Hans von Spakovsky:

Americans voted in November for seismic change, but our outgoing president is still as clueless as ever about the nation he governed.

In his farewell speech-cum-lecture earlier this month, President Barack Obama proclaimed that he made America better by “almost every measure.”

The statement goes far beyond optimism, and lands squarely in the realm of delusion.

Eight years of Obama’s leadership has left America demonstrably weaker and more divided. Rather than the promised “healing”—racial and other—the Obama era frayed the ties that bind us.

James Wigderson as we reach the next-to-last day of Barack Obama in the White House:

His own ambition was to be a transformative figure like Ronald Reagan, and his long farewell to the American people is supposed to remind people of George Washington. Instead, Obama’s ambition outweighed his ability, and the last week has us wishing Chevy Chase was back on Saturday Night Live – “Our top story tonight, Barack Hussein Obama is still saying goodbye to the American people.”

Let’s remember the promise of eight years ago when Obama was the change he was seeking, or something like that. He took office after a terrible financial collapse and recession. However, the Bush Administration had already taken the immediate steps of the Wall Street bailout to stabilize the economy, and it was Obama’s fortune to preside over the nation’s economic recovery.

Obama’s $804.6 billion stimulus, crafted by Congressional Democrats, contributed to doubling the national debt in his time in office. It’s estimated that only $33 billion went to “shovel ready” transportation spending. Much of the money was spent shoring up state government spending on Medicaid and education, including here in Wisconsin. But at least the Recovery.gov website was redesigned, and it only cost $18 million.

The “summer of recovery,” like the effects of global warming described by Al Gore, never seemed to arrive. Economic growth through the beginning of 2016 averaged just 2.1 percent. While unemployment is down, labor participation is the lowest it’s been since Jimmy Carter was in office, and that’s only partially due to demographics.

It certainly didn’t help that under the Obama Administration the Federal Register, the book of federal regulations, is now over 97,000 pages long. Worse, according to Forbes the problem isn’t just the regulations but the growth in “Agency guidance documents and memoranda, notices, bulletins, circulars, other decrees.”

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration’s environmental policies didn’t help, either, including his war on coal. Yes, natural gas got cheaper, thanks to fracking technology, but much of the coal industry was hit hard by EPA regulations, putting thousands out of work and raising energy costs. The good news is that Obama never addressed the public on energy costs wearing a sweater and suggesting we adjust our thermostats. We can thank the private sector and fracking.

Finally, the greatest disappointment of the Obama domestic agenda has to be Obamacare. The greatest lie Obama ever told was the promise that if you liked your health insurance you can keep it. Not only did that turn out to be a lie, but people were having a hard time keeping their new insurance policies through the exchanges, too.

Insurance companies like Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealthCare dropped out of the exchanges when it became clear they couldn’t make money by being in them. The insurance companies remaining in the health care exchanges often have such high deductible and premium costs to make them unaffordable, even with government subsidies.

Obamacare co-ops were designed to create more competition, but only seven of the original 23 co-ops now remain, according to The Hill. In Illinois, Oregon and Ohio, 92,000 people had to scramble to find insurance when their co-ops failed in 2016.

As large private health insurance companies leave the market and the co-ops fail, many consumers are left with no choice. Business Insider reports a study by Avalere Health said 36 percent of the “exchange market regions” may only offer one insurance carrier in 2017. Nearly 55 percent will have two or less carriers. The Heritage Foundation says that number could grow to 70 percent of the counties in the United States next year.

Obama said recently that 20 million people have health insurance coverage that did not have coverage before. The Heritage Foundation points out the number is closer to 14 million, and 11.8 million of them received coverage through expanding the rolls of Medicaid, not private insurance. As many of them are discovering, “coverage” does not equal care, and are frustrated by the number of doctors that do not accept Medicaid.

So, no, Obama didn’t preside over a civil war, although race relations actually got worse during his time in office and police departments feel besieged by liberal politics. He didn’t get impeached, although his administration was hardly scandal-free. Obama is not the “worst president ever.”

But his domestic policies can be graded a failure on the Obama standard. Instead of the transformative figure he hoped to become, Obama’s policies should be swept away by a Republican congress that achieved success when it ran against the Obama agenda.

The Washington Post reports on Donald Trump’s controversial (those three words are now a cliché) choice for secretary of education:

Former senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut on Tuesday introduced Betsy DeVos at her Senate confirmation hearing for education secretary in the upcoming Trump administration — and in the process he dissed the entire education establishment.

