PN-G bamatex

Evidently, y’all didn’t see this the first time. Cut down on the personal insults and get back to the football. No more bashing of a particular vocation or a particular SETXSports user by anyone.

Y'all keep the personal insults down and get back on topic.

Lol, I completely understand.

If I recall correctly, he lost the ball on that hit that knocked him out of the Huntsville game (could honestly be wrong). That's the only time I think he's had a turnover.

I take your point, and I'm not trying to quibble with it in this post. I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but I think the issue is broader than what you've outlined here. Simply put, I think we have a generation of people that has lost its sense of reality. It's not merely that people around my age were raised without a sense of discipline or morality. This generation has not had to grow up living with the same, harsh realities that prior generations had to contend with. I think what I'm trying to say here is best explained through examples. There are young women that I went to law school with at UT who will look you in the eye and tell you, with a straight face, that your mere existence as a white male means you will always have power over them. You can ask them what they mean by that, and most of them won't even try to explain it to you. They'll tell you it's just something you wouldn't understand. The gist of their argument appears to be that men carry out certain microagressions in professional environments which inherently oppress women, and there are certain things men can get away with doing that would be looked at differently if carried out by women (though they'll never accept the corollary that there are things women can get away with which men can't). Occasionally, they'll point to general, conceptual examples, though I've rarely seen them offer hard evidence even by anecdote. The most popular one I've heard proffered is that a man's assertiveness is characterized as confidence and desired in the work place, where a woman's assertiveness is characterized as "b*tchiness" and shunned. I've looked - hard - for concrete examples of this, and haven't been able to find it either at the law school or in working for a host of state and federal offices during law school and since graduation. The best example I've been able to come up with to date involved important contextual factors that simply eviscerate the point. But even accepting this as a premise, the best example that these very intelligent, driven women can come up with of the "oppression" they face boils down to office semantics. More tangible issues, like the pay gap or the number of women holding executive positions, are undermined when factors like maternity leave and the number of women who leave the workplace altogether to raise children are accounted for. The infinitely more significant factor in this equation, though, and the one that seems to get overlooked the most in my experience, is that the same women who will tell you this with a straight face at UT Law, and I imagine in dozens of other highfalutin academic circles around the country, will turn around and leave the building they have access to because their father is paying their tuition through a trust fund, go to the $200 parking space in the nearest garage that their father purchased access to, hop in a BMW, Mercedes, Lexus or Range Rover that their father bought, and drive to the million dollar condo down on Rainey Street that their father rents with his oil money. The whole time, they're carrying around the Louis Vuitton handbags and the Prada sunglasses they received as Christmas and birthday presents from - you guessed it - their parents. They'll spend their breaks from school on vacations in East Asia, or the Bahamas, or Europe, or Latin America, all expenses paid for by - guess who - their fathers. The women that say this are not the middle and working class women of America who help keep America running; the ones who go out and do real work to earn their paychecks every day can't even spell Louis Vuitton, much less afford it. These women have never had to fight for the right to vote, which was so coveted by Susan B. Anthony. They never watched the family fortune evaporate, and have never been left wondering if they'll have food on the table or clothes on their back like so many millions of women were during the Great Depression. They've never done an ounce of real, physical labor, like the millions of women who stepped up to the plate to perform during the manpower shortages of World War II, just to be sent back to the kitchen when the men came home and could work the jobs again. The women who make these claims were never passed around in the Antebellum slave trade, or in the modern day sex trade. These women who run around saying these things never had to fight for the passage of egalitarian milestones like Title VII; they've never walked into a workplace where their paychecks were literally withheld until they performed sexual favors, because they've never lived in a world where the law allows that. And yet these women have the audacity to claim they know what 'oppression' is because they feel a few things they say or do may be mischaracterized by men in the workplace. The very idea indicates to me that they don't know what actual oppression is. And why should they? We've done a damn fine job of eliminating it in this country so they wouldn't have to. The unfortunate side effect, though, is that when these little inconsequential incidents occur, they're taken as the dead giveaway of sexism by a generation that hasn't experienced real sexism and thus can't differentiate. On a very related note, I think the same issue presents itself with respect to all of this newfound outrage over sexual assault. Once upon a time, rape was what happened to the poor, defenseless woman who was cornered in a parking garage or a back alley late at night. It involved real violence - as in beatings, lacerations and even gunshots. That conception was formed by generations of Americans who lived in far more violent eras than the one we're in today. And it was against that background that we construed other forms of sexual contact. It wasn't that long ago that drunk sex was something Willie Nelson wrote songs about, and the subject of those awkward scenes in romantic comedies. When it happened in real life, at worst, it was a regrettable mistake. 99% of the time, the parties got over it and moved on with their lives, understanding that people have been getting drunk and having sex since alcohol was invented. Heck, sometimes, relationships even formed out of it. In that world, drunk sex and rape were flatly incomparable. They were just two different things. But now, if two people get drunk and have sex on a college campus, it's a sexual assault. Heck, at UT, even if both parties were drunk and can't remember having sex, the guy still committed a sexual assault - there's a lawsuit over that very case right now. That is the product of a generation that doesn't know what violent rape actually is. We are fortunate today that violent crime rates, including sexual assault rates, are at historic lows. We just don't see the street violence in this country that we did even twenty years ago. The unfortunate side effect, though, is that this generation, which has never had to live in that violent world, conflates drunk sex with actual rape. They just don't have the raw experience to draw the distinction. The same can be said for the changing conceptions surrounding guns. There were whole generations of Americans who fought in long, terribly bloody wars with guns everywhere. To the men who spent four years driving tanks in Europe and firing 16" shells from battleships in the Pacific, the idea of a man with an AR-15 just isn't all that scary. They've seen worse. The guys who spent a decade in Vietnam getting shot at by guerrillas with AK-47s don't take much issue with the idea of buying an AK of your own to have around the house if things ever get out of hand - they know exactly how good of a gun that is. But to the kids who barely remember 9/11 and didn't pay all that much attention to Iraq, the mere presence of a Glock is earth-shattering. On that note, it shouldn't be lost on anyone that a generation that throws around the word "Nazi" with the likes of Donald Trump and his supporters has never lived in a world where actual Nazis had actual power; if they were alive today, I shutter to think what my great uncles who went ashore at Normandy and helped liberate Buchenwald would say to the white liberals who think they know what a Nazi is. And I can't make a post like this and not mention the LGBTQ+ movement. I have sat there when transgendered students have literally said their very right to exist is abridged by multi-stall bathrooms reserved for specific sexes. It wasn't that long ago that homosexuals were castrated, tarred, feathered, burned at the stake and/or hung by their entrails. Now they can get married. It wasn't that long ago that transgendered persons were committed to mental institutions. Now they can get on the cover of Time Magazine. A generation that hasn't seen those burnings, hangings and so on doesn't understand what infringing on a person's right to exist really is. I say all of that to say this: I think you're correct in saying that we have a generation of "spoiled brats," but I think it's a mistake to narrowly describe them as spoiled because their parents have given them whatever they want or they haven't received proper moral instruction. They're spoiled in the sense that they've grown up in a world free of the lion's share of brutalities prior generations dealt with every day, and sacrificed substantially to eliminate. For all the benefits of that, the bad biproduct has been a generation that's lost vital perspective, and doesn't realize how good it's got it.

