PN-G bamatex

[Hidden Content]   I have a question for the legal experts. John Hinckley, Jr., was found not guilty by reason of insanity of all of the counts against him, including the attempted murder of James Brady. Since this has now been ruled a homicide, he couldn't now be charged with murder, could he? It would be a different charge, but wouldn't that still violate the double jeopardy clause?

  Last I had heard, LSCPA wanted Woodrow Wilson, but PAISD wasn't interested in selling it. They wanted to make it a performing arts center or something along those lines.

Judging Fox News by Bill O'Reilly's talk show is like judging CNN by Piers Morgan's talk show or CBS by Dave Letterman's talk show. If you want to challenge the objectivity of a media source, stick to its news shows, not its talk shows.

[Hidden Content]   Some neat hypotheticals there. Especially that ninth one.   With all the tension in the room, y'all just need to go ahead and get it over with.  :D

    These are all of the schools in the SEC and the Big XII with their academic rankings, per US News & World Report:   SEC:   #17 Vanderbilt #49 Florida #60 Georgia #69 Texas A&M #86 Alabama #91 Auburn #97 Missouri #101(T) Tennessee #112 South Carolina #119 Kentucky #128 Arkansas #135(T) LSU #142(T) Miss State #150 Ole Miss   Average Ranking: #97   Big XII:   #52 Texas #75 Baylor #82 TCU #101(T) Oklahoma #101(T) Kansas #101(T) Iowa State #135(T) Kansas State #142(T) Oklahoma State #161 Texas Tech #170 West Virginia   Average Ranking: #112   Texas is the top dog, academically speaking, in the Big XII. In the SEC, it would be outranked by Vanderbilt and Florida, with Georgia not far behind. The worst school in the SEC, Ole Miss, ranks ahead of the two worst schools in the Big XII, Texas Tech and West Virginia. The average SEC ranking is 15 spots higher than the average Big XII ranking. If what you're saying is true and Texas would refuse to join the SEC because of academics, it's because Texas wouldn't want to play second (or rather, third) fiddle.   Now, I agree that the higher-ups in the SEC might want to make an exception to their rule about not adding schools in states that are already represented for Texas because, as you pointed out, Texas is the most profitable brand in college athletics. Having the nation's most profitable athletic department in the nation's most profitable conference would seal the SEC's dominance among collegiate athletic conferences. And, on that note, I think a lot of the officials in Austin would see the benefit of that as well, regardless of what the "academics" think. As big as the burnt orange brand is, think how much bigger it would be if UT was playing A&M and Arkansas again every year, along with the likes of Alabama, LSU, Florida, Auburn and Georgia. Frankly, that would be the greatest level of competition UT has ever had in a conference, and that kind of competition would likely only breed more fandom, and thus more merchandising.

[Hidden Content]   Uh, what?

[Hidden Content]

I wouldn't mind making cheap forms of birth control available in housing projects and perhaps even certain federal offices. But I agree with Trojan; they probably wouldn't be used as often as I would like, and I think the birth rate would probably only fall incrementally.   If we really want to stop the propagation of people on welfare, tell them we'll only pay for the kids they have when they enter the welfare rolls. If they have more children, we'll provide Medicaid, but no new food stamps and no extra cash. You don't get a raise when you have kids, so why should someone on welfare?

