Here are some final items of the day:

* Thune border fence amendment to immigration bill fails 39-54. As with Grassley amendment last week, only nay-voting GOPers were Gang of Eight members plus Lisa Murkowski.

* Big Tea Party march in Washington to protest IRS on tap for tomorrow.

* TPM publishes caustic comments on Politico from Nate Silver.

* At Ten Miles Square, Jonathan Zasloff hails Republican Rep. Ed Royce as the unlikely champion of international food aid reform.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer looks at the dreadful ratings teachers' colleges are receiving.

And in non-political news:

* Nike caught jumping the gun on Miami Heat NBA Title, which could evaporate tonight.

Gotta get one more Monterey Pop video in: here's Jimi performing a song from Are You Experienced: "The Wind Cried Mary."

Okay, gotta do this as an encore:

Selah.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott trails two potential 2014 challengers by 10 points in a new poll, but the numbers show the governor is closing the gap and his approval rating is the highest ever.

Forty percent of voters had a favorable opinion of Scott, his best rating since he was elected and up 7 points from March, according to the Quinnipiac poll on Tuesday.

Also trending up, 43 percent of those surveyed approved of the job Scott was doing as governor, the highest number he’s gotten so far, and up 7 points since March.

Though only 35 percent responded that Scott should be reelected compared with 50 percent who said he shouldn’t be, those numbers have also improved for Scott over the last six months.

In a 2014 election against former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who has switched parties from Republican to Independent to Democrat, voters surveyed picked Crist over Scott, 47 percent to 37 percent. But the 10-point deficit is closer than in March, when the same poll found Crist leading by 16 points.

Tuesday’s poll also found Scott trailing potential Democratic challenger Sen. Bill Nelson, who has not declared a run, 48 percent to 38 percent.

Kopan's right in all his comparisons, but you might think he'd use a term like "back from the political grave" rather than "rebounding" to describe Scott's progress. In today's hyper-polarized climate where it's very difficult in a competitive state to drop below 45%, Scott's numbers leave a lot to be desired. Guess he's been down so far and so long it may look like up. Give the man a hug.

Here's Josh Barro at Business Insider:

This is a big reason the Republican party can't change. So many of its members have a warped vision of what liberalism is. They think it's something so mind-bendingly awful that they cannot fathom how voters could willingly choose it. It must be some mistake. And sooner or later, mistakes get fixed.

Back in Louisiana, Jindal has an approval rating of 38%. His popularity took a nosedive this year because he pushed a plan to repeal the state's income tax and replace it with a higher and broader sales tax, which would have meant a big tax cut for the wealthy financed by higher taxes on the poor and middle class.

He had to withdraw the plan because he couldn't get it through the legislature, even though it has a Republican majority. It was just too unpopular — the same poll that found Jindal at 38% found only 27% support for his tax plan.

Yet Jindal does not seem to have gotten the message: Voters are unimpressed with an economic agenda that claims the best way to create jobs and grow prosperity is to cut taxes on the rich.

Ezra Klein is more succinct:

Jindal has gone from diagnosing what’s wrong with the Republican Party to personifying it. The GOP’s problem isn’t that it insults the intelligence of the voters. It’s that it insults its own intelligence. It’s come up with a theory of liberal governance that has obviated the need for a theory of conservative governance.

What's even more revealing is that you're not seeing the kinda "attaboys" from the conservative chattering classes for Jindal's jeremiad that you'd expect. At National Review, Reihan Salam cites the op-ed as an example of why Bobby's presidential stock continues to decline.

Interestingly enough, I seem to be the only gabber at this point who is noting that if you get rid of the sound bites and framing, Bobby's specific advice to his party now isn't that different from what he was recommending back when he was being touted as a brave "rebrander:" move as far right as you possibly can and wave your arms about it. Here's how I described the guts of his "reframing" speech back in January:

When tied to a world-view that rules out everything that happens in Washington as either irrelevant and evil, this you don’t have to change mantra creates an endless playground for right-wing irresponsibility in the name of “principle.”

But what’s most amazing about Jindal’s speech is that it is being and will continue to be greeted as some sort of breath of fresh air when it’s devoted to some of the oldest and most shop-worn memes in American politics, up to and including the “populist” idea that “big government” is the only reason you have “big business.”