DeVos is a Michigan billionaire tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to run the Education Department. Supporters see her as a tireless advocate for school choice while critics say she has spent decades working to privatize the public education system.

Lieberman — a member of the board of the organization that DeVos founded, the American Federation of Children — talked about DeVos in glowing terms and said she has helped hundreds of thousands of children.

“She is disciplined, organized, knows how to set goals and then develop practical plans to achieve them. She is really a purpose-driven team builder,” he said. He noted that the Department of Education is bigger than anything she — or virtually all of the senators on the panel — had ever run but said she is ready to take on the task.

And then, he said: “I know that some people are questioning her qualifications to be secretary of education, and too many of those questions seem to me to be based on the fact that she doesn’t come from within the education establishment. But honestly I believe that today, that’s one of the most important qualifications you could have for this job.”

To Lieberman, then, working within the public education system is disqualifying to run the Education Department. Understanding, from the inside, how the system works, isn’t a qualification.

So what is a qualification to Lieberman?

“She has many others. She’s a mother and a grandmother. She cares about children more generally, and she has been involved in education, like so many parents and local citizen school board members across America for almost 30 years,” he said. And he noted that she isn’t only a “philanthropist and advocate for reform” but also “mentors students in the public schools of Grand Rapids, Mich.

“And here’s another important qualification: She will ask the right questions,” he said.

The Education Department is nearly 40 years old. Public education has gotten worse in the U.S. since the Education Department came into existence. Among other things, nearly every big city in this country has a terrible school system, including Milwaukee. The pernicious influence of teacher unions has been well documented in this blog.

Elsewhere in the Capitol, the Post reports …

Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who has spent years battling the Environmental Protection Agency, on Wednesday ran into a litany of questions about his fitness to run the agency given his litigious history, his views on climate change and his close ties to the fossil fuel industry.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the EPA told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at his confirmation hearing that he plans to steer the agency away from what he sees as an era of overzealous and unlawful regulation during the Obama years.

Pruitt said his EPA would be one that respects the authority of states and is open to a “full range of views,” namely those of an energy industry that felt overburdened by Obama-era rules.

Pruitt, who has long been supported by the fossil fuel industry, dismissed the idea that if someone supports the oil and gas interests, he can’t also favor environmental protection.

“I utterly reject that narrative,” he said. “It is not an either-or proposition.” …

Pruitt’s tenure as attorney general in Oklahoma has been marked by his role in opposing many of the Obama administration’s key initiatives, often arguing that the executive branch was overstepping its constitutional authority and trying to circumvent the role of Congress.

Pruitt has been a leading voice among a group of Republican attorneys general who sued over issues including the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reforms and immigration. But he has been particularly aggressive in attacking the EPA’s efforts, repeatedly suing the agency to challenge its legal authority to regulate toxic mercury pollution, smog, carbon emissions from power plants, and the quality of wetlands and other waters.

That combative approach has earned him broad support from fellow Republicans and from the fossil fuel industry, which helped fund his campaigns and contributed large sums to the Republican Attorneys General Association under Pruitt’s leadership.

Yet his nomination has galvanized environmental advocacy groups, who note that Pruitt dismantled a specialized environmental protection unit that had existed under his predecessor and poured resources into a new “federalism unit” aimed at challenging “unwarranted regulation and systematic overreach” from Washington. …

Pruitt rejected the “climate denier” label in his opening remarks Wednesday, saying “science tells us that the climate is changing” and that human activity plays a role. But how we measure that human influence and what policy actions we take to combat global warming are “subject to continued debate and dialogue,” he said. …

For his part, Pruitt has repeatedly framed his EPA opposition as driven not by ideology but by constitutional questions over the separation of powers.

“There truly is an attitude in Washington that the states are mere vessels of federal will, and so long as they act in accordance with the federal government’s view . . . things are fine,” he said in a speech in July. “But when states actually engage and exercise the authority they possess, that’s where the conflict and the tension rises.”

Pruitt has powerful forces pushing for the GOP-controlled Senate to confirm him.

The conservative America Rising Squared, an arm of the Republican super PAC America Rising, recently launched ConfirmPruitt.com to promote him as someone who can return the EPA to its “core mission” of protecting the nation’s water and air but leaving broader authority in the hands of the states and industry.

Last week, a coalition of nearly two dozen conservative advocacy groups separately backed his nomination, writing that he has “demonstrated his commitment to upholding the Constitution and ensuring the EPA works for American families and consumers.”