I’ll admit to being skeptical of the Herman hire before today. Before today.

Listened to most of the game. Vidor always play us hard and it sounds like tonight was no exception. Glad to hear the Indians are back to their winning ways, and that Roschon is back at full speed. Good luck during the rest of what's shaping up to be a great season, Pirates.

Susan Collins gave an excellent speech in which she explained her decision to vote for Kavanaugh's confirmation. "Some argue that because this is a lifetime appointment to our highest court, the public interest requires that doubts be resolved against the nominee. Others see the public interest as embodied in our long-established tradition of affording to those accused of misconduct a presumption of innocence. In cases in which the facts are unclear, they would argue that the question should be resolved in favor of the nominee. "Mr. President, I understand both viewpoints. This debate is complicated further by the fact that the Senate confirmation process is not a trial. But certain fundamental legal principles—about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness—do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them. "In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy. "The presumption of innocence is relevant to the advice and consent function when an accusation departs from a nominee’s otherwise exemplary record. I worry that departing from this presumption could lead to a lack of public faith in the judiciary and would be hugely damaging to the confirmation process moving forward. "Some of the allegations levied against Judge Kavanaugh illustrate why the presumption of innocence is so important. I am thinking in particular not of the allegations raised by Professor Ford, but of the allegation that, when he was a teenager, Judge Kavanaugh drugged multiple girls and used their weakened state to facilitate gang rape. This outlandish allegation was put forth without any credible supporting evidence and simply parroted public statements of others. That such an allegation can find its way into the Supreme Court confirmation process is a stark reminder about why the presumption of innocence is so ingrained in our American consciousness." -- Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) [Hidden Content] It's a fitting end to this mess that a female, Republican United States Senator from a solidly blue state should be the one to cast the swing vote confirming Kavanugh tomorrow evening, and to articulate such a thoughtful rationale so well-grounded in our nation's core philosophical principles today. A lot of my faith in our system of government was restored today.

