Grim reminder in Parker deaths

Have you observed two reoccurring events in the news?  First, there is murder followed by a suicide.  Is this the result of teaching and acceptance of evolution in our society?  If life is just a matter of chance and time, what difference does it make what I do?  If I am not responsible to a Creator God, than I can do anything I please. 

Second, the people left behind always express shock that their friend/relative was capable of such an atrocity.  However, such disclaimers ignore basic humanity for the perpetrator and the one making the claim.  Jesus said, "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander" (Matt 15:19). 

Evolution conjectures that things are getting better and better.  The news of the day negates this theory.  If we are honest with ourselves, we will recognize the truth about our own deceitful heart.

My 2012 survival kit

(Denver Post, Jan. 1) “Let us eat and drink,” said the beautiful people at last night’s glittering parties, “for tomorrow we shall die.” Maybe they thought their insouciance fitting as 2011 ticked away, but they could not have thought it original. It was Obama’s favorite economist, John Maynard Keynes, the original Mr. Stimulus, who remarked coldly in the 1930s that in the long run we’re all dead. And Keynes was echoing the dissipated elites of ancient Israel 2700 years ago, says the prophet Isaiah. Fatalistic irresponsibility endures though nations rise and fall. Our fall may now impend, as 69 percent of those polled believe America is in decline and 57 percent expect our kids will live less well than we do. Yet you saw little evidence of that somber outlook in the prosperous holiday bustle at suburban malls and downtown theaters. A psychologist might call it cognitive dissonance. I’d call it either rank denial or good old American gumption. But which?

On this first day of a fateful election year the choice is entirely ours – and I choose gumption. Notwithstanding our fiscal and economic woes, political polarization, slumping demographics, nukes in Iran and North Korea, global jihad and sharia, the USA has the potential to come roaring back in 2012 and onward to 2020. It starts with deciding we can.

True, historians warn that great nations seldom make it to age 250, and we’re now 235. “Pessimism, materialism, an influx of foreigners, the welfare state, the weakening of religion, the love of money, and the loss of a sense of duty,” Sir John Glubb’s checklist for a country in decadence (from his 1976 book “The Fate of Empires”), fits us all too well. Our advantage, though, is that there has never been an America before.

Are we exempt from the undertow of history and the underside of human nature? Absolutely not. We do possess, however, resilient free institutions and an indomitable fighting spirit. From this fortunate combination – representing for our generation a trust to keep, not a charm to boast on or coast on – a victory for the United States over decadence and decline, against the odds, remains possible.

I’m no Pollyanna. Our state and nation are ill-led by Democrats and Republicans alike. Judges flout the Constitution, producing tyrannous rulings like Colorado’s Lobato school case, and making it unlikely the Supreme Court will annul the disaster that is Obamacare. The spiritual poverty in today’s public square would appall the pioneers who put “Nil Sine Numine,” nothing without the Spirit, on our state seal. We face a stormy year.

But like many Christian and Jewish conservatives, I enter 2012 with a survival kit of ideas and ideals that keep me buoyant, storms or not. Here on the shelf by my desk are wisdom-books giving timeless encouragement in the toughest times. Enemy attack, economic crash, electoral defeat? I hope and pray not. Still in such volumes as these, there is sustenance to persist regardless.

Of course my list of ten titles, compiled years ago for a friend, won’t match yours. But I do recommend compiling your own. It will ground you on bedrock and make 2012 go better. And what are the books on my shelf?

First is the Bible, alongside Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man” and Lewis’s “Mere Christianity,” for an anchor in eternity. Next, “The Federalist” for politics and Bastiat’s “The Law” plus Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” for economics. Weaver’s “Ideas Have Consequences” and Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative” diagnose America’s travails since 1945.

From literature, though a hundred come to mind, I complete my ten with Bolt’s “Man for All Seasons” and Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” epitomizing moral integrity. We’ll need a lot of that, and divine help besides, as beleaguered America turns the calendar page. Happy New Year.

