The Coxes' decision is one unfolding in African-American households across the nation. After decades of mass exodus, blacks are returning to the South in one of the most notable migrations of the new century.

It's a subtle but significant shift that experts say provides not only a snapshot of the changing economics and sociology of the nation but of an emerging new South and, in some cases, of a growing disillusionment with the urban North.

For most of the 20th century, blacks were buying one-way tickets out of the Jim Crow South in hopes of a better life. Nearly 6 million African-Americans followed the railroads to places like Detroit and Chicago, never dreaming that their children and grandchildren would someday lead a return migration, chasing the American dream back down the Mississippi and straight across the Mason-Dixon line.

The Great Migration slowly eased in the 1970s as the North's economic fortunes began to dim and the South's racial climate began to improve. But it wasn't until the 2000 Census, when the South posted its first black population increase in more than a century, that demographers started to really take notice. By 2010, about 57 percent of the nation's African-Americans were living in the South - a higher percentage than at any time in 50 years.

The South, to be sure, has been a population magnet for people of all races since the end of World War II. The region was the top destination for newcomers between 1997 and 2011, picking up 1.52 million people - the majority from the Midwest - according to the US Census Bureau's 2012 American Community Survey.

What could this mean?

The Great Migration transformed the nation politically, economically, and culturally. But most experts don't see the current cavalcade in the opposite direction having anything like that level of impact.

For one thing, far fewer blacks are moving this time. They are also moving back to a region that is far more racially diverse than when they moved up north. Many of the African-Americans returning to the South are settling in urban and rural areas across the region. During the Great Migration, blacks concentrated largely in a handful of Northern cities, where they helped reshape neighborhoods, race relations, and politics.

Still, any migration of significance will have at least some implications. One could be to boost the Democratic Party, as large numbers of middle-class African-Americans return to predominantly Republican states. Yet their influx could bring new tensions to the party as well: According to the University of Alabama's Giggie, many of the migrants come with a "Northern-inflected liberalism" that may nudge Democrats across the region, traditionally fairly conservative, leftward.

Next week is the last chance for most people without insurance to sign up for individual health coverage for the remainder of 2014.
Yet according to the latest monthly tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 60 percent of those without coverage still don't know that.

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Couldn't make squat happen on the felt today. Was pretty much card dead and could never get in a spot to make any real poker plays (someone was always raising big ahead of me). Way it goes.

Yee --a child psychologist by trade who's an announced candidate for CA Sec. of State -- and former San Francisco Board of Education President Keith Jackson have since been charged with public corruption in federal court this afternoon, for bribery and wire fraud under the federal "theft of honest services" criminal statutes. Mr. Jackson and his son Brandon have also been charged with murder for hire.

I'm sure we'll hear much more about this developing case in the coming days.

"After comprehensive legal review of state law and all recent court rulings, we have concluded that same-sex couples were legally married at county clerk offices in the time period between U.S. District Judge Friedman's ruling and the 6th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporary stay of that ruling.

"In accordance with the law, the U.S. Circuit Court's stay has the effect of suspending the benefits of marriage until further court rulings are issued on this matter. The couples with certificates of marriage from Michigan courthouses last Saturday were legally married and the marriage was valid when entered into. Because the stay brings Michigan law on this issue back into effect, the rights tied to these marriages are suspended until the stay is lifted or Judge Friedman's decision is upheld on appeal."