America has problems more urgent than our dreadful schools, but none more serious.  Little contributes more to high unemployment, sluggish economic growth, rising income inequality, poverty and violent crime. Thirty two million adults -- 14 percent of the population, 19 percent of high school graduates -- can't read, according to a study last year by the U.S. Department of Education.  The literacy rate is no better than it was in 2003 and is worse than in 1993.  Of the students who come to his classroom, "only a small fraction have a functioning understanding of written English," said a high school teacher in Oakland, California in 2007.  "They do not know how to form a sentence.  They cannot write an intelligible paragraph."  Even more struggle to make change or balance a checkbook. It isn't for lack of resources.  Per pupil expenditures were $11,184 in 2009-2010.  This is worse than a tragic misallocation of resources, a gargantuan waste of money.  Ponder the fact that nearly one high school graduate in five is functionally illiterate.  Could there be a more egregious -- or more pernicious -- example of fraud?   The fraudsters -- Democrat politicians, teacher unions, educrats -- have done more harm than those engaged in other types of organized crime.  They belong in jail, not running our schools.

President Barack Hussein Obama spoke for 65 minutes Tuesday (1/28) night, but didn't say much.  And hardly anyone in the country paid any attention.  Did you? State of the Union addresses typically are laundry lists of a president's alleged accomplishments, and of his legislative goals for the coming year. It's difficult for even the most gifted speechwriters to turn laundry lists into spellbinding oratory.  But this was "the most plodding, enervated and pointless national address of his presidency," said John Podhoretz in the New York Post.  "Gone is the lyricism for which liberals swooned in 2008 and to a lesser extent in 2012," said Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. "In its place are a list of half-measures and forced anecdotes about Obamacare."  They were "picayune --  high-tech hubs, broadband access for kids, the minimum wage," said Rich Lowry of National Review. "Is that all there is?" asked Ron Fournier of the National Journal.  The president touched on liberal hot buttons such as gun control and income inequality, but his touch was perfunctory.  This was the most startling passage in the SOTU:

There are none so blind as those who will not see, and hardly anyone wants to see Iran for what it is:  an evil regime bound and determined to dominate and destroy us, our friends and our allies.  The evidence is luminously clear, but most all of our attention has focused, as usual, on the nuclear issue.  Did the Iranians promise to stop enriching uranium or "dismantle" some of the components of their nuclear program?  How many Western sanctions are being eased or lifted in exchange? And on and on... We can expect the Iranians to prolong and exploit this period to their advantage and our peril.  They've already begun. The Iranian regime is expanding its regional and global power, killing its domestic enemies, and subverting and intimidating Middle Eastern nations that are reluctant to bend to its will.  These matters require serious Western attention, but they aren't getting much.  For us, it's all about nukes and sanctions. Just take a few of their major actions:

One day in the 1920s Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a café in Vienna waiting for her coffee refill. It never came. She noticed that her waiter had an excellent memory for all of his customers' orders, but somehow had forgotten her coffee. Bluma set herself to the task of investigating this phenomenon further. What she found in her subsequent studies was this: People tend to remember the details of things exceptionally well when those things are unfinished. She had already paid her waiter, so he had forgotten about her because he was finished with her as a customer. What is unfinished haunts us. It stays with us, nagging us to bring it to completion. Benjamin Franklin once said that houseguests, like fish, begin to smell after three days. What is unfinished has an uncanny ability to stink up our lives.  Here are some tips on how to unstink them.

How would most Americans and Congress react if a foreign government passed laws regulating U.S. businesses and people in the United States? Probably with justified outrage. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act or FATCA is U.S. financial imperialism at its worst.  It's causing great resentment in much of the world, which is hurting U.S. interests. The administration and many in Congress seem to have learned nothing from the Obamacare disaster. Now that they have destroyed the world's best health care system, they are in the process of further destroying what was at one time a very functional global financial system. In its place, they would erect a tax law whose costs were far higher than its benefit, that may drive hundreds of billions of dollars of job-creating foreign capital out of the United States, and that could trigger a global financial crisis.  Only the Democrats could do something so sinister and masochistic -- and try to stymie any Republican effort to repeal it.