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Will Justice Robert's Obamacare vote prove perverse for Democrats who were initially exuberant. (See 1 below.)
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Daniel Henninger,always offers sober thinking. (See 2 below.)
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The market's closing suggests investors see a murky outlook and much of this uncertainty is a by product of Obamacare hype and disbelief it will be what the White House would have us believe, the question of whether Obama can recover from his disastrous five years of inept leadership, will the Middle East explode as Iran goes nuclear,whether China becomes less belligerent towards its neighbors, can our economy recover considering the burdensome rules and regulations which have negatively impacted corporate decision making, what will be the effect of The Fed's withdrawal actions and that is just the most evident list of problems and uncertainties.
I would expect a more sober investment atmosphere in view of last year's euphoric recovery. But then there is Professor Siegel's more optimistic forecast. (See 3 below.)
Time will tell.
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In five years Obama has: shown disdain for the Catholic Church, has not lifted a finger to speak out in defense of Middle East Christians who have been slaughtered, has displayed more sympathy with the Muslim Brotherhood than he has with our Democratic Ally, Israel, has basically abdicated our commanding role in the Middle East, turned his back on Egypt and Saudi Arabia, sicked the IRS on his political opposition, has lied enumerable times about health care and his Administration's weapon debacle involving to Mexican Drug Lords, has made illegal , if not downright unconstitutional appointments claiming The Senate was not in session when it was, has made legislative changes outside the scope of his presidential authority and the list seems endless.
He has consistently blamed others for his own failures, has been absent during critical events, one such leading to the death of Americans it appears he failed to protect and he has chosen to reduce our nation's footprint leaving our allies querulous about our leadership intentions.
Meanwhile, he has spent recklessly and favored friends and campaign contributors who have squandered billions and failed to deliver a working product when it came to the health care launch.
'What difference does it make'seems to be the uncompromising driving force behind this administration's philosophy of governance.
These are not false accusations, these are not baseless accusations, these are not contrived and frivolous
attacks.
These comments pertain to actual events, actual happenings.
How much voters are willing to tolerate is a function , in large part, of the disrepute in which Congress is seen and unlessRepublicans can present a united front, speak with focused singularity and make a lucid case Obama will continue to have an open field day which he will take advantage of it because that is the nature of the man and his recent staffing suggests nothing less.
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Dick
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1) The Roberts Trap Is Sprung
By Bill Dunne
One of the most overlooked aspects of the year just ended is the vindication of Chief Justice John Roberts -- a vindication that showed up as the national catastrophe known as ObamaCare got rolling. Roberts may have also doomed Hillary Clinton's chance to live in the White House again.
The chief justice, an appointee of President George W. Bush and reputedly a constitutionalist in his jurisprudence, set his diabolical trap (diabolical to Democrats) on June 28, 2012, when he joined with the four liberal justices on the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of ObamaCare. Conservatives and Republicans across the land were apoplectic. But in hindsight, it appears that Roberts actually saved the Republican Party from going into a death spiral and imperiled the Democrats instead. This suggests amazing foresight, but it wouldn't be the only instance.
For example, Tevi Troy, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, made a remarkable prophecy a year and a half before the Court's decision. It was soon after the November 2010 midterm elections, in which Democrats in Congress and in state legislatures suffered huge losses. In an article in Commentary magazine, Troy wrote:
The Pyrrhic victory Democrats secured for themselves [when President Obama signed theAffordable Care Act into law] may prove not to have been a victory at all but rather an ever-roiling, ongoing, and recurring act of political and ideological self-destruction.
How's that for prescience?
When the Supreme Court ruling came down, a shocked conservative historian, Paul Rahe, cited as a cause the PR pressure that President Barack Obama had been exerting on the Court in the fevered weeks leading up to the decision. It was "an act of judicial cowardice," he fumed. But then he added, "There is, I am confident, more to it than this."
What that "more" consists of has been growing more apparent by the day -- with the ongoing and painfully obvious parade of disasters, and the accelerated emergence of government by decree.
