Rick Perry's 'Texas Miracle' Includes Crowded Homeless Shelters, Low-Wage Jobs, Worker Deaths

HuffPost: It was 105 degrees outside late last week when Vanessa Surita, 24, planted herself on the sidewalk and stretched her legs. Her young daughter sat in a stroller within arms length, outside the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless, or ARCH. Her needs were great: housing, a job, a high school diploma.

LiveScience: Record Heat Unlikely to Cool Climate Change Debate

No state in the union was safe from July's blistering heat wave, according to data from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center.

The horrible July heat wave, lasting weeks in some cities, the entire month in others, affected nearly 200 million people in the United States at some point. Preliminary data show that 2,712 high-temperature records were either tied or broken in July, compared with 1,444 last year, according to the NCDC. At least one weather station in all 50 states set or tied a daily high temperature record at some point during July.

Romney Judicial Advisor Robert Bork: Civil Rights Act Is ‘Unsurpassed Ugliness,’ But Criminalizing Contraception Use Is OK

Yesterday, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) announced Robert Bork will co-chair his presidential campaign’s “Justice Advisory Committee.”

President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to serve as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1987 to replace Justice Lewis Powell. President Reagan, a staunch conservative, had already appointed two justices -- moderate Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981 and conservative Antonin Scalia in 1986, the latter at the same time that William Rehnquist, also a conservative, was named to replace the retiring chief justice, Warren Burger.

Right-wing backers of the Pres. Reagan had been disappointed in 1981 when Reagan chose the more moderate O'Connor over Bork, but accepted the fact that O'Connor's nomination was Reagan keeping of a campaign promise to put the first woman on the Court. But, for Powell's replacement ultra-conservatives pressured the Reagan White House to nominate Judge Robert Bork, a known conservative then serving on the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals.