New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait claims that for today’s GOP, “everything Reagan thought or did was presumptively correct, even the things that contradict the other things he did.” Specifically, “the Reagan cult is largely (though not entirely) a propaganda vehicle for the anti-tax movement,” even though “in reality, Reagan veered wildly out of step with anti-tax orthodoxy.” The Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore thinks the Cult of Reagan has been strengthened by its de facto alliance with a newer movement, the Tea Party.

Well before Obama moved into the White House, he believed his presidency would have “the potential for shifting the national paradigm” to the left as Reagan’s moved it to the right, and Brian Beutler contends that such a shift still could happen if “the economy’s rapid growth in recent quarters” continues.

Yesterday, in a column at his organization's web site, the head of the nation's leading polling organization called the government's official unemployment rate, currently at 5.6 percent, a "big lie."

Rest assured that if Gallup Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton had written this column during a Republican or conservative administration, his words would have been picked up by the Associated Press and the New York Times, and would have echoed across the Big Three networks' nightly newscasts. Instead, because relatively good-looking government data is sacrosanct during a Democratic administration, an expansive Google News search at 1:15 p.m. ET on "Gallup unemployment lie" (not in quotes, showing similar items and duplicates) returned only 26 items. Almost all of them are from center-right blogs and outlets. One exception is an item at Fortune.com which accuses Clifton of indulging in a "vast" "conspiracy theory."

Elias Isquith contends that “after eight years of George W. Bush,” America “was in such rotten shape that Obama had little time to do more than stave off the next crisis,” but that by this past Tuesday night, favorable economic developments gave Obama “an opportunity to boast of changing the ‘trajectory’ of the country like few presidents before him and none since Ronald Reagan.”

MSNBC plays the race card 365 days a year, but on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, you can be sure they'll really ham it up. Witness MSNBC.com writer Jane Timm's pathetic attempt to bash the GOP as racist by bringing up decades-old votes on whether or not to make the civil-rights leader's birthday a federal holiday.

"GOP haunted by anti-MLK Day votes," blares a teaser headline on the msnbc.com home page. "Amid highly publicized racial tension in areas like Ferguson, Missouri and New York City, these nay votes have received renewed scrutiny and attention," adds the caption beneath a black-and-white photo of President Reagan signing into law a bill to make MLK Day a federal holiday.