Have a mindful Thanksgiving

(Denver Post, Nov. 22) Were you as shocked as I was to read in the paper last Sunday that Frontier Airlines’ new boss prays for his employees and sees them as made in the image of God? The very idea. Who would want to work for a man like that? It certainly cast a pall over my Thanksgiving season. One of those offended by Bryan Bedford’s faith-based capitalism was Buie Seawell, a DU ethics professor and Presbyterian minister. Since principles such as respecting co-workers are “universal values,” scolded Seawell, “God would be pleased if we did that without doing it in his name.” But the right reverend is wrong. The equal dignity of every individual is NOT a universal value. Ask the billions who live under Islamic, Hindu, or Marxist oppression. It matters whether we’re regarded as endowed by the Creator or evolved from slime. So acknowledgment of the Author of our liberties has been understood by great men from Washington and Lincoln to FDR and Reagan as being essential to the preservation of those liberties.

America’s tradition of Thanksgiving, first proclaimed by President Washington, is integral to this. When leaders in business and media, education and science, the military and the arts, as well as political leaders, reverence higher authority at this or any time of year, they ennoble themselves and all of us. Of clergy who rebuke them for it, the less said the better.

On this day in 1963, Nov. 22, two of the most influential men of the century died. One, of course, was John F. Kennedy, slain in Dallas. Remember his pledge that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, to ensure the survival and the success of liberty”? If our sense of purpose is less certain now, perhaps it’s from forgetting a truth asserted by another voice that was silenced the same day, C. S. Lewis.

“I was not born free,” insisted Lewis, the Oxford don and Christian apologist. “I was born to obey and adore.” Much as Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, and Rev. Seawell might bridle at this idea, countless God-fearing Americans including Frontier’s Bedford would cheerfully assent. None of us is self-made or self-sufficient. Yet many of us forget it’s so. Only those who remember are fit for freedom. Thanksgiving Day is about the remembering.

Indeed at our house, as mentioned earlier, we try to make this a gratitude season, Thanksgiving month. Some of the markers are communal, others are personal. Some are celebratory and others somber. Day by day, regardless, it’s possible to say with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural – quoting the Psalms, after four years of war and only days before his own death – “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

During this present November, for example, only the ingrate could fail to lift up thanks on the 3rd for our voting rights, on the 9th for our Berlin Wall victory, and on the 11th for our brave veterans. Even in mourning the jihadist massacre at Fort Hood on the 5th, we had occasion to be thankful for our country’s compassion to victims, its justice to evildoers, its resilience in adversity. My family rejoiced in birthdays for a grandson on the 13th and a daughter on the 18th. What have been your family’s gratitude moments this month?

It was also on Nov. 22 back in 1858, notes historian Tom Noel, that our pioneer forebears organized Denver as a city. Achieving statehood 18 years later, they took the motto Nil Sine Numine, “Nothing without the Spirit.” It’s inscribed on the chairs, the stairs, and even the doorknobs in our State Capitol, reminding all who enter there to reverence higher authority. May we as Coloradans be not forgetful but mindful on Thanksgiving Day 2009.

Tuesday's clues for 2010

(Denver Post, Nov. 8 ) Before Tuesday, only one loss had ever marred Barack Obama’s smooth ascent to greatness. From the Harvard Law Review to the Illinois Senate to the United States Senate to the White House, the charmed young leader rose unstoppably. The lone speed bump was his congressional primary defeat in 2000. Then came the shellacking of 2009. Governorships in two key states flipped from Democrat to Republican despite the president’s best efforts. Virginia and New Jersey were both solidly blue a year ago. But recession-weary voters proved to be a stingier prize jury than the leftists of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. So much for water-walking on the Potomac. Meanwhile on the Platte, how did these elections treat Bill Ritter? Our beleaguered governor was not on the ballot. But he is under more pressure than Obama, with a budget to balance, no health-care razzle dazzle at hand, and one year left in his term. While clues for the next election from Tuesday’s results were slight, they held little comfort for Ritter.