I can see the Historical Commission's landmark now. "Constructed when Anglo settlers first colonized the area under Mexican land grants in the late 1820s, Bulldog Stadium has been the continuous home of the Nederland High School football team since before the high school even existed. It is one of the only structures in the state to have survived the 'Runaway Scrape,' the scorched earth policy instituted by Sam Houston during his retreat from Mexican President-General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana's forces prior to the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. When asked whether the stadium should be burned, then-General Houston is rumored to have responded, 'It's not worth the lighter fluid.' "Dick Dowling and his men are said to have used the field to practice drills before fighting the Battle of Sabine Pass in 1863; in fact, local legend holds that Nederland's dogmatic dedication to military style marching bands stems from the Confederate colonel's wartime routines, and that the uniforms worn by Nederland's marching band to this day are the same ones donated by Dowling's men in 1865 because they were of no further use after the Confederacy surrendered. Patillo Higgins is said to have hosted games on the field for his wildcatters during company recreational events around the time the Spindletop geyser began producing oil in 1901. "When the stadium began showing its extreme age in the mid-1930s, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered to replace it through the Works Progress Administration. Nederland ISD turned the offer down, however, due largely to opposition efforts headed by the SETXSports poster formerly known as 'smitty,' who charged that the WPA was a 'socialist program' that would inevitably lead to higher taxes, and that President Roosevelt was a 'communist' who would be a better fit to lead 'Stalinist Russia' than America. smitty was later instrumental in the election of Joe McCarthy. "In 1984, the stadium hosted Nederland's first win over the arch-rival Port Neches-Groves Indians since 1965. Local legend and substantial eyewitness testimony suggest that Nederland ISD's groundskeepers wet the field before the game to slow the Indian ground game, eventually culminating in a 13-7 win. Grown men in the Nederland stands are said to have briefly ceased their incessant barking to openly weep as time expired, as none of the students then involved in the game were old enough to remember the last time Nederland had beaten PN-G. In honoring the win, considered legendary in Nederland but mostly ignored by the rest of Southeast Texas, the field has been kept continuously - and suspiciously - muddy for more than three decades. "During early 2000s renovations, a local Nederland family donated their mid-1990s 'big box' TV for use as a jumbotron. Nederland ISD gladly accepted the hand-me-down, and the television sits atop brick pillars today, providing low definition instant replays for those in the stands not too annoyed by the stadium's terrible sound system to watch. (2018)"

I thought Nederland preferred wet fields?

#19 Texas vs #7 Oklahoma (-7.5) #13 Kentucky at Texas A&M (-6) (My upset pick for the week. Y'all don't disappoint me.) #1 Alabama (-33.5) at Arkansas (Lol.) Florida St at #17 Miami (-12.5) #5 LSU (-3.5) at #22 Florida (I honestly don't understand how the spread is this close. I watched LSU beat a good Auburn team at their place and absolutely demolish Ole Miss at home. Florida's getting better, but Mullen still has a lot of rebuilding to do. LSU should be favored by more.) Indiana at #3 Ohio St. (-25) #8 Auburn (-3) at Miss St. (As much as I hate to say it, I don't think this one will be that close either.) #6 Notre Dame (-5) at #24 Virginia Tech Maryland at #15 Michigan (-17) #10 Washington (-21) at UCLA Nebraska at #16 Wisconsin (-21)

Y'all please shut Mike Stoops up.

Title VII expressly prohibits discrimination based on sex in employment. I suspect that argument would be stronger than a Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection argument, though I think there's viability there as well.

