CHRISTIE: "New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed into law on Monday a bill that aims to stabilize the largest solar market in the United States, which has suffered from a sharp decline in demand for renewable energy credit and credit prices. The Republican governor signed S-1925, a bipartisan bill that easily passed in both houses of the state legislature," Reuters reports.

PORTMAN: The New Jersey Star Ledger: "Democrats have made no secret of how they would skewer Ohio Sen. Rob Portman if Mitt Romney puts him on the ticket: by tying the former White House budget guru to former President George W. Bush and his controversial economic policies. That’s the broad-brush. But there’s one particularly potent line of attack top Democratic strategists are itching to launch. As Bush’s top trade negotiator in 2005, Portman urged the president not to impose restrictions on cheap Chinese steel imports, causing a drop in sales and job losses for the U.S. steel industry. And that could resonate with voters at a time they’re worried about the economic threat from China and American jobs being shipped overseas."

RUBIO: New York Magazine: "Recently, Republican Senator and future Presidential Timber Marco Rubio compared a speech by President Obama to that of a ‘left-wing 3rd world leader.’ It’s not the first time Rubio has drawn upon the comparison. Last year, he described an Obama speech advocating the cloture of a small number of upper-bracket tax deductions as “the kind of language you’d expect from the leader of a Third World Country.” At other times, he’s called Obama’s arguments “more appropriate for some left-wing strong man than for the president of the United States.” It is no longer terribly newsworthy for even the most respectable Republicans to equate Obama’s policies with dictatorships. But Rubio appears to be fixated on a particular kind of dictator, the Third World strongman. What could explain this odd fixation? Rubio’s parents, of course, emigrated from Cuba. His father first left in the waning days of the Batista regime, but some members of his family returned and then fled when Fidel Castro took power. Rubio inaccurately represented his family as having fled Castro, but in his defense, it seems likely that he grew up believing the rise of Castro precipitated their arrival in America, or at least the revolution loomed large in their story of how they could never return to their homeland."