I think nominees like DeVos and Pruitt, though obviously they weren’t nominees before Trump was elected, are one of the reasons Trump won. The election certainly was a rejection of what Obama did in eight years and what voters thought Hillary Clinton would do if elected.

At least that seems to be how Daniel Henninger sees it:

A standard journalistic defense for publishing, or reporting on, the sort of thing BuzzFeed put on the web Tuesday night about Donald Trump’s alleged compromise by the Russians is that “the people” ultimately will sort it all out. You could say the same thing about tornadoes.

Conventional wisdom after the election held that the media had been chastened by its coverage of the campaign, that it had learned to be more careful about separating facts from the media bubble.

The past week’s news, if one still can call it that, was bookended by two Trump files. The first was the intelligence community report that Russia’s hack of the presidential election favored Mr. Trump. The second was a salacious opposition-research file on Mr. Trump published by BuzzFeed, which says it is about “trending buzz.” Below the site’s Trump-in-Russia stories Wednesday sat, “Lauren Conrad Just Posted The Most Adorable Photo Of Her Baby Bump.”

When people played on real pinball machines, everyone knew that if you banged on the machine too hard, it would lock up. It would “tilt.” Because so many once-respected institutions are behaving so badly, the American system is getting close to tilt.

The interregnum between the election result and next week’s inauguration has become a wild, destructive circus, damaging the reputation and public standing of everyone performing in it, including Donald Trump.

Trumpians will resist that thought, but they should be concerned at their diminishing numbers. Quinnipiac’s poll this week puts Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 37%. Building in even an expansive margin for error, this is an astonishing low for a president-elect.

Mr. Trump routinely mocks the “dishonest media.” He has a point, but dishonesty isn’t the problem. The internet, media’s addictive drug, is the problem. Whatever publication standards existed before the web are eroding.

Any person getting a significant federal job undergoes an FBI background check. These “raw” FBI files—a mix of falsity, half-truths and facts—are never published.

The BuzzFeed story about Donald Trump in Russia is a raw FBI file, or worse. Once it went online, every major U.S. news outlet prominently published long accounts of the story, filled with grave analysis and pro forma caveats about “unverifiable,” as if this is an exemption for recycling sludge.

This isn’t news as normally understood. It’s something else.

Before web-driven media, follow-up stories on anything as fact-free as BuzzFeed’s piece would go on page A15. No more. Now all such stories—in newspapers, on TV or online—run at the same unmitigated intensity because that’s the only level the web knows. These recurring political media storms have become self-feeding wildfires, and they aren’t going to stop. Everyone near them gets burned.

The intelligence community used to know how to keep important secrets. That collapsed in 2011 when the Obama White House poured out operational details of the Osama bin Laden raid within 48 hours. Now the intelligence community, whether the FBI’s James Comey, the CIA or NSA, have become public players in a media environment looking more like Mad Max chasing gasoline than all the news that’s fit to print.

The intelligence community’s report on Russia’s hacking of the election purported to disavow politics even as it said Vladimir Putin stopped praising Mr. Trump in June because he “probably” feared it would backfire. Or “Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton.” We need three intelligence agencies for “probably” and “most likely”?

The intel report burned as another Trump bonfire for days with little notice given to its page-after-page detail on Mr. Putin’s broad, intense and malign effort to undermine the West’s belief in itself. Our election was the tip of the Putin propaganda iceberg. But that’s barely a story.

Mr. Putin has to be grinning at how easy it is to manipulate the U.S. political system into chaos with a Gmail hack and disinformation. Our web-fueled flameouts are doing his work for him.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, the next president.

The New York Times posted this early Wednesday: “From the moment the unsubstantiated but explosive intelligence report hit the internet, the questions arose: When and what would Mr. Trump tweet?”

That is the Gray Lady reducing U.S. politics from something formerly serious to the level of a videogame app—abetted by Mr. Trump, who tweeted that the oppo-research report was “Nazi Germany.”

The fantastic, unsubstantiated memo on the Russians controlling Donald Trump got elevation, in part, because of Mr. Trump’s extensive pro-Putin tweets and comments. Absent more than a 140-character rationale from the Trump camp, the darkest explanation bubbled to the top of the web fever swamp.

Our primary political institutions, including the presidency, are disappearing into a thrill-filled world of their own making that is beyond that of normal, onlooking Americans. None seem to know how to stop banging on the system.

Tilt.