This is a very long post. If there's one thing I think everyone can agree on about the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, it's that it's shined a spotlight on the real world problems of dealing with sex-related offenses. I've been on both sides of this fence. My freshman year of undergrad, I received a text late one evening from one of my roommates. About an hour and a half or so before I received the text, his girlfriend at the time had been cornered in her bedroom and forcefully groped by a classmate in the same honors program this roommate and I were enrolled in, in a manner not altogether unlike what Dr. Blasey Ford described in her testimony. I arrived at her dorm about ten minutes later to find her vomiting in her bathroom, clearly under immense stress. Her appearance was totally disheveled, and it was obvious she had been sobbing for some time. My roommate was doing everything in his power to console an extremely hysterical 18 year old girl living alone for the first time, three states away from home. The incident had occurred while the roommate and I had been in the particular honors class, and more importantly, while the alleged assailant had not. As the girlfriend relayed more details, I came to learn that the assailant had appeared at her dorm, knocked on her door, basically invited himself in, and once inside, became more and more aggressive until she was pinned in a narrow space between her bed and a wall, and he was unbuttoning her pants. Amid her crying and begging him to stop what he was doing, he broke off the attempt before getting all of her clothes off, but not before he had felt just about everything you can imagine. According to her, he left almost immediately thereafter. From what I can piece together, I'd estimate that the entire incident took less than a half hour, though I'm sure to her it felt like a lifetime. There's no doubt in my mind that everything she relayed to me that evening was the truth, not only because I knew her, but because I knew the guy, and this wasn't something I'd put past him. The hardest part of that night - aside from resisting the overwhelming urge to hunt this dude down and beat him within an inch of his life - was convincing this poor girl to report what had happened to the campus police, and ultimately to tell her parents. Her immediate reaction in the wake of that nightmare wasn't to report it at all. Instead, her immediate reaction was the college student's version of the flight in fight or flight. She wanted to get through the night, get up and go to class the next morning, and to forget the whole thing had ever happened. Basically, she never wanted to have to think about that night again. It seemed alien to me at the time, but I've learned since then, both through raw experience and research, that it's not a totally uncommon reaction. It's essentially a neurological self defense not totally unlike the outright suppression of memories - the mental version of running like hell. The experience is so traumatic that the victim wants to bury it to prevent the additional trauma of reliving it every time he or she thinks about it, or has to recount it through an investigation process and so on. I probably spent two or three hours on the couch in her dorm room working through everything that happened with her that night before I finally convinced her the best thing to do was to report it. When we finally got somewhere, she agreed to do it on the condition that we contacted her parents first and the police second (she had been afraid all night that her father would be ashamed of her for this, a feeling I still don't understand today; she had likewise been afraid he'd go the other way and show up on campus the next morning shotgun in hand, a feeling I understand as much now as I did then). Her boyfriend and I were in the room when she called her parents, which probably happened around midnight. We contacted the police I guess about a half hour later, and it was probably 2 or 3 AM on this Monday night when everything was wrapped up and I went back to my dorm to get some sleep. That was right at seven years ago now. Some time a few weeks later, I received a handwritten note from this girl's mother thanking me for getting her through that night, which I'm sure I still have in a file or a box somewhere. Even this far removed from it, I still sometimes get a text or Facebook message from the girl thanking me for stepping in when I did; she's much happier being able to discuss this now than she believes she would have been had she chosen to keep quiet the way she originally wanted to. Likewise, my junior year at Alabama, I was approached by another young woman about a remarkably similar incident. While leaving an extracurricular meeting in a classroom late one night, she caught me as I exited the door and asked to speak to me. The next thing I knew, she was tearing up as she explained that another member of the same extracurricular group, who I had been involved in removing from office amid irregularities in the organization’s finances about two months earlier, had gotten violent with her. I called over one of our female vice presidents, and we quickly moved the conversation to my apartment. Once there, we learned that this particular guy had invited her over to his apartment one night, and she had found him very drunk when she arrived. It wasn’t long until he was pressuring her into performing sexual favors, and she quickly decided it was time to leave. When she attempted to leave, though, he became angry, and began choking her until she relented and agreed to do as he wanted. Basically, she was raped; I knew then, and have the legal training to confirm now, that what she was describing was undoubtedly sexual assault. She was able to show us the bruising on her lower neck and upper back from the choking. Like the first young woman, this one did not want to report. Unlike the first young woman, there was nothing I could do to change her mind, and I completely understood her reasons for not wanting to. The male student involved in this situation was the step son of the vice president of a Fortune 500 company; a few months earlier while we had been attending a conference in New Orleans, I was just down the hall when this guy told two New Orleans police officers that one phone call to his mother would have “the best lawyer in Louisiana” on the scene while he was being questioned about several hundred dollars in cash and several pairs of women’s underwear that had come up missing from the hotel room of another young woman who he had visited the night before. This guy grew up in a penthouse suite in a ritzy neighborhood in a major, northern city. The girl involved in this situation, on the other hand, came from a working class family in small town south Alabama. Her dad was an ex-Marine and at least as far as I know, her mother didn’t work. We all knew that if that allegation got reported either to the school or to local law enforcement, a virtual army of attorneys would descend on Tuscaloosa, and she just didn’t have the financial tonnage to fight back. She stayed quiet, and it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if she hasn’t said a word to anybody else about this in the more than four and a half years since then. (Sidenote: After a long conversation with one of the deans at Alabama and a lot of behind the scenes work, I was able to force the guy off campus about a year later using hard evidence of some other illicit things he had done. Last I heard, the step-dad kicked him to the curb and he’s now selling used cars in Kentucky. He was never able to get into another school, hasn’t been back to Alabama since, and I doubt he’ll ever step foot on my side of the Sabine River.) I say all that to say this: I understand where the #MeToo movement is coming from. Yes, there are problems that women (and some men) face with regard to these issues. Yes, things happen in the dark that aren’t reported for years, if ever. Yes, the realities of our system of justice often make it difficult to prosecute these kinds of cases. I concede all of that, and about three years ago, I was on board with the narrative that our society could do better in these cases. Then I went to law school at Texas. At this very instant, there is an active civil rights investigation against UT for their handling of a Title IX complaint. It’s not the kind of civil rights case people have become accustomed to hearing about in these cases; it’s