Maine’s spending lobby may have succeeded in defeating a TABOR-style requirement for voter approval of taxes, with teacher unions doing a $1.8 million ad blitz of lies about Colorado. Former Gov. Bill Owens and former education commissioner Bill Moloney responded as a truth squad, but the dark side won.

At home in Aurora, however, sensible citizens turned down a tax hike for libraries, of all things. Not even motherhood and apple pie could move the tapped-out taxpayers. It’s a sign that Ritter and his government pals will face a tough sell for any “revenue enhancements” in 2010, or for an outright repeal of TABOR in 2011, if he’s still around. No wonder he prefers a flimsy fix for the budget shortfall with federal stimulus dollars.

This governor’s entire persona has morphed from flinty to flimsy since 2006. It’s harder and harder to take him seriously. He has a gravitas gap. His blunders with labor-management issues have made the statehouse “feel like Detroit,” said Republican challenger Josh Penry at a candidate forum the other night. Team Ritter can’t keep their story straight about the Villafuerte scandal, job creation data, or his own hiring record.

Nor was union political muscle, so helpful in Bill Ritter’s victory three years ago (along with “lawbreaker” slurs against opponent Bob Beauprez), fearsome this time out. Teacher-union candidates did tip the Denver School Board their way on Tuesday. But a reform slate defeated four union-endorsed candidates for Douglas County Schools, and conservative Laura Boggs unseated a liberal incumbent in Jeffco Schools.

Last week’s local election results also hinted of a GOP that is regaining its ground game. My party pushed back against the stealth Democratic efforts in those nominally nonpartisan municipal and school board races. Arapahoe Republican Chairman Dave Kerber helped elect Marsha Berzins to the Aurora Council and Ron Phelps to the Centennial Council. Douglas Republican Chairman John Ransom courageously put money and muscle into his county’s board of education fight.

Hearing that some paper had published his obituary, Mark Twain played it for laughs. Republicans at that forum for governor hopefuls (held Nov. 3 at the Centennial Institute) had a laughing optimism seldom seen since 2004. Senate Minority Leader Penry, former Congressman Scott McInnis, and businessman Dan Maes are campaigning as if they missed the memo that this is now a one-party state. And attitude counts for a lot; ask the Broncos and Coach McDaniels.

Twelve months is forever in politics, it’s true. As Obama slumped in the year past, so Ritter may rebound in the year ahead. But his blue crew is reeling right now. Though no great seer – I’m the guy who thought the Beatles were a flash in the pan – my hunch is Colorado returns to red in 2010.

Over the climate cliff with Bennet & Udall

(Denver Post, Oct. 25) The year is 2030. The scene, an assembly joining Michael Bennet High School and Mark Udall Middle School in Denver. The occasion, a talk on Colorado history in the early 21st century by Prof. Cody Hawkins, the onetime Buffs quarterback who is now a popular CU faculty member. Let’s listen: “During the Obama years, back when your parents were young and football was still allowed in this country, before the UN banned all violent sports, I wasn’t the only big star who was humiliatingly benched. The two famous senators whom your schools are named for, had their political careers terminated by voters in the same way my NFL hopes were snuffed by angry alumni and the coach. (Dad and I later made up, of course.) “Economic hardship in Colorado following passage of the 2009 cap-and-trade energy tax did them in. Sen. Michael Bennet served only a two-year appointive term before going down in the Republican landslide of 2010. Sen. Mark Udall plugged along in unpopularity until announcing in early 2013, just after Barack and Michelle vacated the White House, that one term would do it for him as it had for them.

“Why did the never-elected Bennet get his name on this high school, home of the Mighty Preble Mice? (Cheers and applause.) Because of the fine job he had done earlier as Denver school superintendent. He never should have left that post. Laurence Peter’s axiom about rising to your level of incompetence was thereafter renamed the Bennet Principle.

“If Michael Bennet had just kept it real in that stormy autumn of 2009, and followed the facts where they led, instead of bowing to the superstitions of the climate alarmists, he would not have cast the deciding vote for cap-and-trade. Colorado and the country would have been spared an economic body slam that worsened the Obama-Pelosi recession just when recovery was starting. And he might have hung onto his seat.

