Posted on 11/13/2007 11:13:48 AM PST by pissant
The American electorate is a fickle mistress. Just ask former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.).
When Thompson announced his candidacy for president just after Labor Day most national polls showed him running a close second behind former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the majority of state polls had him in the top three.
No longer. Thompson's campaign has yet to take off as expected and voters -- especially in crucial early states like Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida.
The most recent data comes from New Hampshire where two surveys were released over the weekend. The first, conducted by theUniversity of New Hampshire for the Boston Globe, put Thompson in sixth (yes, SIXTH) place with just three percent of the vote. (Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney led the way with 32 percent.) In a Marist University poll Thompson again took sixth place with just five percent support. To be clear, Thompson was never a frontrunner in New Hampshire but polls conducted in the run-up to his announcement and just after he formally entered the race show him regularly polling in double digits.
Thompson's shrinking support is apparent in other early states as well. The last three polls taken in Iowa put Thompson in fourth, fifth and fourth place, respectively, and his high water mark in any of those surveys is 11 percent. In Florida, too, Thompson appears to be fading. A new poll conducted for the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times showed Thompson in fifth place (eight percent) behind Giuliani (36 percent), Romney (19 percent), Arizona Sen. John McCain (12 percent) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (nine percent).
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.washingtonpost.com ...
It won't be over until Super Duper Tuesday folks!
Interestingly, the courts have upheld the property rights of the unborn. They can inherit and have standing in probate.
Thats cool - I hadn’t realized that.
That is "FOUNDER" as in a horse becoming ill and going lame.
So, while it is clear that citizenship only applies to those who have been born it is not clear that personhood is limited to those who have been born.
Interestingly, the courts have upheld the property rights of the unborn. They can inherit and have standing in probate.
***Bookmark. I had not heard that. Do you have any references or links so I don’t spend too much time reinventing the wheel?
Thompson is MIA KIA here in Iowa... McCain is doing more and doing it better. Heck.... Ron Paul and Huckabee will likely end up with MORE votes than Fred come January. He’s truly got zippo going on here. Less than Zippo...
I think you may be right... none of these guys can break out of the high 20s for long on any set of polls... a Brokered Convention is VERY likely... in fact.. the eventual nominee may NOT even BE running right now...
Of course I do. Unlike Thompson I would support a human life amendment and criminalizing abortion while recognizing as a practical matter that neither can be obtained now.
I think you may need to rethink this particular tactic, then. I don't really support a constitutional amendment (as you could probably tell), yet I would wager that I am as pro-life, if not more so, than anyone on FR.
However, he seems to be trying to push social conservatives as far away from himself as he can and still get our votes.
Which is why he is consistently touting his 100% pro-life Senate record, as well as tacking our way on the rest of the issues (abortion isn't the only social conservative issue, btw) with his pronouncements on illegal immigration and his reaffirmations of support for the 2nd amendment....?
I guess I just don’t trust him on social isses.
Well, that's your choice. I think you're just being a bit too focused on one particular pro-life methodology (and not even a very useful one) as a "litmus test". I consider your criticisms of FDT to be quite unreasonable.
Good news, folks. Petronski and I worked things out on the efficacy thread, and this post pasts muster as “not a lie”.
It’s a wide open race, might as well back the most conservative man.
According to Polls, Fred Thompson Foundering
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1925179/posts
Here’s what I’ve been posting lately.
Here’s a recent poll showing Hunter at 4%.
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/28889/republicans_2008_giuliani_28_thompson_19
Here’s an intrade link to the forum site discussing how Hunter might be gaining traction.
http://bb.intrade.com/intradeForum/posts/list/1797.page
Here’s an intrade link to the forum site discussing how Fred is at $6, which corresponds to the traders believing he has a 6% chance of winning the nomination, and discussing why.
http://bb.intrade.com/intradeForum/posts/list/1805.page
One thing prediction markets are better at — their only bias is whether someone can make money trading the futures contracts.
The Efficacy Of Prediction Markets
The Liberty Papers ^ | November 8, 2007 | Brad Warbiany
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1922961/posts
Posted on 11/08/2007 12:21:43 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Fred has lost ~30 points at Intrade over the last few weeks, looks like it’s stabilizing at ~6%.
Thompson Tanking in Futures Markets (Intrade, IEM)
Intrade; Iowa Electronic Markets ^ | October 31, 2008
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1919127/posts
The Dropout contract for Thompson has an ask price 2 points higher than last trade. There is no Dropout contract for Hunter.
http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/contractSearch/
DROPOUT.DEC07.(F)THOMPSON
Fred Thompson to drop out of 2008 Presidential race on/before 31 Dec 2007 M 6.0 9.2 4.0 0 0
37 posted on 11/14/2007 6:53:53 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
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Unfortunately, no. You can't take the last clause out of the natural context in which it resides. The "persons", whether citizen or not, who are afforded equal protection are those who are "born" - the same meaning applies throughout the amendment. Do you think that the apportionment of representatives in Section 2 then should include a census of unborn children, so that they can be counted and included in the population upon which apportionment of representation is decided?
