IS PUTIN REALLY MORE POWERFUL THAN OBAMA? “The second and far bigger point is that Barack Obama is weak internationally by choice. At home he’s amassing immense, unprecedented powers over the economy.”

SORRY GUYS, BUT YOU CAN LUMP IT: Billboard advocating jury nullification concerns local prosecutors. “The billboard is part of a growing national campaign to encourage jurors who disagree with a law, or think a punishment is too harsh, to vote for acquittal. Kirsten Tynan of the Montana-based Fully Informed Jury Association, whose name and Web address is included on the billboard, said the nonprofit group generally challenges crimes it calls ‘victimless,’ such as vandalism by graffiti or gun possession.”

For those interested, I highly recommend Clay S. Conrad’s Jury Nullification: The Evolution Of A Doctrine.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, the “graffiti” that Tynan was talking about was sidewalk-chalking. Here’s the case. The jury voted to acquit.

HELL, YES. PANIC! The Sriracha Factory Could Get Shut Down. Panic?

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INSTAVISION: I talk with Virginia Postrel about her new book, The Power Of Glamour: Longing And The Art Of Visual Persuasion.

ELIANA JOHNSON: Investigation IDs IRS Leaker.

SILENCING HARRY AND LOUISE: Investor’s Business Daily: Obama’s “Keep Your Plan” Lie Was Key To Getting ObamaCare Enacted. “Obama’s ‘keep your plan’ pledges were perfectly precise. By making this false claim and repeating it over and over again, he was able to convince those who had insurance that they’d be immune from ObamaCare.”

MILITARY HISTORY SKILL CHALLENGE: Freedom Academy’s Victor Davis Hanson challenges your knowledge of the top generals, based on his recent book The Savior Generals. Try your hand at these questions but be warned – the four weeks of challenges become very difficult. A score board shows the best ranking. Challenge #1: “Whom Did General Sherman Consider His Most Gifted Colleague?”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Number of LSAT Takers Continues To Drop.

UPDATE: More here (with cool graphic) and here. “When you pair this data with attendance levels at recent LSAC Law School Forums (law school fairs, essentially) in Boston (down 47% from last year), Houston (down 15.4% from last year) , Miami (down 16.3%), and New York (down 18%), law school admissions teams and law school deans are staring down some grim news.”

JAMES TARANTO: Another ObamaCare Victim: One man’s insurance cancellation is a cause for Schadenfreude.

He liked his health-insurance plan–or close enough: “It was there, and it did its job.” He seems to have believed President Obama, who said–and said and said and said–that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.

Now our protagonist has become “one of the hundreds of thousands of people whose insurance coverage was canceled for not complying with the terms of the Affordable Care Act,” the euphemism for ObamaCare. “As a result, not only will I pay more, but I have had to divert many otherwise useful hours to futzing around with websites and paperwork.”

Before ObamaCare, he paid $668 a month for a high-deductible plan. He actually managed to get through to his “state” exchange (he lives in the District of Columbia) and price a more or less comparable plan. It’s $865 a month, and the deductibles are higher, by $600 within the plan’s network and $1,200 without. By our calculations that means he will pay $2,364 more a year in premiums, and a total of $4,164 more if he maxes out on the deductibles.

Don’t get him wrong. He doesn’t want your pity. “I am not presenting myself as any kind of hard-luck case,” he insists. “Maybe from some social justice perspective it’s perfectly fair and reasonable to load all the costs of health reform onto people like me.”

Still, it hurts him that “this administration has been less than candid about what those costs would be.” And he’s not sure all people like him will be quite so magnanimous about what the Daily Beast headline calls “The Obamacare Ripoff.”

“Those Washingtonians who earn too much to qualify for subsidies probably do not regard themselves as wealthy,” he writes. “An extra $2,400 a year to keep a high-deductible policy may feel to many of them like–if not a hardship–then certainly a serious nuisance.” He adds that those people “probably voted for President Obama” and “probably believed his promise that the ACA would deliver improvements for them personally.”

Now this is especially rich because in 2010, just after the House sent the Senate’s ObamaCare bill to the president’s desk, Frum wrote a blog post titled “Waterloo” that was a work of either liberal triumphalism or conservative despair, depending on where Frum’s true sympathies lie. . . . Frum in 2010 didn’t criticize the Republicans for allowing the Democrats to achieve unchallengeable majority status. Instead he criticized them for opposing ObamaCare rather than making peace with it.

Heh.

THE FIRST RULE OF OBAMACARE CLUB IS DON’T TALK ABOUT OBAMACARE CLUB: Report: White House exerting ‘massive pressure’ on insurance companies to keep quiet about problems.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Death by Extortion: How Politicians and Crony Capitalists Are Destroying The American Dream.

