PN-G bamatex

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.

  Although I suspect I know what several of the answers to this question will be, I can't speak for anyone but myself, and no, I'm not okay with it. In fact, I think the only reason Rick Perry got behind that bill was to have something on his record that appeals to Hispanic voters in the event of a presidential campaign.   But that's not really the point here, is it? You're trying to make some bogus point about Rick Perry being similar to Barack Obama in how he deals with illegal immigrants, and I suspect that you erroneously believe and would then ignorantly try to point out that the only reason we hold differing views of the two of them is either race or partisan affiliation.   Well, as usual, you're wrong. They don't hold the same views on illegal immigration and border security, and Rick Perry doesn't speak out against Barack Obama's policies regarding those issues in public just to quietly go along with them in private. Don't believe me? Rick Perry deployed 1,000 troops to the border. Barack Obama ordered ICE to turn loose any illegal immigrant they took into custody, including suspected criminals, unless they were being held on felony charges.   I rest my case.

tvc, can they still be prosecuted for lesser crimes without involvement from ICE?

I never received a message about it, so I assume it had nothing to do with my post.

  Thinking more along the lines of a JD at the moment, but that's still a year away. Fine, otherwise. You?

  Not the same thing. President Bush put together a compromise that won bipartisan support in the upper house. The word "compromise" isn't in President Obama's dictionary; he prefers to make demands and then blame Republicans for their inability to pass in Congress.   The funny thing about it is, with the way the political landscape is in Congress right now, if President Obama actually tried a compromise along the lines of President Bush's proposal, he might just be able to get it passed and salvage his dismal legislative record.

  She thinks he could have passed immigration reform as Governor of Texas.

You know, it's funny you should bring up this subject. It was actually the focal point of one of my research projects last year.   Iraq or no Iraq, Bush tried to do something about immigration reform. Look up the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, which was a bipartisan piece of legislation introduced in the Senate in 2006 at the urging of the Bush administration. Its counterpart never passed the House because of partisan bickering.   President Bush talks about that legislation specifically in his memoir, Decision Points. It was modeled in part after the successful Bracero Program implemented by Franklin Roosevelt and killed by Lyndon Johnson. Frankly, it was the best compromise ever proposed in this country on the immigration issue, and it passed the Senate with a strong margin. Had it passed the House, it likely would have quelled the immigration problem before it became a crisis.

Justice.

    And I'm willing to bet those same voters would vote for Romney in the same remorse poll two years later as well.

If there's one benefit to all of the Second Amendment hype we've seen in the last few years, it's that the courts are now further entrenching an already well preserved right. Given the strong opposition to gun rights coming out of certain political circles, this enlarged body of case law supporting and expanding the Second Amendment could, in theory, come in very handy going into the future.

The topic of this thread is a poll showing that Mitt Romney would win in a landslide if the 2012 election were held again today, not which voting base is more intelligent or less informed.   Personally, I think this is evidence that a lot of moderates, independents and swing voters begrudgingly gave Obama their vote in 2012, and now wish they could go back and change it.

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  If I remember correctly (don't quote me on this), various energy companies had local projects in the earliest planning stages that were shelved after the 2008 financial collapse. It could be that they're finally getting back to a point of enough confidence to go through with them, although I have no doubt they've paid attention to the BISD situation as well.   There's one more thing that could have also had some influence on it:     [Hidden Content]     [Hidden Content]