Posted on 05/11/2012 8:12:59 AM PDT by Steve Schulin
Tom Hoefling is the longtime FReeper EternalVigilance -- and he's the presidential nominee of America's Party. America's Party is unlike any party you've seen before -- it is designed to ensure that America's Principles are its guiding force. The party doesn't want your money, it just wants you to do your duty as a citizen. Check out Tom's first campaign video interview, being conducted live now.
Many of us here have experience with him, I wouldn’t support him for dog catcher, post 14 was an accurate description.
Your first comments page goes all the way back to 2004, you probably don’t have the incredibly negative experience with him here that many freepers do, especially the Palin supporters.
No Steve, it is a blatant misrepresentation to say she thinks women have the right to abortion. Her public statements concerning Roe have been wildly misconstrued. Even if the Roe decision had never been written, natural law suggests something like a right to privacy, i.e., to control of one’s own person. It is an essential element of personal, individual freedom. But one cannot extrapolate from that a belief in a woman’s right to commit murder, and to my knowledge Palin has never made such a statement.
What this really comes down to is whether prolife people can differ on strategy without devolving to name-calling and demonization tactics as a means of promoting their particular strategy. . If two people, A and B, hold the same basic belief about the right to life for the unborn, and both A and B are looking to bring an end to the practice, it is simply not moral, not honest, to say that A is not really prolife because they believe in a different strategy than B for accomplishing that same objective.
For example, I confess my own position on this began with an unexamined acceptance of the assumption that federal legislation was the best approach. However, after studying the question more closely, I now believe, as Palin does, that “our federalism” provides a more reliable path to actual success in eliminating abortion and saving real lives than to create federal bans. The federal government should be little more than a treaty organization between the several sovereign states, and I believe that is largely how it was regarded by many of the founders. So if California wants to go to hell, it is free to do so. The rest are free to outlaw abortion altogether. Under our federalism, the police power resides with the state, not the federal, and for excellent reasons.
US action against Hitler is sometimes offered as a justification for the notion of imposing natural law principles on renegade sovereign states. The argument is basically that state sovereignty ends where universal moral law begins. But the German conflict was the action of one sovereign state going to war against another sovereign state, and that decision was not made primarily to prevent remote atrocities happening overseas, but was born of a reasonable fear that those atrocities might reach our own shores were Hitler not stopped. I had relatives who worked on the Manhattan Project, and it is certain we had no choice but to engage Germany preemptively in order to beat them to the nuclear punch.
Thus, even in our response to Hitler’s Germany, our federal system was merely doing its most basic job, providing for the self-defense of our collection of hypothetically sovereign states. Sovereign states can and will do bad things. We are not God. Our powers to enforce good in the world, both pragmatic and moral, are limited. To think otherwise is hubris.
You see, the Hitler question is really an attempt to figure out the limit of that power to enforce good, as defined by the natural law. The Nuremburg trials provide an excellent study in the tension between state sovereignty and natural law. From them we learned that crimes against humanity can be committed even if the state itself is the sponsor of the crime. But to “arrest” the criminal, your state must wage a real war against his state, and you must win. Those are the rules for dealing with sovereign states, and though they are sometimes hard to accept, ultimately they promote both freedom and life.
The real irony is that AIP has staked out a position against surrender to UN sovereignty, and rightly so, but inconsistently argues for the further disintegration of boundaries of jurisdictional sovereignty among our own states. In this they are really following, not rejecting, the example set by the UN. The totalitarian impulses of the UN benefitted greatly from Nuremburg, in that for the first time an international body was given power to impose criminal sanctions on a sovereign state. From that seedling we now have an evil progeny arising, the UN Treaty on the Child, Treaty on the Sea, etc. And unlike us, unlike our federalism, they have no structural or ideological inhibition against exerting their growing police power across any and all jurisdictional boundaries.
Which is why the founders allocated the police power to the states. The federal may announce the charter of individual rights (and Palin has never, to my knowledge, objected to using the federal platform to do so with respect to the rights of unborn children), but it must respect the limitations of its own power. To turn the police power over to the federal is to concede the totalitarian premise.
Which is why Palin believes it is best to wage this war against the murder of the unborn state by state. In systems analysis we call this partitioning the problem. It is a very practical approach that has a very high probability of long-term success. She augments this strategy by exporting a culture of life, which is to wage real war, but to avoid bombs and bullets while saving lives, using persuasion as an adjunct to locally written and locally enforced laws.