not a case where some poor girl reported something to the school and the school failed to act. It’s the other way around, and it came from the law school. The gist of it is that a male law student was accused of a ton of stuff by a very, very angry female law student he had previously dated. Six individual factual incidents were alleged against him. Four were disproved, three before the investigations had ended and one after a hearing. Of the remaining two, he was never granted a hearing on one of them despite his explicitly stated right to a hearing in school policy, and the hearing over the last accusation was a complete farce. These allegations started as exaggeration and lies of omission. About three weeks before the guy broke things off with this girl, a homeless guy high on meth was running around the neighborhood they both lived in. He had alerted her about it by text. The homeless guy ran into the alley behind the girl’s house and was hiding in the dark, so he circled the block until the cops arrived to arrest the homeless guy. The girl was thanking him in the text messages for doing this at the time, specifically noting – in writing – how much it meant to her. But fast forward three weeks to after he breaks things off, and suddenly the story became “he was circling my house in the middle of the night” – with no mention at all of the homeless guy, the meth, the fact that he got arrested, the fact that this law school student lived just a few blocks down from her to begin with or the texts where she was thanking this guy for taking care of things. One of the other allegations had to do with the actual break-up. The guy broke things off via break-up letter; it’s literally in writing that he was the one ending their relationship. By all means, they had a relationship, albeit a problematic one; they had been dating on and off for four months. Just the week before he delivered his break-up letter, they had gone to dinner together, he had walked her home from class together, they had been seen dancing at a party together, and they had left said party together. They had gone on at least four dates over the four months prior to that, and the evidence suggested they’d made arrangements for more dates at different intervals – at least one of them at her behest – which they simply hadn’t followed through on. At various points she had said that she wanted to continue going on dates him and that she was happy they were doing things together. All of that was attested to by credit card records, text and social media messages, and testimony from multiple witnesses. The general opinion of other female law students was that she just couldn’t decide whether to make it something serious or not. But then he breaks things off with her, and her story suddenly becomes that she had ended things months earlier and that he had pressured her into everything they’d done together since. Facebook messages that literally said how glad she was they were doing things together were suddenly just her being nice. Comments she had left on his Facebook complimenting his wittiness in the middle of a Saturday night (when she was frankly very likely inebriated) were also just her being nice. Them dancing together at law school parties (where frankly, she was dancing dirty right up next to him)? According to her, she doesn’t dance for anybody but herself (even though dating profiles she’s put up on social media since then make reference to how she starts to remember choreography when she’s had enough cocktails, winky face emoticons included, of course). Him walking her home from school and buying her dinner a week pre-break-up letter? She just didn’t know how to politely decline the invitation. Her inviting him to drinks a month before that? That apparently never happened. That law school girl who testified she was interested in the guy but couldn’t make up her mind about getting serious? Oh, she just doesn’t really know this girl, so that couldn’t possibly be accurate. The story even changed during the investigation. She initially claimed that she was not scared for her safety at all at the very onset of the investigation. But upon meeting with investigators, she claimed that when he dropped the break-up letter off on her front porch and knocked to signify its delivery, he apparently woke her up out of a sound sleep and left her believing there was a burglar at the door (you know, because burglars knock first). She initially claimed this occurred at midnight. But it was 1 AM the next time they discussed it, and 1:30 AM the time after that, though she eventually went back to 1 AM. Her two roommates completely contradicted her later accounts in written, signed and witnessed statements; one roommate claimed they were all awake, and simply said they were nervous when they heard knocking after dark but that the girl was just mad and everybody else was fine after they realized what it was, while the other roommate contradicted the girl’s account on some of the finer details. At the hearing ten months after the break-up letter was dropped off, the girl claimed for the first time that she had grabbed a bat when she heard the knocking because she so believed it was a burglar, and that one of her other roommates grabbed a vase. Though neither roommate was present at the hearing (apparently, both deliberately chose not to go even though they were all still rooming together, which says something in itself), neither of the roommates’ statements reflected these details, nor did either of them express any concerns that might lead one to believe this had actually occurred. She also continued making new allegations after the investigation commenced. She contacted the school two months into the investigation to report that the guy was contacting her during the investigation, which is barred by the no contact orders mandated in these cases. In the course of investigating that specific accusation, the girl admitted in writing that she had lost all of her contact information because of some problem with her phone, that she had confirmed with friends that the number the alleged contact came from was not the guy’s, and that she only thought it was him because the voice was obviously male and familiar to her (though she stated in the same breath that she cut whoever it was off before he could finish his first sentence in the conversation, and hung up on him). The school was never able to obtain screenshots from her showing the alleged contact had even occurred; for all we know, it never even happened. The guy provided cell phone records showing he had not contacted the girl at the alleged times. But believe it or not, this is one of the two allegations the guy was finally convicted of, and it’s the one he was never given a hearing on; literally two hours after admitting to the guy during a recorded interview that there was "no actual evidence" he had contacted the girl, a UT investigator put in writing that there was a "preponderance of evidence" he had done so. When the guy and his attorney filed a FERPA request to obtain the case file on this accusation, the request was flatly ignored well past the 45 day statutory limit under federal law. The worst overall allegation this girl made came eight months into the investigation, and it was the moment I can definitively say without doubt that she transitioned from exaggerating or leaving details out into flatly making things up – it was the moment a very questionable story became a fabricated one. One weekday afternoon, she apparently called the school to report that he was following her by car as she was on the phone. What documentation we’ve been able to recover shows that she gave an eerily accurate description of the guy and his truck, right down to the parking tag hanging on his rearview mirror. As the testimony goes, he apparently followed her for several miles through north Austin, through every twist and turn right up into the parking lot of her destination. The problem? At that exact moment, he was in Houston. His own cell phone records show that he placed a phone call originating at a cell tower in Brookshire, Texas, just west of Katy, seven minutes before she claimed he was following her. Multiple witnesses confirmed that he was out of town for a family function that evening, at which he was present. (On an aside, my darkest suspicion based on the evidence is that she had plotted that accusation based on her own observations of him. They lived in the same