WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: With Obama Weakened, His Trade Initiatives Are In Trouble.

Congress is essentially giving trade negotiators a license to make commitments that involve substantial changes in US domestic policy. TPA does more than facilitate trade negotiations; it transfers power from the legislative to the executive branch.

That is problematic for Constitutional theoreticians. And in a very practical sense this is a problem for Congressional representatives. Laws that affect important industries are Congress’ bread and butter. Literally. Laws like that attract lobbyists and campaign contributions. Industry desperately wants influence over bills that affect the basic regulations of their business, so a nice juicy regulatory bill is a kind of ATM for Congressional representatives yielding lots of campaign contributions. TPA shifts all the discretionary power to the White House, however. All those lobbyists that want to influence the content of a trade deal that covers hundreds of industries and issues, will ignore Congress and descend on the executive branch.

The move by two-thirds of House Democrats to oppose giving Obama TPA is a revolt against this surrender of power and money to the White House, and it is a sign that the Obamacare rollout among other things has weakened the President’s hold on his own party. Just as we are seeing Democratic senators looking for ways to repeal or amend important features of the health care law, we are seeing House Democrats turning on a key element of the President’s second term agenda.

It’s too soon to tell whether these challenges signal a permanently weakened White House, but they are a sign that even as the President slips in the polls, his authority within the political system is being challenged. (Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog this morning declared “a new low for the Obama administration.”)

The strong horse and the weak horse.

PAUL HSIEH: Will Tomorrow’s Medical Innovations Be There When You Need Them?

RULE OF LAW IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Megan McArdle: ObamaCare Is Whatever Obama Says It Is. “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Obamacare is going very badly indeed, and that the president knows it is going very badly. Until sometime in late October, he was clearly still confident that, despite some setbacks and embarrassments, the system would soon be up and working, and the public would rally behind it. Now he sees his polls rapidly declining, and with them the political capital that he may need to fix any further problems that crop up. Turning the insurers into scapegoats, when he still needs their help to make this law work, was an act of desperation. How many acts does this play have left?”

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INSTAVISION: I interview Gregory Zuckerman, about his new book, The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters.

ROGER SIMON: Obama Should Resign Over ObamaCare.

ACCOUNTABILITY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Congress Unlikely to Intervene in ‘Stand Down’ Controversy.

POLITICO: Obama’s Dysfunctional Relationship With The Military. “Was there a single moment when Obama’s relationship with the military began to sour? Most observers point to the bruising 2009 debates about troop numbers in Afghanistan.” Tellingly, Obama got this one wrong, adding more troops, but not enough troops. And this take seems applicable to more than military affairs: “There’s a sense that the White House wants contradictory, impossible things … but won’t resource them.”

NATIONAL JOURNAL: ObamaCare’s Problems Could Haunt Democrats For Years.

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The President’s ObamaCare Backpedal: His proposal to allow people to keep their health plans will not provide a political escape hatch for beleaguered congressional Democrats.

Mr. Obama took to the podium in the White House briefing room to explain that yes, some Americans may indeed now keep the health-care plans they like. Maybe. If insurers can undo three years of work in a few weeks. If state regulators can move at similar lightning speed. So long as the old plans come with new warning labels. And with the understanding that those Americans lucky enough to receive a renewal option can only keep the plans they “like” for a further year. Those giant caveats aside, the president wishes you good fortune.

This small turnabout was nonetheless a humiliating concession for Mr. Obama, whose press secretary, Jay Carney, only a few days ago was ripping the idea of allowing insurers to continue selling “substandard” plans. His hand was forced by a growing mob of congressional Democrats who are getting slammed over cancellations, and who threatened revolt if the administration didn’t act.

The primary purpose of the White House “fix” was to get out ahead of the planned Friday vote on Michigan Republican Fred Upton’s “Keep Your Health Plan Act.” The stage was set for dozens of Democrats to join with the GOP for passage—potentially creating a veto-proof majority, and putting enormous pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to follow suit.

The White House couldn’t risk such a bipartisan rebuke. Moreover, the Upton bill—while it lacks those GOP joy words of “delay” or “repeal”—poses a threat, since it would allow insurers to continue providing non-ObamaCare policies to any American who wants one. Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s version of the bill would in fact (unconstitutionally) order insurers to offer the plans in perpetuity. Both bills undermine the law’s central goal of forcing healthy people into costly ObamaCare exchange plans that subsidize the sick.

The president’s “fix” is designed to limit such grandfathering, but that’s why it is of dubious political help to Democrats. Within minutes of Mr. Obama’s announcement, several Democratic senators, including North Carolina’s Kay Hagan —whose poll numbers have plummeted in advance of her 2014 re-election bid—announced that they remain in favor of Landrieu-style legislation.

And the White House “fix” doesn’t save Democrats from having to take a vote on the Upton bill. A yes vote is a strike at the president and an admission that the law Democrats passed is failing. A no vote is tailor-made for political attack ads and requires a nuanced explanation of why the president’s “fix” is better than Upton’s. Which it isn’t.

