PN-G bamatex

Am I correct in assuming you're talking about gay marriage and abortion?

[Hidden Content]   The link is posted for laughs, but it touches on a real issue.   I can remember learning about the people who picked up and left Texas and Oklahoma during the dust bowl for greener pastures in California in seventh grade Texas History. Now it seems the tables have turned in the Lone Star State's favor.   When Occidental announced its decision to move from California to Texas earlier this year, Texas was officially slated to become the home state for more Fortune 500 companies than any other state in the country, fittingly eclipsing California in that ranking. When that transition is complete, 53 of those 500 companies will be headquartered within our borders. Despite the 2008 recession and the decline of US manufacturing, the total manufacturing output in Texas is up more than 150% since 1997, and Texas has the second highest number of manufacturing jobs of any state in the country (another metric where I believe we will soon outpace California). Energy production in Texas is projected to exceed its mid-70s record high within two years, and Texas will be out-pumping every oil producing nation in the world except Saudi Arabia by the end of this year. Accordingly, we've become a magnet for new residents. Texas led the country in domestic migration between 2002 and 2012, with more than a million people moving into this state from elsewhere in the country - roughly a sixth of our total growth during that time period. I think it's safe to say "Gone To Texas," a phrase also discussed in Texas History classes, is making a comeback.   What's different about this mass migration, though, is that it hasn't been caused by some unforeseeable weather event that's devastated one regional economy and made another that much more enticing. This is caused as much by a difference in leadership as much as anything else. California easily could have taken steps to keep the companies and workers they've lost. The bottom line is, they didn't. Meanwhile, Texas has maintained a low-tax, low-regulation atmosphere that's drawn in everyone from Google, to Mossberg , to Charles Schwab, to Toyota. And for every company that picks up and moves completely, there's a half a dozen more that move significant portions of their operations into Texas.   I don't think it can be made any more plain than that. When it comes to economics, the Texas model works. If we want the American economy to have a real recovery, and not this excuse for one we've gotten, then we're going to have to turn it from the Texas model into the American model.

  I agree with affirmative action in university admissions for that exact reason. There's nothing the black student could have done to truly compete with the white student in that scenario, which is unfortunately a pretty common one.   But what about in the workforce? If we use the colleges and universities as an engine to compensate for the disparity in qualifications of high school graduates from different backgrounds, shouldn't they, in theory, be at least comparable candidates for employment after graduation from college? And, in theory, wouldn't it be inherently unfair to hand the advantage to the black student after that since he, for all intents and purposes, has pretty much caught up? I realize that's a pretty abstract argument that may not apply so neatly in the real world, but I think it deserves some thought.

This is said by someone who hopes to be wearing burnt orange this time next year.   The most important comparison between the LHN and the SEC Network is this: one took a good conference and made it an average conference, while the other makes a great conference even better.

... she says in response to a guy who voted for Obama.

Where, exactly, have I ever stated that the administration was trying to cover up a deliberate misdeed? Where has bullets said that, for that matter? Please, go back and find those posts. When the Benghazi attack first happened, I clearly remember stating that we needed to wait for the results of a full investigation before jumping to conclusions about anything. I gave the administration the benefit of the doubt and even argued on the administration's behalf with a couple of the posters here. If I could go back and quote those posts, I would; unfortunately, the site crash that occurred a few months later makes that impossible. I'll admit, the fact that it has taken this long to get an investigation, in conjunction with the fact that the Democrats have never really cooperated with any of the inquiries that preceded it, makes me very suspicious. It doesn't help that the evidence that has been released about the attack completely contradicts the narrative the Obama administration ran with in its immediate aftermath, or that this all occurred in the middle of a heated election when the last thing the Obama campaign wanted was a terrorist attack on the president's record. But, unlike some people who want to post half a quote from a Democrat member of an investigative committee that has yet to release its actual findings and call it noteworthy, I'm sticking to what I said almost two years ago and waiting to see the conclusion of a full investigation before formulating an opinion. In the meantime, you should make sure the people you point your asinine blanket accusations at have actually done some of the things you claim before calling them out.

  Unfortunately, I didn't get to look at any appellate court decisions. The class focused entirely on Supreme Court cases. We weren't limited to the cases we discussed in class, but we were limited to cases from the highest court. Because of that, I actually didn't even know Hopwood existed. I guess that explains why Grutter made it all the way up the line.

  That they can be. Especially if you believe that political beliefs are shaped as much by the environment in which a person is raised as they are by underlying principles like I do.