neighborhood, and both testified that over the two months leading up to this accusation, they had seen each other while he was on his way home from work and she was jogging down the street. She claimed he was following her when he ordinarily would have been alone in his one bedroom apartment, where nobody could have vouched for him on any normal workday. It was by sheer dumb luck that he had left work early, gathered his things and left Austin for this family event that particular day.) The school’s reaction to that specific allegation was to immediately suspend this guy during the investigation, before any final determinations had been reached. They notified him of the suspension by email the following week, late in the evening while he was literally on a date with another girl he had been seeing for six months at that point. When they notified him of the suspension, they did not notify him of the new allegation; he wasn’t told for another week, at which point he gathered and turned in all of the evidence proving he was out of town which I’ve mentioned above. The school was dumbfounded, and had to lift the suspension almost immediately. Now here’s the kicker. Four months into this investigation, and four months before this girl said she was being followed, the guy and his attorney had filed a Title IX complaint of their own against the girl, alleging four incidents of harassment and stalking all their own. This complaint alleged, among other things, that early in the investigation, the girl had interrupted a guest lecturer to start yelling at the guy from across the room in the middle of a class, and it named witnesses to that event. That particular allegation obviously flew in the face of the girl’s “I’m scared” narrative, not to mention that it clearly constituted harassment under University policy. But the most significant thing they alleged was that during the investigation, the girl had in fact started following the guy, both in person and through a close, personal friend of hers in what appeared to be a clear attempt at intimidation. One of the specific stalking incidents mentioned in the guy’s complaint posited that she followed this guy to an event his employer was hosting. It was strikingly similar to the girl’s later following allegation; both posited that they had followed each other from their neighborhood for several miles to destinations in north Austin. The only difference in the substance of the accusation was that the guy had witnesses who saw her in the parking lot when they arrived where the girl’s accusation was uncorroborated and totally contradicted by hard evidence. The biggest difference of all, though, wasn’t between the accusations themselves, it was how the school had reacted to them. When the guy had reported this, the school dismissed his complaint outright without an investigation, claiming - in writing - that nothing he had alleged constituted a violation of school policy. Yes, you read that right. UT initially said that UT students aren’t violating their stalking policy when they follow other students around (I should note here that UT’s stalking policy specifically defines following people as stalking). But when the girl made the exact same accusation against the guy four months later, UT suspended the guy before he was even told she had done so. I don’t think I need to expound on the double standard the facts I’ve described above obviate, but I will say that it sketches out a case of what attorneys call “disparate treatment.” Disparate treatment is one of the legal theories used to prove discrimination. That is at least one of the theories at the core of the current civil rights complaint the Department of Education is investigating against UT right now. Things only got worse from there. In what I can only characterize as a desperate attempt to substantiate her accusations, the girl started filming the guy after he left his house one day (recall that they were living in the same neighborhood). In the final months of the investigation, UT issued an investigation report about the girl’s last allegations. Even though she claimed he was following her when he was demonstrably 140 miles away and they knew they couldn't convict him on that one, they continued to label her credible, claiming that her testimony “accurately reflected her individual experience” (I’ve seen that documentation with my own eyes, and it has to be the most conclusory thing I’ve ever read). Worse yet, the cell phone records showing the guy was in Brookshire were specifically omitted from the investigation report. And that’s not the only document missing from school records; it now appears that the Title IX complaint the guy filed against the girl may have been deleted as well, based on its absence from open records disclosures the guy and his attorney filed to get internal UT documents in advance of their hearing. I can only infer from that that the school’s Title IX investigators knew they should have investigated that complaint, and were trying to cover their tracks. Thankfully, though, the guy and his attorney kept copies of the complaint for themselves. As bad as all of that may be, the hearing may be the worst part of the entire ordeal. The guy tried to do what any good attorney would have done in his situation: he attempted to introduce the evidence showing the girl had lied about all these other allegations to kill her credibility on the extent of their relationship and the break-up letter, which were the issues at the hearing. The hearing officer – a former kindergarten teacher getting her Ph.D. in higher education administration who I suspect didn’t know the first thing about legal process or ordinary rules of evidence, and who's been known to endorse tweets about about how "boys are broken" – refused to let him introduce it, claiming it was irrelevant. She would later go on to openly state in her decision that the girl was credible. She excluded roughly a fifth of the questions the guy tried to ask the girl while she was on the stand, later explicitly telling the guy he had no right to cross-examine any witnesses at all even though that right, like the right to a hearing, was clearly stated in school policy (I should note here that when she denied the right to cross examination, the guy was specifically attempting to impeach the UT investigator with proof, contained in emails, that she had certain exculpatory evidence in her possession which she had expressly denied knowledge of under oath; the exchange contained in the hearing record makes clear that he was impeaching said investigator, and it seems apparent the hearing officer was attempting to interrupt that impeachment). The hearing officer made no such statement to the UT investigator acting as de facto prosecutor or to the girl while they were conducting their examinations, nor did she exclude any of the evidence they sought to introduce despite well made objections on the guy’s part which would have been sustained in any ordinary trial. An examination of the hearing record carried out in conjunction with UT’s student newspaper, which is currently preparing articles about this case, revealed the guy was interrupted an estimated fifty times; there were stretches of the hearing record where the hearing officer was stopping him almost every other sentence. On occasion, she even let the girl and the UT investigator do the interrupting for her. The guy had three witnesses, all female, appear at the hearing to testify among other things that this was just a break-up that had gotten out of hand and that the guy hadn’t done anything wrong. They were similarly interrupted with similar frequency by both the girl and the hearing officer (I should note here that no witnesses beside a UT investigator appeared to support the girl’s testimony, even though the school summoned other students on her behalf, a courtesy not extended to the guy). During the guy’s examination, the hearing officer was making him state the purpose of several of his questions on the record in front of the girl and the investigator, as though allowing them to preemptively alter their answers and defeat the point of his questioning (any trial attorney who reads this will get how serious an issue that is, I’m sure). By contrast, the hearing officer excluded none of the UT investigator’s questions and only one of the girl’s questions, never made them explain the relevance of their questions in advance of asking them on the record, and interrupted neither