We’ll see how Jindal’s putative 2016 rivals react to this opening gambit. But he’s pretty much staked out the ground of cynical pseudo-populism as his very own.

Maybe the buzz he got from that speech convinced him he could just phone something in at Politico and peddle the same base-pandering red meat in different packaging. He should have left well enough alone, or found a substitute ghostwriter.

What's troubling about that situation is that it represents the nose-counting before the fight actually begins. The fresh threat from Mitch McConnell to go "totally nuclear" in the future if Reid messes with the filibuster could rattle a Democratic senator or two. And as the confrontation approaches, McConnell will undoubtedly be looking for a deal much like the one he cut with Reid that largely neutered filibuster reform at the beginning of the session. Will he have some silent partners in the Democratic cloakroom?

It would be helpful, of course, if Reid and company could generate some real public interest in this issue, which it unquestionably merits. If this whole thing is worked out behind closed doors with minimum public fuss, the very large stakes involved could be won or lost without a great deal of accountability. I'd hate to see filibuster reform consigned to the killing floor without a public debate.

You should definitely read the whole thing, but what grabbed me was the rationale Harris and VandeHei offered for Politico's upcoming foray into the long-form format under the direction of former Foreign Policy editor Susan Glasser. Chotiner tries with mixed results to get the duo to explain just why Politico needed a magazine:

JH: We are great at scoops that drive the conversation—about the meeting where someone told someone else to go screw themselves. That is catnip for our audience. We can drive the conversation, but often in a very in-the-moment way. I think it is within our reach to produce journalism that is not ephemeral and moves the conversation in more lasting ways. The article we have frequently invoked was the Anthony Weiner one in The New York Times Magazine. That was very much a Politico story. It drove a lot of coverage and conversation. But the honest answer is that we are not currently well organized to land the type of story that involves several weeks or months of reporting. That is not something Politico can routinely do. I think now we will be. A story that might appear in The New York Times or New York magazine or The New Yorker or The New Republic or The Atlantic—we want to be part of those conversations.

IC: Are those the publications you see as your competition for your new long-form team?

JH: I think it’s important to note that we are not trying to enter the national magazine distribution derby. We do not have some insight that we think makes us smarter than Newsweek or something like that. You can buy The Atlantic or The New Republic in Seattle. You are not going to be able to buy our glossy in Seattle. But we do have success at a certain business model that works very well in our niche, and the biggest component of that is advertiser-supported content. This is going to make us more attractive to certain types of advertisers. By the way, we have done glossies on a smaller scale before and made money.

IC: But what is your ultimate goal? Is it more than to drive the conversation in D.C.?

JVH: Your questions come from the premise that we run The New York Times in 1995. We are a publication for and about Washington.

JH: You seem to have a frame that something is important if it’s dull, and you make the reader eat their spinach. I don’t approach the question that way. I just think: That was interesting. The reporter took me for a ride and I was glad I went. The piece that The New York Times did on Weiner was interesting. It was long and interesting. I read it. The larger political world read it. It served as a marker. I didn’t read all of [Steven] Brill’s piece on health care. But it wasn’t ephemeral. I am not that worried that people should be reading about price supports, and they’re not, and that it’s a big problem for democracy. People who need to read about price supports will.

IC: You think politics is just people talking about things that are interesting?

JH: It’s more than that, but it is that. It’s that.

Regular readers know that I'm not a Politico-hater; I think the site serves a legitimate reporting function and sometimes does it well and other times at least covers a lot of landscape that might otherwise escape attention. It's when Politico tells us what it all means or tries self-consciously to drive narratives that it gets into trouble, often to the point of self-parody.

But I'm really struggling to understand the kind of audience that just can't get enough of Politico coverage of Washington and needs a regular long-form fix, since it's clear Harris and VandeHei think length will be the main and perhaps the only differentiator of the new long-form outlet. Is the idea to create enough content in different formats that the Washingtonian can satisfy all his or her reading needs from Politico? Is this all based on an addiction model? I shudder to think so.

Anyway, here are some mid-day news/views snacks:

* Here's the Sargent/Bernstein hypothesis that Boehner is bluffing in promising to follow the Hastert Rule.

