PN-G bamatex

  Don't believe everything you read.  :D

Exactly what it said.

For the time being, you can find short biographies on all of them here:   [Hidden Content]

  Southern barbecue is a different animal than Texas barbecue. Brisket isn't served at most establishments, just ribs, sausage and chicken. They believe everything's in the sauce, whereas Texans put more emphasis on the rub and many don't like any sauce at all. Plus, their sauce is normally vinegar based, and it leaves that strong vinegar taste.   Some of it's pretty good, but I prefer my native delicacies.

  This is what I said:       See that "as much" part? That means that they get the same amount of credit for it.   I never said that Newt did it all himself. What I said was that he contributed every bit as much as Bill Clinton. The truth of the matter is that nothing would have gotten done had it not been for both of them working together. We had bipartisan balanced budgets and entitlement reform during a period where Congress was republican and the White House was democrat. That means both parties, and the leaders of both parties at that time, get the credit for the accomplishments.

  It depends on the circumstances inherent in the situation. I've said on here before that I blame Harry Reid for a lot of things a lot of other people peg on Obama. For instance, I actually think he's more to blame for the debt than Obama is; it was Harry Reid, not Barack Obama, who spent five years refusing to allow a budget to come to the floor of the Senate for a vote.   In any case, Newt Gingrich never controlled the Senate, so that's kind of irrelevant to the conversation to begin with.

Not to mention that many of the Clinton administration's signature achievements are as much a result of the Newt Gingrich's work as they are Bill Clinton's.

It probably is.   UT is facing a scandal over the admission of friends and family connected to prominent legislators. It extends from undergraduate admissions all the way up into otherwise prestigious UT graduate programs, most notably the law school.   Truth be told, that happens everywhere. And it's much worse in many other states. If anything, the fact that someone is trying to expose it here in Texas, I think, is a sign we still have some ethical code; in many other states, this would simply be dismissed as par for the course and too minimal to be considered a legitimate issue.   That's another reason I will be very happy to return home in a year.

He was right about Kanye.

Are you aware that George H. W. Bush, fully cognizant of the bill's opposition in his Houston area congressional district and the threats his biggest political backers had made against him, sacrificed his reelection bid by voting for the 1964 Voting Rights Act, because he preferred to preserve his conscience and lose his election rather than vice versa?

LBJ did the right thing for all the wrong reasons. He was more interested in recruiting democrat voters than he was giving said voters rights.   I'm curious, though. What's your opinion of George H. W. Bush?

  I've stopped there before. That place is pretty good, too.

  Did you bother to read the entire example, or did you read the first two sentences and quit?       Did you bother to read my last post on the subject? The one with the emboldened, underlined and highlighted statements? If you did, you would know that Clapper, a current Obama administration intelligence official, made his claims in 2003, that Sada, former Vice Marshall of Saddam's air force, made his statements in 2006, and that Ya'alon, former director of Israeli military intelligence, provided his assertions in 2002. So no, it didn't take eleven years for people to draw these conclusions. You're just hearing about it for the first time after eleven years.       Yes, he did. And that is often the result of strategic miscalculations in situations like these. But that doesn't change the fact that he was still in the country. So, I reiterate, why do you think Saddam, who only had his own interests at heart, would stay in an active war zone where the most advanced military force in the world was looking for him if he thought they would be there for very long?

If I put all my guns in my neighbor's house and somebody breaks into my home the day after, are you going to sit there and ask me why I didn't use my guns? No, because the answer is obvious: I didn't have them on me. The better question to ask is why I chose to put my guns in my neighbor's house where I couldn't get to them if I needed them. It sounds stupid... until you find out that I'm an excon with several prior felony convictions who's banned by law from owning a gun, and that the people who were breaking in were law enforcement officers carrying out a search warrant to find my guns. Saddam may have been a tyrant, but he wasn't stupid. He, like the North Vietnamese forty years earlier, knew that America is susceptible to something a traditional enemy is not: war weary public opinion. And that belief wasn't without validation; the last time we had invaded Iraq in 1991, the first President Bush chose to halt the invasion after liberating Kuwait and not to remove Saddam for fear that it would take the war to another level and turn public opinion against him. Now, knowing that, put yourself in Saddam's shoes. You're facing a war you know you cannot win conventionally against a vastly superior enemy that's beaten you before. If coalition forces come in and find chemical weapons or worse, you choose to use them in your own defense, you're done. It's just like the excon; if the police find his guns or worse, he uses them to try and keep them out, he's facing that many more charges and convictions, and that much more jail time. If, on the other hand, coalition forces find no chemical weapons - if the police don't find the guns - there's a chance public opinion turns against the war and they leave - that the police, their warrant expired, exit the home and your life goes back to normal. In essence, Saddam was hoping for a repeat of the Gulf War. The US comes in, finds no chemical weapons, turns around and leaves because the primary objective is either completed or uncompletable, and he stays in power, leaving him to go and retrieve his weapons later. It also explains why he stayed in the country as long as he did; how many third world dictators are going to stick around when the world's most powerful military force comes a callin' unless they believe it won't be there for very long? Especially going from living in a palace to living in a hole under a piece of plywood.

