"President Obama will soon roll out one of the most ambitious and controversial programs of his presidency, an effort to grant a reprieve from deportation to millions of adult immigrants living in the country illegally.

"With time short and stakes high, the Obama administration knows it cannot afford another debacle like 2013's botched introduction of the Affordable Care Act.

"The challenges posed by the new immigration program will be enormous. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services projects 1.3 million people will apply in the first six months, starting in May, although no one knows for sure. Anything close to that will be a giant new workload for the agency, which processes about 6.3 million other applications annually.

"The cost of implementing the president's executive actions will be $324 million to $484 million over the next three years, according to a draft of a letter from Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson obtained by The Times."

"In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush 'lied us into war in Iraq.'

"I found this shocking. I took a leave of absence from the bench in 2004-05 to serve as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction -- a bipartisan body, sometimes referred to as the Robb-Silberman Commission. It was directed in 2004 to evaluate the intelligence community's determination that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD -- I am, therefore, keenly aware of both the intelligence provided to President Bush and his reliance on that intelligence as his primary casus belli. It is astonishing to see the 'Bush lied' allegation evolve from antiwar slogan to journalistic fact.

"The intelligence community's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction -- a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject. ...

"In any event, it is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam."

"On Tuesday, the so-called Islamic State released a slickly produced video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a steel cage. On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a report detailing various 'mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children, and burying children alive' at the hands of the Islamic State.

"And on Thursday, President Obama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to forthrightly criticize the 'terrible deeds' . . . committed 'in the name of Christ.' ...

"We are all descended from cavemen who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit. But that hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the vantage point of the West's high horse, because we've earned the right to sit in that saddle."

"Musicians and Kardashians may claim they can break the Internet by posting alluring photographs, but they have nothing on Tom Wheeler.

"The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission unveiled on Wednesday a plan to demolish a policy that for two decades has allowed the Internet to become the jewel of world-wide communication and commerce. His new 'Open Internet' plan represents a monumental shift from open markets in favor of government control. It is a grave threat to American innovation.

"In a piece for Wired magazine, Mr. Wheeler announced that this week he will circulate to his fellow commissioners a plan to enact what President Obama demanded in November: century-old telephone regulation for today's broadband communications companies. ...

"Mr. Wheeler claims that his 'proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, when they want, and the rights of innovators to introduce new products without asking anyone'€™s permission.' That's false. They will soon be asking his permission, an historic blunder that will politicize an Internet economy that has until now been dominated by innovators and consumers."

"There's no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.

"And it's a lie that has consequences, because the great American dream is to have a good job, and in recent years, America has failed to deliver that dream more than it has at any time in recent memory. A good job is an individual's primary identity, their very self-worth, their dignity -- it establishes the relationship they have with their friends, community and country. When we fail to deliver a good job that fits a citizen's talents, training and experience, we are failing the great American dream.

"Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. We need that to be 50% and a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America's middle class.

"I hear all the time that 'unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren't feeling it.' When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth -- the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real -- then we will quit wondering why Americans aren't 'feeling' something that doesn't remotely reflect the reality in their lives. And we will also quit wondering what hollowed out the middle class."

"We believe in the power of 21st-century international norms. Russian President Vladimir Putin believes in the power of lies and brute force, and implicitly asks, in the spirit of Josef Stalin, 'How many divisions do international norms have?' ...

"There is no appeasing Putin. Frankly, there is no directly stopping him, either. It is only possible to raise the costs to him of his war, including the military costs. If we won'€™t provide military materiel to Ukraine now, we deserve the contempt with which Putin regards us."

"Has it struck you, as it has struck me, that with every other nation, including the most repressive and anti-American on earth, Mr. Obama is careful never to give offense, to always extend the olive branch, and to treat their leaders with unusual deference and respect? Except for the Jewish State of Israel. It always seems to be in the Obama crosshair.

"Because this attitude is so detached from objective circumstances and the actions of Israel and the actions of the adversaries of Israel, something else -- and something rather disquieting -- is going on here. Mr. Obama wouldn't be the first world leader to have an irrational animus against Israel. He's not even the first American president to have an irrational animus against Israel. (See: Jimmy Carter.) But it is fair to say, I think, that no American president has been this consistently hostile to Israel while in office or shown such palpable anger and scorn for it and for Israel's leader.

"Perhaps given President Obama's history -- including his intimate, 20-year relationship with the anti-Semitic minister Jeremiah Wright -- his shouldn't come as a surprise. But that doesn't make it any less disturbing."

"While the prospects for tax reform in Washington are dim, as many as 20 Republican governors are moving forward with their own pro-growth tax-relief initiatives. This is on top of the 14 states, including Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, whose 2014 tax cuts will take effect this year. ...

"Texas is the model for many Republican governors. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from December 2007, the official beginning of the Great Recession, through October 2014 Texas created more jobs than the other 49 states combined. But Texas, which has no income tax, is not done. The new governor, Greg Abbott, says that 'we can still make things better here by cutting business and property taxes - which is what I intend to do.' ...

"Many governors have come to understand that states aren't just competing against each other for businesses and jobs. As Mr. Kasich puts it, 'In Ohio we'€™re in a contest against Europe, Asia and the rest of the world, so we have to keep our taxes low.'

"That has become the dominant view in statehouses this year, and it explains why the big tax-cutting activity in 2015 won't be in Washington but in state capitals."

"A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama's game is. That's because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world. ...

"Three explanations dominate speculation about what Obama is up to. The first is that he's trying to lay the groundwork for his successor, presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. The second is that he's trying to pad his legacy. The third is that he's trying to 'troll' or bait the GOP into debating his agenda rather than pursuing its own. All are plausible, and none necessarily contradicts the others.

"But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics."

"President Obama delivered his penultimate State of the Union with renewed confidence, eager to take credit for the economy's recent growth spurt. He offered few olive branches to Republicans for their landslide victory two months earlier; articulated a panoply of liberal proposals that stand little chance of passing through Congress; and took the rosiest possible view of the economy and international landscape - even in the face of contrary evidence. In the moment, it's a savvy political play: Claim credit for an improving public mood and force Republicans on the defensive.

"But despite the hoopla, recent polling shows that the public is much more in sync with the GOP's agenda than the White House's. This month's NBC/WSJ survey illustrated a striking disconnect between the president's improving approval rating (at 46 percent, up 2 points since November) and the top priorities of the American electorate. In the survey, 85 percent of voters rank 'creating jobs' as a top priority, followed by defeating and dismantling ISIS (74 percent), reducing the federal deficit (71 percent), securing the border with Mexico (58 percent), and addressing Iran's nuclear program (56 percent). The last four are core GOP strengths; polls consistently show Republicans with an edge on those issues.

"The items at the bottom of the priority list are all top administration priorities: closing the Guantanamo prison camp (24 percent rate as top priority), addressing the issue of climate change (34 percent), creating a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants (39 percent), and increasing the minimum wage (44 percent). It wasn't just Obama's assessment of the international stage that was disconnected from reality. It was also his assessment that the American people are with him on his agenda."