* Conversely, Dana Rorabacher gets very specific in warning Boehner that maintenance of the Hastert Rule for immigration bill is a strict condition for keeping his gavel.

* The Hill's Erick Wasson has a very handy list of amendment fights the House is undertaking over the Farm Bill.

* I love it: CT Gov. Daniel Malloy crashes a luncheon wherein Rick Perry was trying to lure businesses into relocating to Texas.

* Guardian reports U.S. ready to join direct negotiations with Taliban over Afghanistan settlement.

And in non-political news:

* James Franco wades deeply into "crowdfunding" to raise money for his planned Palo Alto movie.

Back within an hour or so. To entertain you in the interim, here's Otis.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday starkly warned Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) not to eliminate the filibuster on presidential nominations, warning that he’ll end the 60-vote threshold for everything, including bills, if becomes the majority leader.

“There not a doubt in my mind that if the majority breaks the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate with regard to nominations, the next majority will do it for everything,” McConnell said on the floor.

With at least half a dozen key judicial and cabinet nominees pending, all of whom Republicans have problems with, Reid has threatened to invoke the so-called nuclear option to change the rules of the Senate and eliminate the filibuster on nominations — but not anything else.

Backed up by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), who echoed his warnings in a floor colloquy Tuesday, McConnell said his hypothetical majority would take it a step further.

“I wouldn’t be able to argue, a year and a half from now if I were the majority leader, to my colleagues that we shouldn’t enact our legislative agenda with a simple 51 votes, having seen what the previous majority just did,” he said. “I mean there would be no rational basis for that.”

McConnell went on to thunder about the various things "his" Senate majority would do, if not restrained by the filibuster--beginning with the repeal of Obamacare.

This would be a more frightening prospect had not McConnell been preparing just seven months ago to do the same terrible things with a spare Senate majority via reconciliation (the same process Republicans used to pass the Bush tax cuts) had Mitt Romney won. The power of McConnell's threat also depends on the belief that he will himself forego filibuster reform as Senate Majority Leader if it's in his interest to move in the opposite direction.

The truth is that the biggest fans of the filibuster in both parties are a dwindling handful of senior senators who want to preserve their own personal power, sometimes at the expense of their own party's agenda. Do you want to rely on that crumbling dam to prevent enactment of the conservative movement's priorities in the event the GOP wins a trifecta in 2016 (not terribly likely anyway, since the Senate landscape in 2016 is going to tilt heavily Democratic that year, buttressing the built-in turnout advantage Democrats enjoy in presidential election years).

I can see an argument against escalating the filibuster reform wars based on the theory that Democrats aren't likely to control the House before Barack Obama leaves office. But is sacrificing or radically curtailing Obama's nominating powers a price Democrats should pay for a marginal reduction in the retaliatory intentions of the GOP? I don't think so, but then I don't like the filibuster no matter who is wielding this fundamentally anti-democratic weapon.

At TNR, Isaac Chotiner makes a very compelling case that Rubio's self-interest is hardly congruent with the vision of Barack Obama handing him a commemorative pen after signing immigration reform legislation:

Consider two scenarios: the first is that a bill limps out of the senate, John Boehner agrees to put it up for a vote in the House (where it barely passes), and Obama signs it. Rubio is then forced to run in a G.O.P. primary in 2016 as the man who shepherded Obama's "amnesty" through the senate. Good luck with that. Flip flopping, of the Mitt Romney variety, will be much harder once a bill has passed. In fact, the best reference is not Romney, but rather John McCain, who had little trouble morphing into Mr. "Build the Dang Fence" despite supporting Bush's immigration reform push. If that effort had succeeded, his path to the 2008 nomination would have been trickier.

The second scenario is that Rubio passes a bill through the senate, and it dies in the House. Not only...does this not reflect anything about Rubio's political skill, but it also allows him more rhetorical space. He can easily blame the failure on the Obama administration ("the president wouldn't work with Republicans" etc.), and he can say to Hispanics in the general election, "I tried my best, and if I am president, I will bring Republicans along." (It's true that Bush couldn't, but people have short memories.) Moreover, Rubio has been vocal enough that he doesn't seem like a typical Republican restrictionist.