WASHINGTON POST FACT-CHECER GIVES FOUR PINOCCHIOS TO Obama’s pledge that ‘no one will take away’ your health plan.

STUART ROTHENBERG: Louisiana Democrats Protest Too Much. Mary Landrieu’s most dangerous opponent is her vote for ObamaCare.

UPDATE: Reader Dan Zimmerman writes: “May she be the Senate’s Marjory Margolies-Mezvinsky.”

ED MORRISSEY: Obama’s Cynical Politics of Deception.

HOORAY! Deficit “only” $680 billion in 2013. On the upside, it’s Obama’s first less-than-a-trillion-dollar deficit. On the downside, what little spending reduction has occurred was because of the GOP House, not any tendency toward self-restraint on Obama’s part.

For more fun, compare this with the deficit for the last year the GOP held the House and Senate. . . . .

ED DRISCOLL ON DAVID FRUM, OBAMACARE, AND THE SHUTDOWN: What A Difference Two Weeks Make. Indeed.

BYRON YORK: In health care mess, Obama reaps what he sowed.

Given the Affordable Care Act’s multiple crises in its first month of implementation, there’s no way President Obama and his fellow Democrats could be having a good time right now. But imagine if, instead of passing national health care legislation with only Democratic votes in 2009 and 2010, the president had won even a little Republican support for his health scheme. What if Obamacare had passed with ten GOP votes in the Senate and 30 or 40 in the House? If that had happened, the program would still be a mess, but Obama’s political problems would be far less serious.

If Obama had 10 Republican senators and 30 or 40 GOP representatives on his side, those lawmakers would be invested in the program’s success. And the GOP would be effectively divided on Obamacare, instead of solidly united. Some Republican lawmakers would likely favor approving additional money for implementing the troubled program, or perhaps favor holding off on vigorous oversight for a while, or at least not attacking 24-hours-a-day. Instead, Obama is facing a solid wall of Republican opposition.

There’s a story about First Lady Hillary Clinton’s attempt to pass a national health care plan back in 1993 and 1994. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the old Democratic senator, told her that such far-reaching legislation had to pass with a really big majority to make sweeping changes in American life. “They pass 70-to-30, or they fail,” Moynihan told Clinton, according to a recent account by Todd Purdum in Politico.

Back in 1993, the Senate had 57 Democrats, meaning a major bill would have needed 13 Republican votes to pass Moynihan’s test. As it turned out, Clinton ignored Moynihan’s advice and her health care scheme went down in flames.

In 2009 and 2010, Barack Obama had an edge Clinton didn’t have: three more Democrats in the Senate. That 60-vote total gave Obama a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and the opportunity to pass national health care with only Democratic votes. (With 256 Democrats in the House, passage there was a done deal.) But Obama’s Senate supermajority was fragile and fleeting. As it turned out, Democrats had the briefest of moments in which they could pass such a far-reaching law by themselves. And even then, the troubled supermajority was unable to deliver the kind of broad support Moynihan felt necessary for such consequential legislation.

The in-your-face behavior of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid team isn’t inspiring any charity from the opposition, either. Nor should it.

WHEN SCIENCE PROVES THE OBVIOUS: Tennessee’s Southern Accent Ranked Most Attractive Accent In North America. But, you know, the science is settled.

OOPS: Obama’s Approval Hits New Low in Poll as Discontent Extends Beyond the GOP.

The popular discontent that engulfed Republicans amid the partial government shutdown has now washed over President Barack Obama, whose job approval rating has sunk to an all-time low in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Americans just weeks ago heaped scorn largely on congressional Republicans over the dysfunction in Washington. But the new poll found a sharp turn against Mr. Obama, during a month in which lawmakers tiptoed up to a potential debt default and the White House fumbled the rollout of its signature health-care law.

Mr. Obama’s job approval fell to 42%, with 51% of respondents disapproving of his performance as president. That marked a drop in his approval rating from 47% in early October and 53% at the end of 2012.

At the same time, more Americans now view Mr. Obama negatively than positively, for the first time since he emerged as a national political candidate.

In all, the poll of 800 Americans captured an extraordinarily deep and widespread public distaste for the two political parties, those parties’ leaders and the state of politics in the nation’s capital.

Well, we do have the worst political class in American history. But the big news is Obama going underwater in personal approval — not just job approval — for the first time.

LIKE PEELING AN ONION OF FAIL (CONT’D): Healthcare.gov appears to violate White House guidance on web security.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Obama’s Big Lie.

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WELL I WAS PRAYIN’ LAST NIGHT WHEN AN ANGEL BROKE THE LINE. . . .

LEGAL DOCUMENT OF THE YEAR: Small-town Tennessee Defense Lawyer’s Response to Prosecution’s Motion to Prevent defense from referring to Them as “the Government.” Love it.