“In Boulder back then, if I had dared label global-warming doomsday fears as superstitions, Al Gore would have leveled me like a Longhorn linebacker. But Americans later realized that’s all they were. Not only did supporters of the legislation admit it would yield less than a 1-degree reduction in warming during this century. Scientists like the EPA’s own Alan Carlin could prove carbon dioxide, the alleged culprit that senators voted to curb, wasn’t even to blame for warming. And with the late-1990s cooling trend unbroken to this day, skeptics have laughed last.

“Sen. Udall still gushed that the cap-and-trade bill was ‘ideal,’ in spite of Heritage Foundation warnings that it would cause a doubling of electricity prices and a 50-percent jump in prices for gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, by the 2030s. Those trends, now fully realized, started soon enough to hurt Udall badly. Colorado’s annual loss of 20,000 jobs and $1000 per person in gross state product, predicted in an ALEC study, was felt from 2012 onward, with public backlash leading to the senator’s retirement.

“Sen. Bennet was long gone by then, of course, comfortable in a salary-capped job on Wall Street. His agonizing vote for the Kerry-Boxer bill (similar to the House version, Waxman-Markey, but worse) got the incumbent past fellow Democrat Andrew Romanoff in August 2010. But he lost in November to the Republican argument that recessionary hard times were the worst moment to raise energy taxes. The GOP, echoing 1946, asked ‘Had Enough?’ Voters decided they had.

“You students have read of the superstitious Aztecs sacrificing lives to appease the rain god, Tlatoc. They didn’t know better. But imagine the perversity of leaders here in our own state, in our own time, sacrificing both prosperity and political careers to a climate deity equally mythical, equally cruel.”

50 ways back at you

(Denver Post, Oct. 11) Attention, liberals. A new book urges that in order to help Obama improve our country, you should adopt a dog, quit smoking, and conciliate conservatives. But don't rush into it. So far the President himself has only accomplished the first of those. The inspiring ideas are from “50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America,” brought out last month by Michael Huttner and Jason Salzman, two lefties in Denver with time on their hands. Huttner and his ProgressNow group wanted no part of change back when I was pushing it as Colorado Senate President, but that was then. He’s an author now, blurbed by the late Ted Kennedy and the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream guys. “50 Ways” is like a kitchen-sink sundae, a nutritional zero with ingredients from the obvious to the ludicrous. “Support political art” no doubt sounded hip when the authors were miming a Paul Simon song and grooving on Barack posters. It has an ugly Soviet ring since the failed propaganda coup at the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Find a town hall, y’all” strikes a plaintive note after the Alinskyites had their bell rung on health care during the August recess. “Get news that’s truly fair and balanced” has a whiny copycat sound as well. The green envy pays pathetic tribute to Fox News.

I come to praise Huttner and Salzman, however, not to bury them. As someone who loves lists, I take stimulus from theirs – the first good stimulus we’ve had from this crowd. Now those of us who don’t WANT to see the land of the free transformed can rise to the challenge with our own list. Here’s mine: “50 Ways You Can Help America Survive Obama.”

Cleave to the Constitution. Dust off the Declaration. Work harder. Save more. Borrow less. Repent, pray, get religion. Resist the divorce epidemic. Tithe to church and charities. Read the classics. Doubt judges and lawyers. Distrust the dinosaur media.

Assert our country’s goodness: America without apologies. Gird against radical Islam. Reject surrender in Afghanistan. Quarantine Iran. Defend Israel to the death. Revive NATO. Suspect Russia. Suspect China. Beware Chavez and Castro. See the United Nations for the dangerous fraud that it is. Secure the borders. Rearm urgently.

Work for a color-blind community. Reject the race card and white guilt. Support charter schools, tax credits, vouchers. Demand intellectual diversity on the campuses. Resist the mediocrity drug called multiculturalism. Encourage a stay-at-home mom. Give to a crisis pregnancy center. Support the shaming of abortionists and pornographers. Boycott Hollywood.

Get arrested dumping tea in the Tidal Basin. Dare Congress to put themselves on Social Security and Medicare. Demonstrate for a timeline when GM gets privatized. Rally for right-to-work. Picket for paycheck protection. Organize for offshore drilling. Sit in for nuclear power. Coalesce for coal. Demand a tax-favored, direct-pay option for your medical costs.