I have to confess, I’m kind of enjoying this.

USA TODAY: Analysis: For Obama, his presidency is at stake.

DENIAL: House Democrats: Obamacare is working, no apology needed. Nancy Pelosi seems almost clinically detached from reality.

FRAUD: To pass health plan, Obama and Dems kept mum about its downsides.

The journalist Jonathan Cohn, an ardent supporter of Obamacare, recently wrote in The New Republic that problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act should be “an opportunity to have a serious conversation about the law’s tradeoffs — the one that should have happened a while ago.”

Cohn is right that there was no serious conversation about those tradeoffs back when Congress was considering the law’s passage in 2009 and 2010. But why was that? It was because President Obama and his Democratic allies could not speak seriously — and honestly — about those tradeoffs and still pass their bill.

So instead, Obama assured Americans they could keep health care policies they liked. And it wasn’t just Obama. “One of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in August 2009. “If you like what you have, you can keep it,” said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October of the same year.

Many, many Democrats promised the same thing. They had to. If they had declared openly that millions of Americans would lose their current coverage and face higher premiums and deductibles — if Obama and Democratic leaders had said that, they would not have been able to maintain party unity in support of the bill, and the Affordable Care Act would never have passed Congress.

It would not have mattered that Republicans opposed the bill unanimously. A frank public discussion of Obamacare would have divided Democratic support, with the result being no new law at all.

But now, as the reality of Obamacare begins to present itself in the lives of millions of Americans, the president and his party can no longer avoid an honest look at the law they passed. And one part of that honesty will be examining what they said when they passed Obamacare. There will likely be a lot of accountability in coming months.

Despite their best efforts to avoid it.

RICH HAILEY: Do We Live In A Police State?

CHANGE: J.D. Tuccille: Democrats’ Grip on the Future Slips Away as Techies, Young Retch in Disgust. “Just last year, Nate Silver told us that President Obama had a lock on Silicon Valley checkbooks, and only weeks ago, USA Today predicted that young voters promised to turn Virginia into a donkey party province. And in such a short time, without any assistance from the largely self-sabotaging major opposition party, the Democrats have managed to piss off both constituencies. The future may well be democratic, but it’s looking less certainly Democratic by the day.”

Hey, the Republicans may be the Stupid Party, but nobody said they were the only one. . . .

HOW’S OBAMA DOING? Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post: “The promise and the apology are the bookends of effective politics. President Obama has, tragically and perhaps irreparably, flubbed both. . . . Can he recover? I’m sorry to say: I’m not at all confident.”

Frankly, he doesn’t deserve to recover. He not only committed — as Marcus terms it — “political malpractice,” he also lied and then apparently sent a trillion-dollar project off to be managed without keeping tabs on it, so that it blew up in his face. At some level, I suppose, it’s not his fault that he’s utterly unqualified for the job he holds. But it is his fault that he sought it out twice, and lied to get it.

COMPETENCE: Regulators ‘unclear’ on O-Care fix plan. “President Obama’s proposed fix for ObamaCare may not work in practice, according to state insurance regulators who would help implement the policy. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) suggested Thursday that the plan to allow insurance companies to offer non-compliant health plans into 2014 is not logistically feasible.”

Related: Insurers: Obama’s fix could cause chaos.

NEW YORK TIMES: Parallels to Bush in Toxic Political Mix Threatening Obama.

Barack Obama won the presidency by exploiting a political environment that devoured George W. Bush in a second term plagued by sinking credibility, failed legislative battles, fractured world relations and revolts inside his own party.

Mr. Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but has also raised questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

Ouch!

THE WEEK: How Silicon Valley Turned On President Obama. “”There’s a strong libertarian streak that dampens support for the Obama administration… Entrepreneurs don’t like the government telling them what they can or can’t do with their bodies or their wallets. . . . One of the biggest advantages the Obama campaign had in the last election cycle was the technical team that wrote their grassroots organizing software. The NSA revelations have seriously damaged technologists’ trust in government, and I think recruiting a similar team for the next elections would be much more difficult.”

Frankly, I’d like to see a list of the names of those who participated in the prior effort. I think they owe America an apology. . . .

IF YOU MISSED IT EARLIER, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND READ JONAH GOLDBERG’S DELIGHTFUL PIECE ON THE OBAMACARE DEBACLE. Excerpt:

If Obamacare had been a shining success from Day One, do you think the Democrats would be in the mood to share the credit? Then why should Republicans be in more of a mood to share the blame?

Feel free to cross your fingers that reality will bend to the gravitational pull of Obama’s stellar ego, his invincible hubris. As for me, I’ll be sitting on the sidelines cheering on Nemesis, with joy in my heart.

Heh. Indeed.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Gallup: Americans trimming — not their tree — but their holiday budget.

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KYLE SMITH: 5 Liberal Myths About JFK.

STACY MCCAIN: What does this have to do with Lena Dunham’s vagina? Everything.

ADVICE TO CRIMINALS on how to load a magazine.