Therefore, to sum it all up (and I know I’ve gone on quite long), it is a gross mischaracterization to castigate Palin as not prolife, simply because she espouses a strategy that strives for the same outcome all prolifers seek, but without destroying the indispensible benefits of state sovereignty. Some may not agree with her approach, but let us do keep it honest. She is as prolife as the day is long, and may in fact have the better roadmap for how to get us to a society where abortion is enforceably illegal because everyone really gets that it is murder, which cannot happen without first valuing life.
You left out oily, slippery, and incredibly rude and arrogant.
LOL, very well said, both ansell2 and Chunga, although you left out "extremely sanctimonious" as well. Hundreds of FReepers agree, believe me.
Servant of the Cross and Steve Schulin: Take me off your stupid "Hoefling" ping lists... IMMEDIATELY.
That should be on a plaque on his wall.
LOL!
In reply to your freepmail, I don’t know, but EV as Leader of the Free World?? That cracks me up!! Obama move over!! There is a new EGO in town!!
In that post, my first sentence was a "I don't know" to a question, and then I started posting a statement about EV's Presidential run that had nothing to do with your freepmail.
Now when I read post 26, I see that I made it look as though the parts of that post after the simple "I don't know" sentence to you, was a follow up to something that you had freepmailed me, and it wasn't.
Sorry about that sloppy merging of a quick answer to your freepmail, and then my totally separate tangent that I did on Hoefling as leader of the free world.
You’ve managed to attract some notable FR detractors of mine from over the years, I see. I have to wonder how many of them will be voting for the most liberal governor in the history of the republic, or, short of that, who in the world they will put their sacred franchise behind.
Thanks Steve. You’re a good friend, and good man.
I don't despise Sarah Palin. I simply disagree with her on public policy. I'm sorry you don't know the difference.
"Our federalism" does not include a right to alienate God-given rights, most notably the right to life. Never has, never will. Those rights precede and supercede all written constitutions and humanly-devised laws, coming as they did from God, not from men. Indeed, all officers of government, at all levels, have a sworn obligation to protect the lives of the people, all of the people. It's the primary reason for the existence of those governments and those offices, all of them.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..."
The federal government should be little more than a treaty organization between the several sovereign states...
We tried that, under the Articles of Confederation. It didn't work. That's why we have the Constitution we have, which is far more than a mere "treaty organization."
The real irony is that AIP [For the record, it is now AP] has staked out a position against surrender to UN sovereignty, and rightly so, but inconsistently argues for the further disintegration of boundaries of jurisdictional sovereignty among our own states.
Simply inaccurate. We support the exact boundaries of jurisdictional sovereignty that are laid out by our Constitution. We have a system of dual sovereignty, in which the people, via the Constitution, granted the national or general government some of the most important aspects of sovereignty, and the several states retained all of the other characteristics of sovereign states.
But the common defense is one area that both retain responsibility for, under our Constitution, although he general government is required to provide it. If they fail, of course the states retain the right to defend themselves. This is clear in the language of the Constitution. Anything else would have been nonsensical, frankly.
What is the common defense, sir? First and foremost it is the defense of the lives of the people, is it not?
Which is why Palin believes it is best to wage this war against the murder of the unborn state by state. In systems analysis we call this partitioning the problem. It is a very practical approach that has a very high probability of long-term success. She augments this strategy by exporting a culture of life, which is to wage real war, but to avoid bombs and bullets while saving lives, using persuasion as an adjunct to locally written and locally enforced laws.
Actually, that is not her position. She, like Gerald R. Ford, Ron Paul, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, believes the decision over whether or not to allow abortion should be left to the states. She's said so a number of times. Which is counter to the natural law premises of this free republic, to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the stated purposes of the U.S. Constitution, all of them, and the explicit, imperative requirements of the Fifth, the Eighth and the Fourteenth Amendments.
"No State shall deprive any person of life without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.""No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law."
I'm saddened to see someone of your intellect buying into the pro-choice for states, Stephen A. Douglas democrat, arguments.
I have been scouring the internet looking up information on this Heofling guy, and I have found some sites about him, none of them good. Didn’t he run the Keyes campaign which gave us Senator Obama in the first place? Those who know him best say that he is a nasty and incompetent person.
http://www.ballot-access.org/2012/02/29/alan-keyes-party-qualifies-for-florida-ballot/
I’m Tom Hoefling. And those people are nuts.
I don’t use that title for people lightly either.
By the way, that is the absolute worst screen name I’ve ever seen on FR.
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