Ridicule the climate alarmists. Tell Biden jokes. Circulate ACORN soup recipes. Start a Palin Club. Launch a Messiah milk carton movement (“Savior of 2008, mysteriously missing in 2009”). Retire Pelosi and Reid in 2010. Draft Petraeus in 2012. Get active as a Democrat and elect more blue dogs. Or get active as a Republican – not because they’re so much better, but because opposition is liberty’s lifeblood.

Voila, just that quickly: 50 ways to help America survive Obama. Please list more if you can. The lengthening lists on both sides will make us a better nation, just for the involvement they stir.

Long after BHO is gone, the USA will endure. But in what form? As he revs the motor for change, someone has to hit the brakes for continuity. I don’t want our kids inheriting a country that a rookie wrecked. Not even Huttner and Salzman want that.

Let parties compete locally

(Denver Post, Sept. 20) Some ideas are so dumb, they could only be in the New York Times. “One-party autocracy” in the world’s fastest-growing economy, China, has “great advantages,” according to Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Of course, you’d want the rulers to be an “enlightened group of people.” But Friedman certifies the Beijing autocrats are just that. Right. My subject today happens to be local government in Colorado, not central government in China. I’m addressing the problem of "suppose you held an election and nobody came" – illustrated by five metro school districts calling off their elections for lack of candidates. But Friedman’s howler is apropos. Our schools, transit, and municipalities will run more and more Chinese-style if something doesn’t change. The American way is not paternalistic rule by the enlightened. It’s two-party competition. Yet our state, like most others, bans such competition in elections below the county level. What’s good enough for electing legislators, governors, and even presidents – hot political rivalry between Democrats and Republicans, with other parties also in the mix – is deemed not good enough for picking the mayor, council, school board, or RTD Board. Why?

Nonpartisan local governance is a utopian relic from the Progressive era a hundred years ago. Scientific administration by altruistic experts in the “cities of tomorrow” was supposed to replace self-interested power struggles. Do you see any evidence that it worked out that way? Me neither.

Thank goodness the country at least retained a competitive partisan arena in which power could check power at the state and federal level. Imagine how many presidential terms such aspiring progressive autocrats as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson might have wangled from our grandparents, absent a raucous opposition party to say “Not so fast.”

We know of nothing autocratic about Littleton School Board president Bob Colwell or RTD Board chairman Lee Kemp. Both are no doubt good men. But Colwell and two other Littleton incumbents will take another term this fall by default. No opponents filed against them, so the election was cancelled as state law provides. As for Kemp, he was elected unopposed last time. So were seven of his 14 fellow RTD directors.

Fewer than half the RTD director elections in the past decade have been contested races. School board elections are often uncontested as well. Districts in Aurora, Cherry Creek, Commerce City, and Adams 12 have joined Littleton in calling off their 2009 elections. The school boards association is “no longer surprised when races fail to generate interest,” the Denver Post reported.

Even when local citizens do get to choose between candidates, knowing what you’re getting isn’t easy. When voters in my city of Centennial mark their mail ballots next month, for example, they will have to rely on whispers to know which of the contenders for mayor and council are smaller-government Republicans or bigger-government Democrats. It’s like guessing on unlabelled canned goods at the food bank.

Localities tax and spend on our behalf in the many millions of dollars; schools and RTD spend in the billions. Vital ideas and values are involved. Public safety is involved. The stakes are too high to continue with these milquetoast nonpartisan elections. For better government, we should choose the responsible officials via party nominations and platforms.

Competitive political parties are the best idea the Founding Fathers never had. American self-government has thrived under them for two centuries, expanding opportunity and safeguarding liberty – not to perfection, but far better than the enlightened one-party Chinese.

Now Colorado should let the parties compete locally. Lift the lid. Gun the engines. The unions won’t like it; they make hay in the shadowy, apathetic status quo. The media will also object, fearing erosion of their dominance as information brokers. The Democrats, shrewder behind the scenes than Republicans, won’t welcome the change either. But it’s time.