Sure makes sense to me. Now it's possible, of course, that Marco Rubio isn't going to run for president in 2016, and has set as his personal goal re-election by Floridians that year, and/or obtaining the deep and abiding appreciation of Republican business elites (and a decent number of Christian Right and libertarian activists) for making immigration reform happen against high odds. For all I know, he wants to be an Amigo, and is following John McCain's path of becoming a Beltway media icon while maintaining a very conservative voting record.

But if Rubio does want to run for president, and does plan to spend some serious quality time chit-chatting at a hundred Pizza Ranches with the intensely nativist GOP caucus-goers of Iowa, it's hard to imagine that signing-ceremony moment with Barack Obama serving as anything other than his political death warrant. As Chotiner points out, John McCain himself might have never survived his championship of immigration reform when he ran for president in 2008 had the 2007 bill actually been signed into law by George W. Bush. Substituting "Obama" for "Bush" in the equation makes the peril involved immensely larger, and thus makes Rubio a likely subversive in the final stages of the current legislation. That's worth remembering since he'll undoubtedly be a major player in what happens after a bill gets through the Senate.

But what I found most interesting in Lizza's piece was the revelation that the Gang of Eight's immigration reform effort began very self-consciously as an effort to prove filibuster reform wasn't necessary--or at least that's what charter Gang member John McCain claimed:

McCain was arguing, in effect, that if the Senate was going to continue to demand the need for a super-majority, it also had to show that it could pass significant legislation. And, like it or not, that meant working with Obama on one of the defining issues of his Presidency.

If the filibuster did not exist (or was not used so routinely), of course, then odds are a bill similar to or more liberal than the Gang of Eight legislation would have already passed the Senate, and the chamber would not be spending close to a month debating and dealing with amendments designed to boost support to 60 or 70 votes, many of which threaten to blow up the whole process. The standard excuse for this exercise is that its bipartisan nature will better "position" the legislation for consideration in the House, or--more hazily--will "build momentum" for the bill in the House. The former meme seems to contemplate that there is a chance John Boehner will ignore the fruits of his own chamber's committee system and spring the Senate bill as passed on the House, to be passed by a coalition in which Republicans are junior partners. And the latter "momentum" idea is classic Beltway-talk based on the idea that House Republicans won't be able to resist a good bipartisan bandwagon, which sort of ignores the fact that large numbers of them view their very purpose in life to be to the ambushing and destruction of such vehicles.

As regular readers know, I'm more skeptical than most of my center-left colleagues about the likelihood of this Rube Goldberg machine producing a comprehensive immigration reform bill that the president can sign. Even if a decent bill comes out of the Senate, the House will almost certainly either pass its own bill or kill the whole enterprise, which means at best a large, fractious House-Senate conference committee--a bicameral version of the Gang of Eight with more problematic membership--which will aim at developing an entirely new bill whose fate will be entirely up in the air. It is not at all clear to me that the Gang of Eight structure in the Senate--or for that matter, the Gang of Seven (now that Raul Labrador has defected) in the House--has really changed the residual partisan dynamics much at all, other than investing a lot of Senate Democrats in the political career of Marco Rubio.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if the Gang does prevail in the Senate and McCain's right about its underlying purpose, then when we move into the scheduled mid-summer fight over the filibuster, opponents of reform are going to tout the immigration bill as an example of the "genius of the Senate" and argue that the filibuster actually forces bipartisan cooperation rather than simple obstruction of the majority by the minority. Let's hope Harry Reid--described by McCain in Lizza's account as a silent partner in this whole Gang scheme to save the filibuster--doesn't agree, or is prevailed upon to keep his agreement to himself.

The fundamentalist approach to reforming the GOP — an oversimplified Reaganism, advocated in the tone of Barry Goldwater — would only hasten the decline. It is an appeal to an electorate increasingly confined to Republican primaries.

But parties generally don’t get to reformulate their appeal from scratch. While Republicans can’t win with their base alone, they also can’t win without it. Religious conservatives, for example, are the single largest constituency within the GOP, and compose about a quarter of the entire electorate. Such voters are not baggage thrown overboard to lighten the ship; they are planks in the hull.

So the Republican Party is left with a challenge: It needs to become more socially inclusive without becoming socially liberal.