of them even once. The only time anywhere in the record the guy interrupted anyone, the hearing officer immediately jumped down his throat. But worst of all isn’t what occurred on the record during the hearing, it’s what occurred during a recess from the hearing. During one such recess, one of the digital recording devices used for the hearing was accidentally left on. When the guy, his advisor and the court reporter left the room to use the restroom, the hearing officer immediately called the girl and her advisor, another female law student, over. In the conversation that ensued, the hearing officer openly began talking with the girl about how to rephrase things she was saying on the record to make it sound less like she was venting. The hearing officer then proceeded to give the girl instructions on how to interpret the visual cues the hearing officer was sending the girl and her advisor when the guy wasn’t looking during the hearing. At the end of the conversation, the girl’s advisor can openly be heard stating that she’s “going to tell the entire world [he’s] just the worst.” The very next day, a satirical article about the guy and the case appeared in the internal newsletter of the Texas Law Review. The girl’s advisor was managing editor of that newsletter. The recording from that recess makes obvious what the hearing record, in conjunction with the deletion of various documents by UT’s investigators and the manner in which the investigation was generally conducted, suggest intuitively: that the hearing officer, and UT generally, were trying to control what evidence was going into the record and what evidence wasn’t at every juncture of their Title IX process for the purpose of ensuring a specific outcome, and ultimately humiliating the target of their investigation. The absurdity of the hearing decision itself only further exemplifies this; the hearing officer stated that the break-up letter, which she even called a break-up letter, constituted “persistent, unwanted romantic attention” which caused the girl “substantial emotional distress” because in explaining why he was ending things, the guy recalled prior romantic experiences he and the girl had shared which were clearly consensual at the time they occurred, but recalled them after he should have already known the relationship was over in the hearing officer’s opinion, thereby somehow rendering him guilty of sexual harassment and stalking. We've further obtained emails where an assistant dean at the law school - one who's notorious for playing favorites, and who endorses things on Twitter which explicitly state "I hate men" - contacted the Title IX coordinator to discuss the guy at a juncture where the Title IX coordinator was deciding whether to recommend disciplinary action against the guy. The same assistant dean later refused to certify the guy for admission to the bar, and he may not get licensed now because of it - an issue the feds are now evaluating as potential retaliation for their opening the civil rights investigation. We've also obtained social media posts where the the same Title IX coordinator, who has since been reassigned to another role, posted about, in her own words, "stalking" a fellow UT employee who was a male love interest at his place of work for several weeks, suggesting a bias which may have infected her decision-making process, specifically with regard to the dismissal of the male student's stalking complaint against the female student. Likewise, since the school couldn’t suspend the guy anymore without risking a serious lawsuit, the hearing officer chose to make him write a paper on how he would practice “healthy masculinity” in the future, which makes clear to me the role his sex was playing in her decision-making process. In any event, what is beyond question is that UT was never once interested in getting to the actual truth in this case. If they were, they would have investigated the girl when the complaint was filed against her, or when she was caught outright lying. Instead, they were coordinating with her and coaching her behind the scenes, and doing everything they possibly could on the record to stifle the guy’s case. And that’s what brings me back to the Kavanaugh hearings. I watched Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony. I watched Judge Kavanaugh’s, too. Dr. Blasey Ford appeared, at first glance, to be credible to me. I suspect something probably happened to her at some point in her life, though I’m skeptical as to whether it was actually Judge Kavanaugh or if it was as serious as she now believes it to be; time has a way of playing tricks on one's memory. But there’s little doubt in my mind that she believes every word she said. I don’t think she was intentionally lying. Likewise, I don’t doubt Judge Kavanaugh; I don’t think he was intentionally lying, either. I could discern no obvious sign of deceit anywhere in the testimony provided by either of them. But the bottom line is, this isn’t just about what two people are claiming did or did not happen 36 years ago. This is about how we, as a country, treat these kinds of situations. 240 years ago, our forefathers laid down a constitution that consecrated some very important rights. Among them were the right to directly confront an accuser and adverse witnesses, the right to a trial by a jury of our peers, and the mandate that criminal charges be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. When they consecrated those rights, they did so against the backdrop of a revolution against an avaricious king who had, among other things, abused the British Crown’s power of prosecution to silence political dissenters by targeting them with trumped up accusations, including false accusations of rape, and tossing them in jail or worse. Our constitution was designed from the start to make sure the criminal system couldn’t be coopted for political purposes in that way again. Likewise, the Congresses and state legislatures of the Reconstruction era that adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Supreme Courts of the decades since that have given effect to that amendment, have held sacrosanct the rights to respond to these kinds of charges and to have them decided by a fair, neutral decision-maker to ensure that the powers of our government couldn’t be coopted for discriminatory purposes. That’s also why civil rights legislation was the hallmark achievement of the 1960s; let’s not forget that Harper Lee focused on a false accusation of rape to make her point in To Kill A Mockingbird. The Democrats want to say that this isn’t a trial, it’s a job interview. That’s a damned easy thing to say when your career, your reputation and your name isn’t the one on the line. The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t guarantee due process in trials, it guarantees it before any deprivation of life, liberty or property can take place at all. There’s a strong argument to be made that ruining someone’s career constitutes a deprivation of liberty, and potentially property as well. And even if that argument, as applied to Kavanaugh, doesn’t hold much weight legally, it’s one that speaks directly to the core values and the core philosophy this country has held dear for the entirety of its existence. I don’t know what happened between Christine Blasey and Brett Kavanaugh in 1982, and I don’t think we’ll ever know. What we do know is that the allegation is at best uncorroborated by any of the witnesses Dr. Blasey Ford named, and at worst lightly contradicted by Judge Kavanaugh’s calendars. If we were to give weight to these allegations as disqualifying factors in a Supreme Court nomination process – even if they are true and simply unproveable – we will undoubtedly open the floodgates for untrue allegations to come forth from here on (given Michael Avenatti’s latest stunt, we may already have), all to serve innately political ends. Weaponizing a movement like #MeToo in that way would only be a step removed from abusing the prosecutorial power the way King George III did, which is entirely antithetical to everything this country stands for. If you don’t believe me, you need to go back and read that horror story I wrote about that UT case a second time, because I’ve seen firsthand what happens when we throw the hallmarks of our jurisprudence out the window. The hashtag has been #BelieveHer. It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be #BelieveHim either. It should simply be #BelieveEvidence.

