by the European Space Agency to measure and map the Milky Way promises to give astronomers a precise, detailed, and three-dimensional view of our galaxy. The five-year project will generate more than a petabyte of data on the makeup, position, motion, and other characteristics of a billion stars.

The satellite will record the position, brightness, and color of every “celestial object” within view. In fact, it will measure them repeatedly. That way, astronomers will be able to calculate the distance, speed, and direction of motion of the objects and chart variations in their brightness.

The thing that struck me about this story, is the absolute immensity of the universe. This project is "simply" tracking the stars in the Milky Way.

 The mission will result in a 3D map of the Milky Way that plots stars to a distance of 30,000 light years. An earlier star-mapping ESA mission called Hipparcos—launched in 1989 and concluded a few years later—recorded about 118,000 stars at distances of 300 light years.

Even with the vast scope of this mission—mapping a billion stars over five years—Gaia is only scratching the surface of what’s out there. The Milky Way contains more than 100 billion stars.

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Nope, Incorrect

The headline is absolutely incorrect. Kemp has a long piece in Rigzone, February 25, 2015, commenting on President Obama's veto of the Keystone XL.

I've always "respected" Kemp but the headline really caught my attention:

Kemp: Keystone Shows Environmental Review Process Is Broken

Say what? The presidential veto of the Keystone XL bill (and the president's long objection to the Keystone XL) has nothing to do with the environmental review process. This was all politics and ideology, though I imagine more politics than ideology.

Fortunately the article is much more "correct" than the headline. Early in the commentary:

But by citing established procedures and the need not to short cut a thorough examination of the issues, after more than six years of environmental reviews, the president's staff demonstrated they have absolutely no sense of irony and a deeply cynical approach to governing.

The president's advisers insist the administration has not yet taken a decision on the merits of the pipeline and is still waiting for the State Department to finish its long-delayed review.

The president's spokesman has insisted it is still "certainly possible" that he could authorise the pipeline in the normal way if he concludes that is in the national interest.
The administration insists its objections are procedural and centre on the attempt to take a decision that is notionally about foreign relations, a traditional area of executive branch prerogative, out of the president's hands.

But the fiction that the administration is keeping an open mind about the project while insisting the normal process is observed is becoming impossible to sustain.

The president himself has made a series of increasingly critical comments in recent months about the pipeline which strongly suggest he has made up his mind to reject it.

On the other hand that sounds very naive. Everyone in the US knew the president would veto the bill. I assume before rejecting the bill, he called both Reid and Pelosi to confirm he was doing what they wanted him to do.