Gerson almost immediately made it clear that the "stable, pro-life convictions" of the "base" were the still point in a turning world, and entirely non-negotiable.

Now that's fairly unsurprising in itself, given Gerson's own identity as a religious conservative. But it helps explain a phenomenon that seems to baffle a lot of Beltway observers at the moment: the noisy and purely symbolic (insofar as there is zero chance it will lead to an actual change in laws) House GOP effort to pass a presumably unconstitutional bill banning abortions occurring after 22 weeks of pregnancy, which is expected to culminate in a floor vote today.

Now this is the sort of stunt that people outside the conservative movement and a handful of Republican Establishment types consider pure folly. That's also the view of secular libertarians who think the Christian Right is an archaic obstacle to the transformation of the GOP into a party seamlessly committed to limited government. But within the conservative movement and most of the GOP elected official class, the effort to overturn abortion rights as they've existed for the last four decades is a great unifying force shared by "rebranders" and "standpatters" alike. Yes, they may disagree on tactics now and then; even within the antichoice movement itself, there is a deep and persistent conflict between those who want to "broaden the coalition" by focusing on late-term abortions or "sex-selection" abortions or some other relatively marginal issue that happens to poll well, and those who want to advance openly radical goals like the "personhood" initiatives.

But all the public and private wrangling over rape and incest exceptions and the exact prioritization of anti-choice efforts in the conservative agenda should not obscure the underlying unity of the Cause and its integral nature to the Republican Party as it exists today. I would have been surprised had the House not debated and passed an abortion bill in the wake of the passage of similar legislation in Republican-controlled states and the immense excitement aroused in antichoice circles by the Gosnell case, the latest event that is supposed to arouse the consciences of the "good Germans" who are slow to grasp that legalized abortion is the "American Holocaust."

Republicans are as likely to "moderate" on this issue as they are likely to suddenly embrace progressive taxes or collective bargaining rights. You can argue all day long as to whether Republican "elites" actually want to ban abortion or are cynically manipulating the poor Bible-thumping yahoos who man the barricades and lick the envelopes (or send the emails) for the GOPs. But in the end, it's so central to the party's identity that it's not about to be "rebranded" into compromise or obscurity.

How about we take all of this energy being spent on autopsies and focus it on painting a picture for the American public, particularly for young people, of what a free and prosperous American future will look like with smart conservative policies.

No more self-analysis; we’ve had our catharsis. The season for navel gazing has passed. Let’s stop defeating ourselves, get on offense, and go kick the other guys around. If you’ve followed the news over the past month, they are certainly asking for it. We are the conservative party in America — deal with it. We have a lot of dissenting voices. So what? Deal with it. The American public waxes and wanes. Fine. It will wax again soon enough. Deal with it, and start fighting for our principles instead of against them, so we can be in position to create the next wave.

Now if you carefully read both the January speech and the current op-ed, they actually say pretty much the same thing: Republicans need to be more consistently conservative. In January Jindal was trying out some sort of libertarian populist rap that involved systematic opposition to the federal government doing much of anything, and now he seems to be channeling the rage of the conservative activist "base" against the shadowy elitists preparing once again to sell them down the river, this time in the name of "rebranding."

Republican political correctness is all the rage, and it’s all roughly the same: we need to stop being conservative… we need to abandon our principles (at least the ones that don’t poll well)… we need to let the smart guys in Washington pick our candidates…we need big data and analytics so we can optimize… we need to be more libertarian…we need to endorse abortion…we need fewer debates…and the list goes on.

The overall level of panic and apology from the operative class in our party is absurd and unmerited. It’s time to stop the bedwetting.

"Political correctness" and "bedwetting" are, of course, epithets conservatives typically hurl at the hated secular-socialist opposition. So Bobby "Big Brain" Jindal is basically going all Joe McCarthy on anybody questioning conservative orthodoxy henceforth. And he's also articulated the strongly held position of "constitutional conservatives" that the American people, not the conservative movement or the Republican Party, need to change:

At some point, the American public is going to revolt against the nanny state and the leftward march of this president. I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but I believe it will come soon.

So stop "navel-gazing," critics, and shut up, "bed-wetters," it's time to put a big hatpin through the frontal lobes and paint the faces blue and raise the unearthly battle cry of the righteous against the heathen. That's the counsel of the perpetual smartest guy in the room, who doesn't want Republicans to be the "stupid party."