States don't have rights. Only people have rights. States have powers, delegated by the people. The States in turn, delegate some powers to the Fed and reserve others.
People have rights vis-a-vis government. States have rights vis-a-vis the federal government. If said powers affirmed to the States are protected by the instrumentality of the Constitution, it is because they (as commonwealths of free citizens) are delegated such powers by the citizens as are necessary for the commonwealths to function. In cases such as these, the individual States are the possessors of these rights which the collective citizenry have voluntarily yielded to them. The rights are transferred to the States, as representatives of each of their collected polities. These remain rights all the same, regardless of whether it is individual citizens who hold them, or States to whom these rights have been yielded.
Just as the rights retained by the people are inalienable by the States, so the delegated RIGHTS held by the States are inalienable by the federal government.
The rest are reserved directly by the people, including the right to life, as noted in the 5th and 14th Amendments. The State and Fed only have the power to take a life with due process, and must give all persons equal protection from the unjustfied taking of life. They cannot protect Whites from murder and not protect Blacks, and neither can they protect infants but not unborn.
Look, I sympathise with your position, and wish it were true, but the simple fact of the matter is that it is not. There is not the least bit of evidence that the terms "person" or "people" as they appear anywhere in the Constitution applies to the unborn. Do unborn children have the right to bear arms? Are the protected against unreasonable search and seizure? Do they have freedom of speech or religion or assembly? Of course not, it is ridiculous to interpret the document in that manner. It is equally ridiculous to selectively define what you mean by "person" in one part of the document versus another.
Under Amendment 14, Section 5.: "The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article." Therefore, under Federalism, and the 10th Amendment, which applies to the 14th as much as the rest, the power to enforce civil rights protections is delegated to the Feds, and the power to violate them is prohibited to the States.
Once again, since "person" in the Constitution (and, therefore, the 14th amendment) doesn't seem to ever indicate that the unborn are in view, your argument is moot. Abortion falls under the 10th amendment as an implied area of concern for the States.
The States have no "rights" or powers to allow extra-judicial killing by pregnant women or doctors. The only reason they do it now is that the unborn have had their humanity and status as living beings removed by the courts.
More accurately, they have never been affirmed as "persons" by the courts - an unfortunate circumstance that is likely the case because up until the middle part of the 20th century, nobody envisioned that we'd be murdering a million plus babies a year in this country.
That is no more logical than changing the legal definition of anyone over 80 years old to "non-living person" and allowing their families to euthanize them.
Legally speaking, you're comparing apples to oranges. An 80-year old, being born, already DOES fall under the purview of the 14th (and other) amendments. An unborn baby, unfortunately, doesn't have that status to begin with, and hence, can't have it "taken away".
Again, I sympathise with your position. I wish it could be worked and reworked until it were true and would actually pass constitutional and judicial muster. But it can't, and it won't. Your arguments about personhood are too strained to be considered credible in any court that would hear such a case. The better route to limiting and then ending abortion is to go through the States, and educate the people. Not depending upon quixotic, never-going-to-happen constitutional amendments.
I don't know how Intrade does things, but if the bid value for a Fred Thompson contract on the Iowa exchange is $0.066 and the ask value is $0.078, that means that players' median estimate of his winning probability is somewhere between $0.066 and $0.078. Anyone who correctly believes Fred's chances to be better than 7.8% would stand to profit by buying shares; anyone who correctly believes that them to be less than 6.6% would stand to profit by selling shares (possibly using unit bundles to effectively sell short).
Nonsense. Homicide is legal, in every state, under some circumstances. There is substantial variation among the several states as to what circumstances qualify.
I see no constitutional argument that would prevent states from effectively legalizing abortion (by creating justification loopholes large enough to fly an A380 through) without severely limiting their authority to define other types of justifiable homicide.
Besides, I think it would make sense to give states back the power to restrict abortion on their own before declaring they have to do so themselves.
11/05/07 THOMF_NOM 99 8.131 0.075 0.085 0.082 0.077 11/06/07 THOMF_NOM 57 4.397 0.076 0.083 0.077 0.076 11/07/07 THOMF_NOM 3,061 209.705 0.066 0.076 0.069 0.066 11/08/07 THOMF_NOM 487 29.952 0.060 0.070 0.062 0.066 11/09/07 THOMF_NOM 144 8.990 0.060 0.066 0.062 0.060 11/10/07 THOMF_NOM 25 1.455 0.058 0.063 0.058 0.063
BTW, what do you make of the large volume on Thompson on 11/07/07?
***How did you get to that screen? I think it’s a bunch of guys covering their short calls + bargain hunters. One of the traders on the forum discussed how he made at least 10 points on shorting Thompson.
https://bb.intrade.com/intradeForum/posts/list/1805.page
“Considering the source, I would say that their constant flogging of Fred means he’s the one we should back.
They’re afraid of Thompson, more than anyone else on the GOP side.”
Wow, you are really, really out of touch.
Caveat: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.
