Burnt Orange Report

Debate Liveblogging and Updates

By Byron LaMasters

First, everyone be sure to welcome Zach Neumann to BOR. He's been a friend of mine and Andrew's at UT for two years now, and also used to be a University Democrats officer, and is currently a junior at UT. Zach emailed me on Monday, and said that he loved BOR, but wanted a larger focus on international issues and offered to fill that void. I said sure, and added him on. His first post isn't on foreign policy, but expect most of his posts to be on that topic. As for adding contributors to BOR, I really don't have a policy. I've been told multiple times by many of our readers that our biggest weakness in terms of content is that there are no female bloggers on BOR. I agree. I added Andrea in March, but she posted just once, and that was it. Andrea's a good writer, but she was busy with an internship, a job and school, and well, there's only 24 hours in the day. Still, I know a lot of BOR readers would like to see a regular female voice here, so if you, or anyone you know is interested, email me at: Byron AT BurntOrangeReport.com - and yeah, this isn't a "no more boys allowed" thing. Anyone that's interested is welcome to email me - basically the only major requirements are that you're a Longhorn and a Democrat (or progressive independent-minded, you-get-the-idea).

Second, happy birthday to Karl-Thomas. I've never had a really sucky birthday, cuz, well, my birthday is in July, so there's no school to worry about. But I do know how Karl-Thomas feels. Two years ago when I was president of the University Democrats among other activities, there were times where I thought I was about to have a mental breakdown. But, I've since learned (I hope) not to try and do too much, not to fall too far behind in classes, and to make time for things besides school and activism. Karl-Thomas is doing a heck of a lot of work between being a UD officer being co-chair of the GLBTAAA, classes (and of course, blogging), so wish him the best.

As for myself, I had a midterm yesterday (30% of my Latin American Revolutions grade), another midterm today (20% of my Human Sexuality grade) along with a paper (20% of my History of Science grade), so it's nice to finally have all that behind me, although I'll admit Karl-Thomas has me beat. I figure I've gotten about 13 or 14 hours of sleep in the past three nights combined (he's had seven).

Anyway, after an afternoon nap I'll plan on liveblogging the debate tonight assuming that I can find a place where I can watch it with a working television and working computer in the same room (I misplaced my cell phone over the weekend, and my computer that I'm having perpetual problems with decided to quit working entirely on Monday, so this is a more difficult task that it might otherwise sound - fortunately, the rest of my week is relatively free and painless, so ensuring that I have a working computer and working cell phone by the end of the week are my top priorities).