* Conservatives in both Houses are beginning regularly to link Obamacare to immigration reform, both substantively and symbolically. That's another danger sign for the "Republican Establishment;" they've got no one to blame but themselves.

* WaPo reports a general pattern by VA Gov. Bob McDonnell and his family of regularly letting the state pick up the tab for small personal expenses.

* Jonathan Bernstein cites WaMo's report on the GOP/church rift over an Obamacare fix as more evidence GOP extremism is gradually eroding its base of support.

* At Ten Miles Square, Andrew Sabl deplores Beltway habit of warning that America is over-reacting to Iraq disaster instead of learning Iraq lessons.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer examines delayed retirements among college professors.

And in non-political news:

* Stocks rise on broad front in advance of a Wednesday press conference by Ben Bernanke at the end of the Fed's current policy meeting. If he does anything unexpected, look out!

Let's wrap up with more from those darlings of the Paisley Underground, Rain Parade, with the 1985 tune "Night Shade."

Selah.

The partisan breakdowns are more interesting: Democrats favored the stepped-up intervention by a 51/42 margin, while Republican disapprove by a much larger 29/63 margin, with indies also disapproving 33/60. Yes, the specific reference to the president probably skewed the results, and there may be some who "disapprove" the escalation of U.S. involvement because it wasn't violent enough.

But if these numbers are bad news for the president, they are worse news for the neocons (particularly the Dos Amigos, McCain and Graham) most identified with advocacy of maximum U.S. intervention in Syria, and most avid to intervene elsewhere if given a chance. This may reflect a new phase in the passive-aggressive oscillation of conservative grassroots opinion about foreign policy and national security (with unilateralism being the one principle holding them together), or it may represent the price Republican pols pay when they demonize a president who shares some of their own views. But you can expect that GOP pols looking ahead to 2016--including those like Marco Rubio who have been neo-connish in the past--to pay attention and at least avoid becoming a third Amigo replacing the departed Joe Lieberman.

UPDATE: A new Pew survey shows even stronger opposition to the arming of Syrian rebels, and show significantly less partisan differentiation (perhaps because the question does not mention President Obama or his administration). The follow-up questions indicating underlying attitudes about military interventions show Republicans more skeptical than Democrats about the Syrian rebels, and less inclined to intervene on moral grounds, so again: it's really bad news for the neocon advocates of intervention.

The purveyors of this poll did not vouchsafe us, so far at least, access to the internals that might show how the approval "slide" broke out by partisan, ideological or demographic category, with one big exception: an 18% drop in job approval from Americans under thirty.

It's a shame CNN/ORC didn't supply similar numbers for under-30s on individual issues. Are they frustrated with the slow recovery of the economy? Are they anxious about Syria? Or, as one might expect, are the "scandals" involving terrorism-related surveillance the main problem?

Funny thing is: steady majorities overall support the surveillance activities that have been in the news, and also support prosecution of Edward Snowden.

The closest thing to a hint we have about the relationship of the surveillance issues to Obama's job approval numbers is in the answers to this question:

Do you think the Obama administration has gone too far, has been about right, or has not gone far enough in restricting people's civil liberties in order to fight terrorism?

43% answered "too far," 38% "about right," and 17% "not enough." CNN/ORC usefully compares these number to an identical question asked during the Bush administration, which received quite similar answers (other than a higher number for "not far enough.").

It seems pretty likely that Obama's approval rating is getting hit from left and right--from people who disliked the surveillance policies under Bush as well, who when combined with people who dislike everything Obama does, makes up a significant majority.

That's bad for the president, and is a reminder that hewing close to the ideological center on some issues doesn't always translate into popularity for this president since it sacrifices support from the Left while opposition from the Right would persist even if Obama tried to channel Dick Cheney.

But it's not necessarily good for Republicans, since a significant share of those who are newly expressing disapproval of the president might well object even more to Republican policies.

So aside from the fact that this is a single poll taken 17 months before the midterm elections, it's important to remember that disapproval isn't the same thing as defection, which should be kept in mind before anyone translates Obama's disapproval ratings into some putative GOP landslide in 2014.