It was something my wife told me while going thru that part of her paralegal schooling dealing with probate law. Essentially, IIRC, if a biological father dies before the birth of his offspring, they have a claim on his estate similar to other children. I seem to recall that the example case dealt with a man who had divorced and remarried a much younger woman whom he had impregnated, then he died before changing his will (without a will? can't recall).
It stuck in my head as an example of the schitzo way the law treats the unborn.
You can, and the courts have. All residents within the US have equal protection, even if they are not citizens.
Do you think that the apportionment of representatives in Section 2 then should include a census of unborn children, so that they can be counted and included in the population upon which apportionment of representation is decided?
They currently do not inquire about residency status in the census. Citizens, residents and illegal aliens are all counted. If they are going to count the two latter categories, I have no real problem with them counting future citizens, who will definitely be part of the apportioned population for the next ten years until the next census.
States have rights vis-a-vis the federal government. If said powers affirmed to the States are protected by the instrumentality of the Constitution, it is because they (as commonwealths of free citizens) are delegated such powers by the citizens as are necessary for the commonwealths to function. In cases such as these, the individual States are the possessors of these rights which the collective citizenry have voluntarily yielded to them. The rights are transferred to the States, as representatives of each of their collected polities. These remain rights all the same, regardless of whether it is individual citizens who hold them, or States to whom these rights have been yielded.
Oops, you did it again. Somehow, you think that transferring a power to do something to the government is the same as transferring a right. It isn't. A power is the authority to act on the behalf of the people in a given way, such as defining the traffic laws or negotiating international treaties. A right is an inherent property of a person to conduct their life as they see fit, such as speaking, worshiping, and owning property. Powers infringe on rights, but only legally to the extent that the people have allowed, such as imprisonment for conviction of certain crimes.
But the right remains with the people, and is not transferred with the constraining power.
Just as the rights retained by the people are inalienable by the States, so the delegated RIGHTS held by the States are inalienable by the federal government.
Since the people transferred no rights to them, the States have none to delegate. I do agree that the States have certain Powers that were not delegated to the Federal government and which the Feds have no business interfering with, but they are not inalienable, as the people may take them back at any time.
Do unborn children have the right to bear arms? Are the protected against unreasonable search and seizure? Do they have freedom of speech or religion or assembly?
Philosophically, why not? A quadriplegic cannot physically bear arms, but has the right. A man in a coma has all these freedoms, even if he cannot exercise them. A child of three weeks cannot be seized without due process.
As a society, we recognize that some people are incapable of responsibly exercising their rights, so we have the concept of "wards". Children are wards of their parents, who have the power to act in their behalf, prisoners are wards of the State. Again, it is an authorization of power, not a transfer of rights.
More accurately, they have never been affirmed as "persons" by the courts
Then, how is it that the State has prosecuted and convicted people for murdering them? For example, the recent celebrated case of the man who murdered his wife and unborn child and tossed them in San Francisco bay. One cannot murder the non-living, an object, a "growth", or an animal.
If you were to assault a woman who was entering a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic to get an abortion, and caused her to miscarry or otherwise killed the child within, you could be convicted of murder for doing what the doctor in the clinic could do 10 minutes later without any legal consequence.
The better route to limiting and then ending abortion is to go through the States, and educate the people. Not depending upon quixotic, never-going-to-happen constitutional amendments.
Even better is to pursue all possible avenues. I am not in favor of making the good into the enemy of the perfect. The immediately achievable goal of overturning Roe, and returning the power to the States is certainly worthwhile and a step in the right direction. That doesn't mean that the fight ends there. While many States will limit abortion and some may even outlaw it, others will not change a thing. It doesn't make the legalization of abortion at will any less evil because the States have the power instead of the Feds.
Not without due process and equal protection of the killed person, it isn't. Even if the homicide is subsequently determined to fall into a legal category, such as self defense, the perpetrator must undergo a trial and judgement. One cannot go about killing people in "self defense" on their own say-so. Yet, abortion is allowed to any woman who decides to have one.
Nor can a State make homicide legal for one class of people, but not another. Nor can they protect one class of people from homicide, but not another.
I am comfortable in allowing abortion under extreme circumstances congruent with self defense, but not without a legal proceedure associated with that determination. For example, a woman with a disease that will kill her without a medication that would kill her fetus, might be eligible for a case of justified homicide. Think of the woman who recently decided to forego chemo for cancer to save her baby.
Besides, I think it would make sense to give states back the power to restrict abortion on their own before declaring they have to do so themselves.
Yes. It should be treated as any other taking of life is. Roe should be overturned AND the civil rights 14th A. violation avenue should be explored. Roe is a bad decision in several ways, and the violation of the 10th A. is just one.
Writing an pro-life amendment in such a way as to allow states reasonable discretion as to what would constitute a sufficiently "extreme case", and yet not leave humongous loopholes, would be tricky. I would think that it would be wise to let some of the 'laboratories of Democracy' try out different styles of regulations to find out which ones actually prove workable before trying to code any particular standard into a Constitutional amendment.
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