    Let me put it to you this way: when I call those two "flagrantly liberal," I mean they were self-described socialists. They fit the standard uber-liberal profile when it came to just about every issue except feminist ones, although one of them was a little bit conservative on immigration. Both of them will be attending law school in Philadelphia starting in a few weeks, which is where one of the two is from.   The third student mentioned was, to be fair, a slightly right-leaning moderate from a military family that settled in Birmingham after his father left the service. However, his family is originally also from Philadelphia, which is where he was born and lived as a small child. If I recall correctly, he'll be working in the business his father started in Birmingham.   Now here's a real shocker for you. The Philadelphia law student who isn't actually from Philadelphia was raised in a small town in south Alabama by a single mother who worked as a nurse to support he and his brother. Kind of contradicts the whole "no women in the workplace" notion, doesn't it?

  Not very easily, I can tell you that much.

[Hidden Content]

  You know, I used to think that. Then one day I met three incredibly chauvinistic college students at Alabama. All three believed women have no place in the workforce, and one of them didn't even think they should be able to vote.   The shocking part? Two of those three were flagrantly liberal, one was a homosexual and a staunch supporter of LGBT+ rights, and one was from a northern state.   Talk about breaking stereotypes....

  I have a friend who always used to say that women and men won't truly be equal until women register for the draft and men can get pregnant.

I think it depends on how you define feminism. I tend to favor the narrower definition, which is that feminism is about ensuring that women are treated as equally to men in the legal sense as reasonably possible. I view the crusades against gender roles and the "hook up" paradigm more as elements of an unhealthy counter culture than aspects of feminist ideology.

I assume we're talking about affirmative action in university admissions given the example in the original post.   The Supreme Court has been very clear about this, and I tend to agree with their decisions. There's a landmark case which basically outlines the constitutionality of affirmative action in admissions policies for public universities called Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). To make a long story short, it says that affirmative action is fine as long as there aren't quotas, and becomes the basis for a more general assertion that affirmative action is acceptable as long as it doesn't pose too much of a burden on more qualified applicants in later cases.   The subject of Bakke was the affirmative action policy in admissions to the medical school at UC Davis, which mandated a minimum of 16 out of 100 accepted applicants be members of an underrepresented minority (for purposes of brevity, this is often referred to as a "URM candidate"). In effect, what that meant was that white applicants were competing for 84 seats, while URM candidates were competing for the full one hundred.   The questions the justices asked during oral arguments broadened to cover affirmative action in general, as discussions over controversial issues often do. And, when it came time for the case to be decided. The decision was as close as you can come to a draw in the United States Supreme Court. The decision was a 5-4 vote in favor of Mr. Bakke, but with no clear majority opinion. In fact, for all intents and purposes, the court was split on the real issue, and there were basically as many opinions as there were justices. The best generalization that can be given is that four justices thought affirmative action was good, four thought it was bad, and one thought it was fine depending on the circumstances surrounding the institution implementing it and the process by which it was implemented.   That opinion, written by Justice Lewis Powell, was the most influential opinion to come out of the case. In it, Justice Powell decried the use of quotas or anything resembling a quota, but upheld the basic purpose and function of an affirmative action policy. He first asserted that the constitution guarantees individual rights to people, not collective rights to segments of society. This includes the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is at the very heart of the affirmative action issue and, indeed, most racial issues. Recognizing that fact, Justice Powell concluded that in order for the UC Davis medical school's affirmative action program to be upheld, it had to pass what's generally referred to as the "strict scrutiny" or "heightened scrutiny" test, which is the standard that any violation of a person's constitutional rights must meet in order to be deemed constitutional. It is a two-pronged test; the law or policy in question must first serve a compelling governmental interest, and then must be narrowly tailored to serve that interest.   Justice Powell reasoned that the affirmative action policy passed the first prong of the test, although not necessarily for the reason you might think. The normal "compelling governmental interest" used to justify an affirmative action policy is that it attempts to rectify social disparities that result from past discrimination. If I recall correctly (it's been a while, so don't quote me on this), Justice Powell didn't even address that reason; normally, that's perfectly fine for an affirmative action policy at an institution in a southern state, but this was California. What he did find to be a compelling governmental interest, though, was to achieve diversity in an educational environment to ensure as effective an education as possible for students. As I recall, he spent several paragraphs expounding on that point. Key to his analysis was that diversity was not simply racial in nature, or even ethnic, economic or religious - diversity was an all encompassing term that included different skills, talents, experiences and other intangible qualities.   The policy did not, however, pass the second prong of the test about being narrowly tailored. The reasoning was simple: other universities had managed to achieve diversity by Justice Powell's definition without employing such a restrictive policy. Justice Powell determined that a racial quota was simply too much of an infraction against the constitutional rights of white students who applied to the program to be considered "narrowly tailored." Instead of the UC Davis system, Justice Powell offered the metric at Harvard's law school as an example of a constitutionally sound affirmative action policy. Harvard chose to consider racial, religious, ethnic and economic diversity as a "plus" on an application, which would be weighted as an approximate equal to a unique talent or experience - all tying back to Powell's general definition of diversity.   A couple more landmark cases on this subject followed. The two most notable are Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). Both cases dealt with admissions at the University of Michigan, one for undergrad and one for the law school. To make another long story short, undergrad admissions used a points system to determine an applicants' probability of admission. 100 points normally meant guaranteed admission, and URM candidates were given a full twenty extra points. Economically disadvantaged students were also given a full twenty points, meaning that a candidate who was both poor and non-white received forty extra points. The law school, on the other hand, was pretty close to the Harvard example; I'm actually not sure how that one made it all the way to the Supreme Court.   *Note: This is the amateur analysis of a prelaw student who only knows so much about this issue because he wrote a paper about it for a constitutional law class three and a half months ago.