The Court also invalidated two key provisions that were held to violate state sovereignty and the foundational concept of federalism. Each state was thereby free, if it chose (as many have), to decline the federal invitation to expand its Medicaid program, and free to not set up a state exchange to sell ACA-compliant policies.
ObamaCare's goose might have been cooked right there. But Roberts then turned to what seemed the most farfetched of the alternative arguments for upholding the law. And he embraced it.
That argument asserted that the law's explicit "penalty" for an individual who failed to buy health insurance was not really a penalty. Lower courts had deemed a penalty to be of doubtful constitutionality. So Roberts agreed with the government's lawyers that the "penalty" was actually a tax, and the levying of taxes is of course a legitimate power of Congress.
Law rewritten on the bench has seldom had such a glaring example. In effect, Roberts single-handedly forced all Americans to face -- up front and personal -- the epic political malpractice that is ObamaCare. "It is not our job," he added, "to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices." Wow. Tough love.
The thing is, however, that the decision has spawned another Great Awakening, because ObamaCare is a civics lesson from hell, with vast implications for America's future. This would not be happening if the law had been squelched in the cradle. People who ordinarily couldn't care less about wonky debates over federal power now see that the law has less to do with insuring the uninsured than with one political party's lunge for unprecedented power and control over people's lives.
Imagine, though, if the chief justice had opined as everyone expected him to and joined with Scalia, Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy (ironically the swing vote whom ObamaCare opponents were most worried about) to guillotine the law then and there. The reduction of Mr. Obama's "crowning achievement" to just a gigantic waste of time when a dismal economy was begging for attention might well have cost him his re-election five months later.
But consider the alternative scenario. Howls of outrage would have erupted from every Democrat/leftist stronghold -- from the White House to Congress, from Hollywood to academia, and of course from the establishment media. The din would have been relentless. The smearing of small-government Republicans as selfish meanies would be easy as pie and more effective than ever.
Nancy Pelosi would be speaker of the House again after next November's mid-term elections. Harry Reid would certainly remain as Senate majority leader. President Obama would be striding mightily across the national stage. His promised fundamental transformation of the United States of America would continue. Hillary Clinton would be a shoe-in for the White House in 2016. And "single-payer" -- full-bore socialist medicine -- would be a slam-dunk. HillaryCare redux.
Perhaps worst of all, from Roberts's point of view, the Court's great prestige would suffer. Left-leaning historians, which means most historians, would be lumping the Court's killing of ObamaCare with Bush v. Gore and Citizens Unitedto paint the Court as a right-wing political operation.
My, how different is the real reality. Democrats are looking ahead in abject terror at the November midterms. And when those results come in, when Obama's lame-duckness grows acute, it's possible to imagine conservatives and Republicans being ready to let the far-seeing John Roberts out of the dog house.
Bill Dunne runs an executive-communications consultancy in Norwalk, CT.
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2)
Time for a Big-League President
The antidote to global chaos is American leadership.
By Daniel Henninger
As the year turns, the subject becoming impossible to duck is growing global disorder. The days before the New Year brought two suicide bombings in Russia and a major political assassination in Lebanon. Throw a dart randomly at a map of the Middle East or Southeast Asia and it will hit trouble.
It is no surprise that in conversations of late one hears invocations of the 1930s. Or that a popular book to give this season has been Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914."
Whether the world in 2014 will tip from containment to chaos or war is not the subject here. The subject is rediscovering the antidote to war, which is strong global leadership. The world we inhabit now doesn't have enough of it. Or any of it for that matter.
Russia's Vladimir Putin runs Russia with soft Stalinism while he intimidates nations on the Russian periphery to bend under his control. Some are resisting the Russian heavy. President Xi Jinping governs a China that is rediscovering Maoist nationalism internally and challenges neighbors from Japan to the South China Sea. They, too, are resisting.
Former Lebanese finance minister Mohammad Shatah was assassinated in Beirut, Dec. 27 European Pressphoto Agency
In the Middle East, the flowers have fallen from the Arab Spring. Egypt is run by a de facto military junta, Syria by a war criminal, and Iran by a Cheshire cat named Rouhani. The Saudis, after downgrading their alliance with the U.S., promised this week to send $3 billion in military aid to Lebanon as leverage against Iran's ally, Hezbollah.
