"Conservatives had better start paying attention to the budget battle raging in Washington: If things go south — and they are poised to do just that — the tea party’s single greatest policy victory, the sequester, could be destroyed. And worse yet, it could be destroyed in exchange for nothing. ... 

'"The sequester is the only place where conservatives have gotten a victory,' Americans for Prosperity spokeswoman Nicole Kaebing told The Daily Caller. 'It’s the one place where we have gotten both parties and the president to agree to actually cut spending. It’s silly to walk that back. We have this victory, and Republicans should not be voting to increase government spending.'"

"Obama is playing a strange game: The more he speaks untruthfully, the more he resorts to emphatic intensifiers that instead confirm that he is speaking untruthfully. In turn, Obama’s audiences play an even stranger game: The more they hear their president speak, the more they are impressed that he can sound so sincere in being so nonchalantly insincere and mellifluously misleading. When I first heard, 'You can keep your doctor and your health plan,' I thought, 'That can’t be true; he knows it can’t be true; and the American people must know it can’t be true' — and, then, I shrugged: 'But he’s hit upon a winning lie.' 

"And so he did — until now."

"Six months after the Internal Revenue Service's inspector general revealed that the tax-collection agency had been targeting conservative organizations for added scrutiny and delaying their applications for tax-exempt status, the IRS has proposed new rules for handling political activity by nonprofits. The proposed rules would plunge the agency deeper into political regulation. 

"The rules would upset more than 50 years of settled law and practice by limiting the ability of certain tax-exempt nonprofits, organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, to conduct nonpartisan voter registration and voter education. Such organizations would be forbidden to leave records of officeholder votes and public statements on their websites in the two months before an election. ... 

"This is not about taxes, so what is it really about? 

"What the left wants is the disclosure of private information about conservative donors. In cases involving unions, the NAACP and other civil-rights organizations in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, the Supreme Court made clear that people have a right to engage in anonymous political activity."

"It’s not the voters who hate Obamacare the most who are going to matter in next year’s elections. It’s the independents who frequently side with Democrats but could, if propelled by a distaste for the health care law, take a serious look at the GOP in 2014. And on this front, Democrats have a big problem with one of their most crucial constituencies — white women. 

"Polling provided to National Journal by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that white women have soured considerably on the law, especially in the month since its botched rollout. The skepticism runs especially deep among blue-collar women, sometimes known as 'waitress moms,' whose deeply pessimistic attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act should riddle Democratic candidates with anxiety. ... 

"According to Kaiser, 40 percent of college-educated white women hold a 'very unfavorable' view of the law — 10 points higher than a month ago. An additional 10 percent view the law 'somewhat unfavorably.' A month ago, those two groups together totaled just 42 percent. ...   

"And that’s not all. Democrats should be far more worried about white women who do not have a higher education. The numbers are astounding: In the latest Kaiser poll, 50 percent have a 'very unfavorable' view of the law — 9 points higher than in October. An additional 13 percent view it 'somewhat unfavorably.' Indeed, antipathy among blue-collar white women runs even deeper than the most conservative white demographic group, blue-collar white men (59 percent of whom hold an unfavorable view, Kaiser found)."

"Young Americans are turning against Barack Obama and Obamacare, according to a new survey of millennials, people between the ages of 18 and 29 who are vital to the fortunes of the president and his signature health care law. 

"The most startling finding of Harvard University's Institute of Politics: A majority of Americans under age 25 -- the youngest millennials -- would favor throwing Obama out of office. 

"The survey, part of a unique 13-year study of the attitudes of young adults, finds that America's rising generation is worried about its future, disillusioned with the U.S. political system, strongly opposed to the government's domestic surveillance apparatus, and drifting away from both major parties. 'Young Americans hold the president, Congress and the federal government in less esteem almost by the day, and the level of engagement they are having in politics are also on the decline,' reads the IOP's analysis of its poll. 'Millennials are losing touch with government and its programs because they believe government is losing touch with them.' 

"The results blow a gaping hole in the belief among many Democrats that Obama's two elections signaled a durable grip on the youth vote."

"Mr. Obama’s problem now is that people think he is smart. 

"They think, as they look at his health-care vows, that either he didn’t know how bad his program was, what dislocations it would cause, what a disturbance it would be to the vast middle class of America . . . 

"Or he knew, and deliberately misled everyone.  

"If they thought he wasn’t very bright, they might give him some leeway on that question. But they think he’s really smart.  

"So they think he knew. 

"And deliberately misled."

"President Obama needs to fire himself. Not literally, of course, but practically: He needs to shake up his team so thoroughly that the new blood imposes change on how he manages the federal bureaucracy and leads. 

"A series of self-inflicted wounds during his fifth year in office, capped by the botched launch of the Affordable Care Act, have Americans questioning the president's competence and credibility. History suggests that second-term presidents rarely recover after their approval ratings fall as much as Obama's have this year. 

"History also suggests that there are two types of White House shake-ups. The first is mostly cosmetic and is aimed at sending a signal that the president is serious. He fires somebody, anybody, as a sacrificial lamb. The second is deep cleansing -- that rare occasion when a president rebuilds his team to change himself. 

"The latter is what Obama must do."

"For now, congressional Democrats — who've been distancing themselves from Obamacare with increasing frequency by political necessity — can take some comfort in the Web site fixes the administration just announced. For a while, it seemed like each day brought worse news about Obamacare than the last. Sunday was not one of those days, at least according to early data. 

"But the larger fight to define Obamacare is just warming up. And nothing the administration announced Sunday did anything to change that."

"Perhaps no custom reveals our character as a Nation so clearly as our celebration of Thanksgiving Day."

"For years, GOP warnings about Obamacare were about something that had not yet arrived. People had not experienced Obamacare, did not have friends who had experienced it and didn't fully understand what it was. Many tuned out the Republican alarms. 

"Now that has changed. Millions of Americans are unhappy with what they have experienced under Obamacare — canceled policies, higher premiums and sky-high deductibles. They are also much more likely to believe predictions of future problems. They've seen what has already happened and now know it can get worse. ... 

"In the three and a half years between March 23, 2010, the day Obamacare was signed into law, and Oct. 1, 2013, the day its implementation got under way, millions of voters, no matter what doubts they might have had, thought it best to give Obamacare a chance to work. That's why they didn't respond to the GOP's dire warnings. But now, they've seen what Obamacare can mean in their lives. And they won't be buying any more promises."