"The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year's innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It used to be the networks only showed the president walking down the aisle after his presence was dramatically announced. Now every cabinet-level officeholder marches in, shaking hands and high-fiving with breathless congressmen. And why not? No matter how bland and banal they may look, they do have the power to destroy your life — to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid's school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen. ... 

"Meanwhile, back in America, conservatives targeted and harassed by the Internal Revenue Service still await answers on their years-long requests for tax exempt status. When news of the IRS targeting broke last spring, agency officials lied about it, and one took the Fifth. The president said he was outraged, had no idea, read about it in the papers, boy was he going to get to the bottom of it. An investigation was announced but somehow never quite materialized. Victims of the targeting waited to be contacted by the FBI to be asked about their experience. Now the Justice Department has made clear its investigation won't be spearheaded by the FBI but by a department lawyer who is a campaign contributor to the president and the Democratic Party. Sometimes you feel they are just laughing at you, and going too far."

"After four years of the politics of divide-and-conquer, Mr. Obama had stirred sufficient resentment in his political base to win a second term. What he has produced entering the sixth year of his presidency is a nation in a state of disunion. 

"The pollsters at Gallup wrote last week that Mr. 'Obama is on course to have the most politically polarized approval ratings of any president.' Segments of the U.S. population see themselves not just in disagreement with the Obama administration, but as the target of its policies. 

"This includes not only the famous 1%, but also the upper-middle class, Southern states, charter schools, politically active conservatives, private businesses, the Catholic church, electric utilities, doctors driven out of ObamaCare's health networks and those famous partisans, the Little Sisters of the Poor. 

"All have been vilified, investigated, audited or sued by the president himself, Eric Holder's Justice Department, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and, not least, the Internal Revenue Service. Last year's most remarkable polling number from Gallup said in December that 72% of Americans regard big government as the greatest threat to the U.S. They got the message."

"In America, the test of any political movement is not what that movement is against, but what it is for. The founders made a point at Boston Harbor, but they made history in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. 

"Unfortunately, in recent years, we have had no choice but to engage in a number of protests against our current president’s Washington-centered agenda. 

"As Americans we must always be willing to fight the Boston-type battles — boldly calling out bad policy whenever we see it — but we must do so with an eye toward Philadelphia, maintaining a positive focus on the kind of nation we want to be and become."

"The House Republican leadership has been confronted by devilishly difficult tactical choices over the years. But what to do on the issue of immigration right now isn’t one of them. The correct course is easy and eminently achievable:  Do nothing. 

"The old Reagan catchphrase calling for non-action — don’t just do something, stand there — has never been more apt. Yet the House leadership is about to roll out a set of immigration principles reportedly including an amnesty for illegal aliens, and presumably will follow up with a push to pass them through the House. This is legislative strategy as unforced error. 

"The basic tactical reason not to act now is that the last thing the party needs is a brutal intramural fight when it has been dealt a winning hand on Obamacare."

"As undignified as it is unedifying and unnecessary, the vulgar State of the Union circus is again at our throats. The document that the Constitutional Convention sent forth from Philadelphia for ratification in 1787 was just 4,543 words long, but this was 17 too many. America would be a sweeter place if the Framers had not included this laconic provision pertaining to the president: 'He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union.'

"'Information'? Not exactly.

"The Constitution’s mild requirement has become a tiresome exercise in political exhibitionism, the most execrable ceremony in the nation’s civic liturgy, regardless of which party’s president is abusing it. You worship bipartisanship? There is not a dime’s worth of difference between the ways the parties try to milk partisan advantage from this made-for-television political pep rally."

"Democrats have assumed all along that once implemented, ObamaCare would be too popular to be repealed or even modified. Republicans shared the same assumption and even now many worry that no matter how grievous the impact of the law on the American economy, it will be impossible to rescind coverage from those who have gained it via ObamaCare. 

"But what neither party anticipated was the emergence of an entirely new demographic — the millions upon millions of ObamaCare losers — whose anger over the law could well be a game-changer. More corporate decisions such as Target’s that have the potential to increase the size of this group is bad news indeed for ObamaCare and the Democratic Party that, without a single Republican vote, foisted it upon an unwilling public."

"The odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years, according to a large new academic study that contradicts politicians in both parties who have claimed that income mobility is falling. 

"Both President Obama and leading Republicans, like Representative Paul Ryan, have argued recently that the odds of climbing the income ladder are lower today than in previous decades. The new study, based on tens of millions of anonymous tax records, finds that the mobility rate has held largely steady in recent decades, although it remains lower than in Canada and in much of Western Europe, where the odds of escaping poverty are higher. 

"Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Harvard and one of the authors, said in an interview that he and his colleagues still believed that a lack of mobility was a significant problem in the United States. Despite less discrimination of various kinds and a larger safety net than in previous decades, the odds of escaping the station of one’s birth are no higher today than they were decades ago."

"Obamacare has so far fallen dramatically short of what was expected -- technically, and in almost every other way. Enrollment is below expectations: According to the data we have so far, more than half of the much-touted Medicaid expansion came from people who were already eligible before the health-care law passed, and this weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the overwhelming majority of people buying insurance through the exchanges seem to be folks who already had insurance. Coverage is less generous than many people expected, with narrower provider networks and higher deductibles. The promised $2,500 that the average family was told they could save on premiums has predictably failed to materialize. And of course, we now know that if you like your doctor and plan, there is no reason to think you can keep them. Which is one reason the law has not gotten any more popular since it passed. ... 

"[...] The law is unpopular, not only with voters, but also apparently with the consumers who are supposed to buy insurance. The political forces that were supposed to guarantee its survival look weaker by the day. The Barack Obama administration is in emergency mode, pasting over political problems with administrative fixes of dubious legality, just to ensure the law’s bare survival -- which is now their incredibly low bar for 'success.'"

"If a bill to eliminate the risk corridors comes to a vote, many congressional Democrats will decide that the success of their cherished health-care program is worth a bailout. But then they will face a choice: Do they really want to stand for an open-ended commitment of tax dollars to insurance companies? Is that what the party now favors? Is that what swing-state senators and swing-district representatives wish to defend?

"Conservatives, who almost all believe that Obamacare is a very bad law that can’t be made to work tolerably through mere tinkering, have every reason to fight a bailout. Campaigning against one will undermine the alliance between the White House and insurers by raising its price for both parties. Let’s find out just how much 'sustainability' that alliance has."

"When Americans first learned last year that the IRS had illegally targeted Tea Party, conservative and evangelical nonprofits for harassment during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns, Obama said such activities were unacceptable and he promised to get to the bottom of the scandal. But not long afterwards, he began dismissing the IRS matter as a 'phony scandal' concocted by Republicans unhappy that he had won re-election.  

"Then, Attorney General Eric Holder, or somebody reporting to him, appointed Barbara Bosserman, a long-time Obama campaign donor, to head the investigation. So it came as no surprise last week when it was reported that the FBI expects no criminal charges to be filed in the IRS scandal. Politicized justice is no justice at all.

"[...] The tragedy is that a man elected in large part because of his perceived integrity has turned out to be a  political dissembler of the first rank."