The West's leaders are distracted or disinterested. President François Hollande has the lowest approval rating of any French head of state in 50 years. Angela Merkel can't extend her leadership beyond Germany's borders.
Only one thing really matters in an unsettled world: the quality of U.S. leadership. And so amid global unease came the disturbingly smug selfie photo of Barack Obama, David Cameron and the prime minister of Denmark at the Mandela funeral.
Of the three or four phrases from this presidency that will live past 2016, one we may see quoted in a future Margaret MacMillan-type history is that in the affairs of the world, Mr. Obama was leading from behind. What this often means is that the American president goes with the flow of opinion polls.
Because polls say Americans are in an isolationist mood, Mr. Obama won't spend political capital outside the country—Ukraine, Syria, Asia. He wants to spend what capital he has left consolidating internal federal authority. The Iran nuclear deal is an obsession, similar to promoting windmills after the fracking revolution.
It falls to the rest of the political class in the U.S. to recognize that one of the clearest signs of a potentially dangerous breakdown in international order isn't just poor leadership. Worse is when national populations in many places lose faith in their leadership. During normal times, what comes next is just another government. But in a world with as many disturbances as now, what comes with intense national disaffection and frustration is rarely good. Surly publics often open themselves to anti-political solutions.
To repeat, the antidote to a world running along the cliff's edge is strong Americanleadership. That won't return until 2017 at the earliest. But it is not too early to expect candidates for the U.S. presidency to start talking about the world. The next president will have no grace period and no learning curve. Barack Obama will leave behind two terms worth of restoration work with allies and redos of his resets with enemies. That will begin on day one, which is some 1,000 days away.
What we are likely to get from these candidates is hard to predict since both parties have internal factions with no interest in the world beyond Netflix's international thriller queue.
The Democrats in their current progressive incarnation are the wrong party at the wrong time. The Obama edition of left-wing isolationism is about one thing: reprogramming money out of defense and global security back into domestic spending. Hillary Clinton must have learned something in all those foreign capitals about America's AWOL leadership, but the left won't want to hear it. What they want are acts of fealty, such as Bill Clinton yesterday swearing in New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive lifer. For the left, leadership is grandiose personalities riding populist waves of domestic economic grievance.
On the right, what we learned from this summer's government shutdown is that even the U.S. can fill up fast with sentiment that wants to pull down the status-quo temple no matter how high the rubble. It's a populism that sucks the life out of the possibility of serious political accomplishment.
The pedestrian reality is that politicians spend most of their time plotting to get power, then assume they'll figure out how to lead once they're in power. These are not pedestrian times. Barack Obama has proven that rookie leaders won't work in the world we've got now. If the U.S. wants to remain a big-league nation, it's going to have to elect a big-league president.
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3)
Wharton's Siegel: Dow Could Break 21,000 This Year
The stock market should keep right on climbing this year amid strong earnings and economic growth and an expanding price-earnings multiple, says market guru Jeremy Siegel, a finance professor at the Wharton.
Fair market value for the
But, "one thing we know is that bull markets usually don't stop at fair market value," Siegel explain
"Bull markets usually carry 10 to 20 percent beyond that. I'm not going to say that's going to happen this year. I'm just saying it certainly could happen."
A 20 percent rise beyond his fair value would put the Dow at 21,600.
Siegel bases his forecast on 5 percent profit growth. "And that very well could be quite conservative," he notes. "When you include the buybacks, leverage, etc., we could have another 8 to 10 percent earnings. And that would drive the fair market value from 18,000 to 19,000, maybe even a little bit higher."
As for GDP, he expects growth of more than 3 percent, perhaps even 4 percent, in 2014.
And while many peg a fair value price-earnings ratio at 15, Siegel says that in this low interest-rate environment, it should be 18 to 19.
Many experts forecast modest market gains for 2014 after the Dow generated a 29.7 percent total return in 2013.
"Our position is the year will bring a much more moderate return and more volatility," Stuart Freeman, chief equity strategist at
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