  Are you saying the point isn't valid?

  [Hidden Content]   It says that they've concluded there was no deliberate wrongdoing. That doesn't mean the administration didn't do anything wrong, just that if they did, it wasn't intentional.   I'd hardly call that a victory.

  Don't think for a second that I was assigning all of the blame to some of the liberal posters on this board. I mentioned a few conservatives by name as well, and I've taken on both Nash and smitty over the state of this board before - you, specifically, should recall that. I was just using DV and his cohorts as examples because that, in my opinion, is the worst it's ever been.

  Oh, I know he is. But I haven't seen him get anywhere near as inflammatory as he used to, and I don't think he's posted on a political thread in years.

That sounds like an awfully chauvinistic thing to say.

This board is going to be what you make of it. I first started commenting on this board as a sophomore in high school. That was a little more than five years ago. At that time, we had posters who would make smitty look like Larry Sabato. One was DickVitale, who I've already jokingly mentioned in this thread. You think Big girl is bad about reducing everything to racism? DickVitale was a Houston area basketball coach who thought that everyone whose favorite color wasn't black was racist. You don't like President Obama? Racist. You think taxes are too high? Racist. You think we spend too much? Racist. You agree with the war in Iraq? Racist. You like vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate? Racist. You're white? Racist. It didn't matter what it was, everything was a matter of race to him, and he would bring up his racial commentary in every single thread regardless of the subject over and over and over again, just like smitty and some of the others do with Benghazi and Cloward and Piven and whatever else. And Dickie V wasn't alone. We had another poster called stang4life who was very much the same way. She was never as confrontational as DV, but she was an expert at provoking people via emotional manipulation. BlueDove liked to get on the bandwagon too; he was much more active on this part of the board then than he is now. DV's most serious internet ally, though, was a poster named SFA85. He accused us all of "hiding behind our mother's skirts" in our "lilly white neighborhoods" because we wouldn't meet him outside of the World Gym in Beaumont to settle things with our fists like he kept demanding. Just about every thread he commented in contained some kind of emasculating insult or physical threat. You know what kept this board going at that time? Do you know why most of us stuck around? Because most of the people here recognized all of that for what it was and chose not to sink to their level. Hippy, and tvc, and westend, and bullets, and baddog and a handful of others called the crap where they saw it, and then got back to the topic of the thread. There wasn't any of the trolling you like to do. And do you know what happened? DV and SFA kept trying to push the envelope until they got themselves suspended and, at least in DV's case, eventually banned. stang4life found her little petty tactics less and less effective and one day finally decided to basically tell us all we were beneath her and she was leaving the board. For about a year and a half after that, this board couldn't have been much better. You would come in here and find a dozen different threads with real discussions taking place - no threats, no insults, no irrelevant tangents about this news source or that special interest group. Just real discussion. Granted, the cycle eventually restarted itself when a guy named True Blue showed up, but the point is, the longer you choose to emulate their tactics, the longer you perpetuate this cycle. Instead of saying this board of "FUBAR" and choosing to help keep it that way, I think we'd all be better served if we stuck to the substance of the debates and didn't delve into this political pettiness.

  Now you have to admit, you do the same thing. I know you only do it to show the foolishness of it all, but that only perpetuates the cycle and you know it. I mean, look at your username.

  I never thought I would say this. I'm not kidding. I NEVER thought I would say this.   I miss the days of Dickie V.  :D

    And Big Girl, before you go calling this guy "ignorant" and "racist" and whatever else, know that he voted for Obama in 2008.

I am no Phillip Klein fan. Anybody who's been on this board for any length of time knows that. His stories are often poorly researched and highly exaggerated.   That said, he may be on to something this time. Something much bigger than Calvin Walker. But, I still want to see it before I believe it.