I'm with tvc. Glock 23.

It's against my better judgment to become involved in this thread at all, but I think I have a moral duty to the truth that requires me to, even if some of the people who read this post would prefer to stick to an inaccurate narrative in the face of inconvenient evidence.   [Hidden Content]   This is a link to a blog post on the website of the United States Naval Institute - not Fox News or MSNBC or any news media organization that could be perceived as biased either way, but rather a 140 year-old non-profit think tank based on the grounds of the United States Naval Academy that counts several retired US military leaders among its membership.   The actual blog post contains direct quotations from a number of significant figures in the international intelligence community. Perhaps most notably is a statement made in 2003 by James Clapper, a retired general in the United States Air Force and current Director of National Intelligence under the presidential administration of Barack H. Obama, in which he made a very convincing case based on satellite imagery that Saddam Hussein had moved his chemical weapons stockpiles out of Iraq and into Syria in the months leading up to the beginning of Operation: Iraqi Freedom in March of 2003.   The blog also contains the assertions of former Iraqi Air Force General Georges Sada, who claimed in his memoirs and to the New York Sun that two separate Iraqi Airways jetliners were covertly converted into cargo planes and used to funnel chemical stockpiles by air to Syria in 56 separate flights under the guise of Iraqi aid following a Syrian dam collapse in 2002.   Additionally, and most damningly, are the assertions contained within the blog made by the Israeli Director of Military Intelligence, General Moshe Ya'alon, who provided evidence of Iraqi truck convoys carrying chemical stockpiles into Syria from December of 2002 to February of 2003 under the direction of former Soviet KGB Chief General Yevgeny Primakov, who headed the Soviet Union's special envoy to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the evil empire's dying days.   I don't know how much more plain I can make this. It's obvious at this point that Saddam had his chemical weapons, and that he got them to Syria before the US invaded - even one of his own generals admits this. Further, the evidence strongly implies that the Russians were involved in helping him do so.   The only thing these assertions lack is the indisputable proof necessary to carry them over from reasonable suspicions to credible charges, which would likely be found if US troops were deployed into Syria, thus explaining Putin's position of defiant opposition to US involvement in the Syrian crisis after remaining utterly silent about US involvement in the same kinds of situations in North Africa.

  You don't have to have lawyers to start a petition, and I don't recall it being said in the news that the Trevinos had obtained one.They're simply exercising their rights as constituents of BISD.   In any case, the only reason it's taken so long for BISD to be taken over by BISD is that the school board voted to appeal the decision in court. Anytime you take up a court case, it takes time. Honestly, if anything, it's surprising it didn't take longer.

  Arguably. A sizable crowd has been seen protesting around Beaumont in favor of the TEA takeover on several occasions. At least part of that crowd was present outside the courthouse in Austin during the injunction hearing. I think that constitutes a fair amount of "buzz."   On an aside, isn't there a rule somewhere banning current school board members from running for school board again after TEA has turned the district back over to local control? Or was that something I dreamed?

  Man, what I woudln't give....

The order has nothing to do with the petition.   According to the news, the judge wants to see the names of the Board of Managers who are set to take over before he'll sign the order. I'm a little curious to know why that is.

Sentimental favorite? The M1 Garand. And yes, I own one.   Practical favorite? The AR-15. Although the AK-47 may take that position if I ever get to spend some quality time with one.

[Hidden Content]   Nobody was hurt and they're saying it was an accident that occurred during a drug sting.   Naturally, I have a lot of questions.

  I've never had their sandwiches before. I'm going to have to try that.

While we're at it, who do y'all think has the best kolaches? My vote is for Weikel's Bakery in La Grange.

  The situation in 1995 and the situation now both involved state mandated tests. Then it was failure. Today, it's cheating. It was about this time last year that the scandal involving Patricia Lambert and the cheating (among several other things) she purportedly coordinated at Central was exposed.   I don't recall what ever came of the lawsuits filed over that situation, but if it was ever proven, that on its own is grounds for a full investigation by TEA, regardless of the district's financial situation.