Speaker of the House John Boehner faces a dilemma on how to proceed on immigration policy, and no matter what course of action he chooses, he is all but certain to disappoint a large part of his own party. Although the immigration issue is new, the dilemma is not. In fact, it's the same dilemma Boehner has faced on multiple issues ever since he picked up the speaker's gavel: do what the Tea Party wing of the Republicans wants, or do what the Republican Party establishment wants. While this division has shown up repeatedly, it seems to be much more stark on the question of immigration -- which doesn't exactly bode well for Boehner.

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Maybe it's just envy. I'll fully admit it, up front. After all, who wouldn't want a job where you get one-third of the time you're supposed to be working as free vacation days? Nice work, if you can find it. So maybe there's a tinge of envy which propels me, on a semi-annual basis, to essentially air the same complaint. But the regularity of these rants is also due to the fact that not much changes in Washington, ever, and one of the reasons that Congress just doesn't work these days is that Congress just doesn't work all that much.

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Welcome back to our monthly review of President Obama's job approval polling numbers. This is going to be an abbreviated version of our normal column, because it got squeezed out of the Monday slot by the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, so apologies for this month's brevity in advance. June wasn't a particularly good month for Obama's numbers -- in fact it was a fairly bad month for him, as his numbers went "underwater" for the first time in his second term. Let's take a look at this month's chart:

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Today, exactly 150 years ago, the Battle of Gettysburg began. Seen by most military historians as the turning point of the Civil War, the victory of North over South was indeed a profound moment in time. But I'm going to leave that sort of thing to the military historians who are much more informed about the battle itself, the meaningfulness of the victory, and all the rest of the arrows-on-a-map analysis. There should be plenty of such commentary this week to commemorate the battle, a three-day affair that left roughly 50,000 Americans dead. Instead, today I'm going to go off on a rather large tangent into the history of the American political world, so be warned.

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Well, we've been away for two weeks, and those two weeks were just chock-full of political news, so we've got a lot to cover. The reason for the interruption in columns was, of course, our attending Netroots Nation, the yearly conclave of bloggers, Progressives, and all and sundry who like hanging out with them. Which brings us to this week's unusual title -- today's Friday Talking Points, for the first time ever, are going to be professionally-produced and focus-group-tested. More on this later.

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They wanted 70, and they got 68. I speak, of course, of the "yea" votes in the Senate on the immigration bill this afternoon. In the political world we occupy today, that is nothing short of astounding. Not only did all 54 Democrats stand together, but 14 Republicans also voted in favor of the bill. That's 10 more than were in the original group which put together the proposal. Which, as I said, is truly astounding in this partisan day and age.

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However, for a whole lot of gay couples, life will have gotten one whale of a lot better. Today's Supreme Court rulings are a giant leap forward along the path to fully equal rights. The federal government will now recognize marriages which their states recognize, and the barriers to equal treatment under federal law have disintegrated for good. That is indeed something to celebrate. Which is why I'm going to stop using the term "gay marriage" ever again in my writing. There is no "same-sex" and "opposite-sex" marriage anymore. There is just marriage, period. From now on, the phrase I'll be using is "marriage equality," because we're all now equal under federal law -- as we should be under state law, as well.

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The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision today, striking down part of the Voting Rights Act. In essence, the court told Congress to come up with a better formula to determine which jurisdictions will have to pre-clear changes to their voting laws (because the old formula is outdated). This has caused much consternation and outcry, but what was notable was that the court did not throw out the concept of preclearance itself.

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This is an article about Paula Deen, racism, and the upcoming gay marriage decisions from the Supreme Court. But mostly it's an article about the long, slow road to true changes in American society. The beginning of this road always starts with the prevailing casual acceptance of bigotry and prejudice in everyday life, and the road doesn't end until society as a whole reaches the point of near-universal condemnation of a way of thinking which used to be widespread and unremarkable.

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Arizona is a truly beautiful state. It has many spectacular sights, of which the Grand Canyon is the most awe-inspiring. But Arizona is also a state of forbidding landscapes -- much of the state is desert or near-desert, where the heat of the midday sun is a force of nature to be heavily respected, if not downright feared. But what has put Arizona into the news recently is its "forbidding" political landscape. Specifically, on immigration.

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