The sharper-eyed among you may have noticed that yesterday was supposed to be Obama Poll Watch day, where we offer up our monthly musings on the state of Barack Obama's public job approval rating. Well, since yesterday was a rather auspicious date on the calendar, we decided to push the poll-watching to Wednesday. Also, because we're still working on the charts.

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Senator Marco Rubio, Cuban-American from Florida, is now officially "on deck." He is idly swinging a practice bat back and forth, in anticipation of his first real major-league performance. This moment, it should be noted, has taken a long time to get here. Rubio was elected to the Senate, after all, in the Great Tea Party Shellacking Of 2010. He's had over two years in the Senate now but has yet to put his stamp of approval on any comprehensive immigration legislation, even though he treats it as his own private issue within the Republican Party. Rubio enjoys being seen as "working hard" on some sort of legislative breakthrough on immigration, but up until now, that breakthrough has never actually happened. There's a good reason for that, and the reason is that his fellow Tea Party Republicans (mostly over in the House) are quite content to have Marco Rubio "working hard" on an immigration bill, but they're never going to support anything he actually comes up with. By supporting Rubio "working hard" on the issue, they can conveniently do nothing and (they hope) defuse the issue among the voters.

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