  Gay marriage and abortion have already been addressed to some degree, so I'm going to leave those two alone.   To answer the questions, I'm going to get really abstract for a minute and then come back to the issues. Before I get started, forgive me if some of the details are incorrect; it's been two years since I took a political theory class where we discussed any of this in depth, so I may be a little rusty. Also, kind of like my comment on affirmative action, this is written by an undergraduate political science student who only knows so much about these subjects because it's a lifelong interest.   If the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence contained references and a "Works Cited" page, the works they would refer to would be the writings of a core group of political philosophers the Founding Fathers based their entire system of beliefs on in one way or another. Those philosophers are John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Hobbes, who was Locke's mentor. All three had kind of covered different aspects of political philosophy (Rousseau did more with democracy, Locke did more with individual rights and liberties) and all of them had their own ideas about the optimal forms of government (Hobbes, for instance, basically spent all of Leviathan trying to justify the monarchy, and Rousseau was really a socialist at heart who accepted property and capitalism as necessary evils). But the one thing that formed the foundation of all of their beliefs was the state of nature - the original environment in which man first lived, from which we, and everything we know, evolved.   In that state of nature, they theorized that man was perfectly free. A person was accountable only to himself, and could do anything he wanted without any unnatural consequences imposed by any authority of any kind. It was pure and unlimited freedom. And thus, man being perfectly free in nature meant that man had a natural right to be free, according to their reasoning.   Of course, the reality of that, as recognized by all three of them, was chaos. When you remove the structure of morality, community and government and tell people they can do whatever they want without consequences, the result is anarchy, death and destruction. Thus, they reasoned that man gave up all or part of that natural right of freedom to achieve peace and order in the course of social and political evolution. As I mentioned in parentheses earlier, Hobbes spent all of Leviathan expounding on this very concept; the actual "leviathan" was the power embodied in a king amassed from all of those individual rights given up collectively by his subjects to create order, stability and security.   The reality of that, on the other hand, was tyranny. Giving up all natural rights to a single power left too much room for abuse, and that was the typical result. That's where Locke comes in and starts talking about the concept of liberty. To try and break that down succinctly, liberty is the balance between ordered tyranny on one end, and chaotic freedom on the other. It basically tries to give us the best of both worlds. The natural freedom gets broken down into more basic rights that are secured to us with certain limitations to ensure we can maintain domain over our own lives, while the government still receives the minimum amount of power necessary to maintain peace and stability. In essence, it's the maximum amount of freedom we can have without killing, robbing or maiming each other.   So how does that relate to prostitution and drugs? Well, what it comes back to is whether we can have those two things without increasing the level of chaos in society.   When it comes to prostitution, I think we can now. At one time, the public health concerns that came with prostitution might have been enough to justify an outright ban absent of any moral arguments. In fact, I think it's fair to say that if we had allowed prostitution without any checks two thousand years ago, AIDS would have exterminated the human race by now. But, with today's technology and resources, I think we could probably legalize it and regulate it effectively enough to minimize, if not nearly eradicate, the risk. Not to mention that taxing it could bring in some extra revenue and we would have a new, legitimate form of employment. Anytime we can expand freedoms without risking public safety, especially with those benefits, I'm all for it, even if I find the practice reprehensible on a personal level.   Drugs, on the other hand, are a different kind of issue. Drugs, to varying degrees depending on the specific drug, deprive a person of his ability to think rationally and reasonably. The only way we can have a society that is both free and peaceable - the only way we can achieve the delicate balance of liberty - is to have reasonable, rational citizens. Along those lines, the risk to the public safety of legalizing certain drugs like marijuana may be debatable, and an appropriate balance might be achievable through compromise. When it comes to other drugs, though, the risk is simply too great. For instance, you'll never be able to justify legalizing PCP - it makes people too aggressive and too likely to do something that may jeopardize the safety of others. So, to sum things up, each drug has to be evaluated individually to determine the correct course of action.   Hopefully that makes things more clear, although probably not.   Also, on an aside, Karl Marx completely rejected the "state of nature" concept, which is why he ended up with such radically different conclusions after his own analyses and ramblings. Typical of a communist to ignore human nature and substitute his own views.  :D

  Giving marriage back to the church doesn't mean throwing consent laws out the window with it.  :D

  That's where I was going to go with the abortion issue depending on the answer to the question.   As for gay marriage, I believe marriage is a religious institution at its core, and thus can't be redefined by a government entity. It wasn't instituted by government, it was instituted by religion and then the government basically tried to take it over. The first time it ever became a government issue was when the king of England decided he wanted a divorce, and even then, he split the churches to be able to do it. A couple of centuries later, several states, Alabama being one of them, only started issuing marriage licenses as a way of regulating the institution to prevent interracial marriage, and many others only instituted marriage licenses for tax purposes.On that note, in this state, marriage licenses weren't even issued until the 1960s; both of my sets of grandparents received marriage certificates from the Methodist church, not marriage licenses from the county.   My thoughts are that there never should have been any marriage licenses. Leave marriage to the churches to sort out. Some of them, undoubtedly, will be willing to confer the institution of marriage on same-sex couples, and some won't. At the end of the day, however, it's up to he individual churches, thus preserving religious freedom and the separation of church and state.   And no, for those who are wondering, I don't have anything against polygamy, either.

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.