Five Arizona counties have been designated by federal agriculture officials as primary natural disaster areas due to damage caused by ongoing drought and related disasters that began in January.

Four contenders for the GOP's presidential nomination are polling competitively with President Obama among registered voters, according to a new poll.  How do potential Independent or third party presidential hopefuls match up against the candidates of the major parties?  We don't know, because the pollsters never ask. 

After weeks of heated rhetoric and accusations directed toward the Tea Party movement in the days leading up to the debt ceiling agreement and afterward, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) stirred up the war of words again in California this weekend by saying: "the Tea Party can go straight to hell."

Let me say at the outset that I have not yet watched the movie version of The Help – the box office hit about black domestics in the deep south and a gutsy young white journalist who exposes their plight to the world.  But I have both read the book and lived the era.  Having grown up as a white southerner, I found myself in a storm of nostalgia recalling the separate but unequal nature of our lives as I sped through this moving novel.

In the wake of the debt ceiling crisis, there has been an astonishing wave of criticism directed at the two-party state and duopoly system of government.  For many Americans, the debt debacle appears to have been the straw that broke the camel's back.  But, will their anger translate into action?