Twitter is a liberal echo chamber. I only watch it to get an idea of what the other side’s thinking. Based on what I saw, they may be saying he won, but the raw anger I saw come out last night tells me they know he didn’t and they aren’t happy about it. I’ve got some friends from law school who are involved in the Beto campaign. I kept an eye on their social media specifically last night. Every last one of them was dead silent all night long. One came back this morning trying to make something out of the police violence exchange, but the effort is weak at best. His campaign staff knows he got hammered in that debate.

I don’t know if any of y’all watched, but I haven’t seen a beat down that bad in a debate since Mitt Romney’s economics debate with Barack Obama in 2012.

And we've got Auburn at home this year.

A couple of my sources have told me to keep an eye on UNT this year. They're expecting pretty big things (relatively speaking) in Denton. Beating Arkansas doesn't say much - half the high school teams in SETX could beat Arkansas right now - but I suspect it says more about UNT than it does the Hogs.

Provided A&M plays the way they did against Clemson, I think this will be the best defense we've faced this year. Not that that's saying much. Nonetheless, Alabama by four touchdowns or more.

*there

At least he can beat an FCS school.

The way UT wastes money on a daily basis, it wouldn’t surprise me if they started doing exactly that.

My picks: #22 USC at Texas (-3) Fox 7pm (A blowout warning is in effect for the following counties: Travis.) LA Monroe at Texas A&M (-26.5) SECN 6:30pm (I don't understand how Michigan State is ranked but Texas A&M isn't after last week.) #5 Oklahoma (-17.5) at Iowa St ABC 11am #17 Boise St at #24 Oklahoma St (-3) ESPN 2:30pm BYU at #6 Wisconsin (-21.5) ABC 2:30pm #12 LSU at #7 Auburn (-9.5) CBS 2:30pm (I'm picking Auburn only because they're at home. There won't be a lot of separation in this game and I'm rooting for LSU.) Houston at Texas Tech (-1.5) Fox 3:15pm #1 Alabama (-21) at Ole Miss ESPN 6pm (There are two places where Alabama has notoriously bad luck: Auburn and Mississippi. We can't keep messing around with a two QB system this week. It's all Tua or nothing.) #4 Ohio St (-12.5) at #15 TCU ABC 7pm (Don't let me down, horny toads. You're my upset pick this week.)

As I was saying.