"States are learning the cost of Common Core is uncommonly high.

"The federally-backed standards initiative, first proposed by the nation's governors and an educators' association, seeks to impose a national standard for achievement among K-12 students. So far, 45 states plus the District of Columbia have signed on, with some implementing curriculum designed for the Common Core Standards Initiative during the current school year and the rest set to take part in the next school year. But several states are reconsidering their participation, and one big reason is the cost.

"States will spend up to an estimated $10 billion up front, then as much as $800 million per year for the first seven years that the controversial program is up and running. Much of the cost is on new, Common Core-aligned textbooks and curriculum, but the added expenses also include teacher training, technology upgrades, testing and assessment. The figures are taking states by surprise."

"Listening to discussions of immigration laws and proposals to reform them is like listening to something out of 'Alice in Wonderland.' 

"Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them. One of the big problems that those who are pushing 'comprehensive immigration reform' want solved is how to help people who came here illegally and are now 'living in the shadows' as a result.

"What about embezzlers or burglars who are 'living in the shadows' in fear that someone will discover their crimes? Why not 'reform' the laws against embezzlement or burglary, so that such people can also come out of the shadows?"

"John Koskinen, the new IRS commissioner, is on the hot seat and would do well to follow the example of Johnnie Mac Walters, who held the same post when President Nixon occupied the Oval Office. After Nixon aide John Dean handed Walters an envelope with a list of some 200 individuals the president considered political enemies, Walters refused to go along with the request for audits. He locked the list in his safe without ever opening the envelope. He subsequently gave the envelope to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. ...

"Koskinen should start the IRS cleanup by withdrawing new regulations designed to bring 'clarity' to the agency's tax exemption enforcement. In fact, these rules are a transparently political attempt to legitimize the president's suppression of conservative, evangelical and Tea Party critics. ... 

"Under the IRS proposal, nonprofits would risk their tax-exempt status if they sponsored voter registration, get-out-the-vote efforts or candidate forums. Such activities are intrinsic to the democratic process, contribute positively to public understanding of the issues and candidates when done in a nonpartisan fashion, and have been sponsored routinely for decades by nonprofits across the ideological spectrum. These also happen to be the same sort of activities that would be conducted by the more than 200 conservative, Tea Party and evangelical nonprofit applicants that were targeted for harassment by Obama's IRS."

"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."