Obama looked so presidential, he looked just like Reagan.

Here's the NYT right now:



ADDED: The story at the top left, by Michael D. Shear, is "Obama, Daring Congress, Acts to Overhaul Immigration." That headline stresses the political interplay with Congress, not the reason for independent presidential action or the legal argument for it. The first words of the article are: "President Obama chose confrontation...."

The story that goes with the picture of Reagan is "Obama’s Immigration Action Has Precedents, but May Set a New One," by Julie Hirshfield Davis. This article addresses the legal argument, which looks at past presidential actions:

Although Mr. Obama is not breaking new ground by using executive powers to carve out a quasi-legal status for certain categories of unauthorized immigrants — the Republican Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush all did so — his decision will affect as many as five million immigrants, far more than the actions of those presidents.

At that link, the photo of Reagan is uncropped, and the figure standing right behind Reagan is George H.W. Bush.

"Obama is not a flaccid Jimmy Carter... He is instead a Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- but a bizarro FDR."

David Sirota strains to understand and characterize the President.

In forging such bipartisan complicity with what were once exclusively right-wing Republican objectives, Obama has achieved even more than what he fantasized about when he famously celebrated a previous bizarro FDR. In an illustrative 2008 interview with a Nevada newspaper, Obama lauded Ronald Reagan for "chang[ing] the trajectory of America" and "put[ting] us on a fundamentally different path."

Reagan was a truly strong executive -- but the Gipper was nothing compared to our current president.

Got that, wingers?

"The United States formally recognized the rebel leadership in Libya as the country’s legitimate government..."

NYT:

“The United States views the Qaddafi regime as no longer having any legitimate authority in Libya,” [Secretary of State Hillary Rodham] Clinton said. “And so I am announcing today that, until an interim authority is in place, the United States will recognize the T.N.C. as the legitimate governing authority for Libya, and we will deal with it on that basis.”...

The step allows the United States to turn over to the rebel group some of the Libyan funds that have been frozen in American banks, to finance its efforts to oust Colonel Qaddafi and to administer the part of the country that the rebels control.

ADDED: If you're wondering what "T.N.C." stands for I think it's The Nicaraguan Contras.

Obama is more like Reagan than Carter, says Mark Schmitt.

But he needs the economy to recover so we can perceive it.

Reagan recovered... in time for the "Morning in America" election of 1984. And so we naturally forget those days when he seemed doomed to be the fifth consecutive president to leave office a failure, rather than the first since Eisenhower to complete two terms and leave more or less respected. (I was kind of shocked to learn of the magnitude of Reagan's slump myself, although I was alive and politically aware at the time.) He recovered not because of his message or his political operation... but because the economy recovered.