2011 valedictions & 2012 predictions

Fantasy presidential nominations for Ross Perot, Olympia Snowe, and John Hickenlooper, along with bouquets for Douglas County school vouchers and brickbats for the Denver police, enliven the air waves this month as Head On completes its 15th year on Colorado Public Television. John Andrews on the right and Susan Barnes-Gelt on the left offer their annual backward glance at winners and sinners of the old year and gaze into a cracked crystal ball for headlines of the year to come. This month John and Susan also spar over Hickenlooper's report card, Obama's chances in 2012, and fracking. Here are all five scripts for December. 1. WINNERS & SINNERS OF 2011

John: Thanks so much for listening as Head On completes 15 years on Colorado Public Television. It’s time again for Colorado winners and sinners of the old year. Thumbs up for Douglas County vouchers, the Pat Sullivan arrest, and the amazing Tim Tebow. Thumbs down for Aurora corporate welfare and the redistricting mess.

Susan: Thumbs down to Curt Fentress’s faux federalist, new state courthouse at 14th and Lincoln; the clueless National Western Stock Show and the Regional Transportation District’s breathtaking incompetence. Thumbs up to the new Clyfford Still Museum, David Tryba’s Colorado History Museum, and Denver’s new Crime Lab at 14th and Cherokee.

John: So, a crime lab connoisseur, are we? More of my winners and sinners include thumbs up Scott Gessler and Walker Stapleton, shaking up state government, and for the taxed-out voters who crushed Proposition 103. Thumbs down for the power-grabbing judge who ordered billions more in state aid to education.

Susan: Sinners: Text messaging Denver cops; Scott Gessler - a partisan political hack, not a statewide elected official accountable to every voter; Wall Street bankers who hedge against their clients; Winners: Coloradans. All of us are lucky to live in a state replete with natural beauty, a gentle climate and Colorado Public Television 12.

2. FEARLESS PREDICTIONS FOR 2012

John: Goodbye, 2011. Hello, Susan and John’s fearless predictions for 2012. Put on your crash helmet, Barnes-Gelt. This is gonna be a wild one. The stock show moves to Limon, out where the cattle are. Occupy Denver moves to Glenwood Springs for a bath. A deadlocked Republican convention drafts Hickenlooper.

Susan: U.S. Senators and Congressionals are permanently attached to lie detector machines; the occupy movement and tea partiers form a successful third party and nominate Ross Perot; text messaging goes the way of the phone booth; the Catholic Church ordains women and pigs fly!

John: Air traffic controllers land those pigs – which is called bringing home the bacon – as Facebook buys the US Postal Service, Diana DeGette leaves Congress to replace Whoopi Goldberg on The View, and Donald Trump’s hair is enshrined at the Smithsonian. What a year we have ahead!

Susan: Repub’s nominate Olympia Snowe for president; Colorado voters abolish Amendment 23, TABOR & the Gallagher amendment; Washington DC reverts to a swamp and Denver becomes the U.S. capitol. My button bracelets become the decade’s fashion rage and each and every one of you have a happy and healthy 2012!

3. ELECTION YEAR ALMOST HERE

John: Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, politically written off last summer, was on the comeback trail as 2011 ended. But Iowa and New Hampshire will have their say as 2012 begins, and Romney or some other Republican could jump ahead again. The ultimate comeback would be an Obama victory in November. Never underestimate the incumbent.

Susan: Mitt, Newt, Newt, Mitt, Newt Mitt – hmmmmmmm. When petulant professor, 1990’s whiner Newt is the flavor of the month for the Republican – not-Mitt posse – cast about for a viable alternative to Hope & Change. I’m betting on a third party candidate – Ron Paul? Trump? What a circus!

John: Barack Obama will go down as one of the worst presidents in history, and he’ll lose next fall. Economic futility and foreign policy weakness disqualify him for a second term. Perry, Santorum, Bachmann, Romney, Gingrich, or Huntsman could all do better. Not party, not ideology, but simple competence will decide this one.

Susan: Competence: Huntsman’s the only competent choice and he won’t get there. Perry doesn’t know there are 9 members of the Supreme Court? Repubs who served with Gingrich say he’s unpredictable and mercurial; Romney – which one? The moderate, the conservative? The hedge fund bandit? The liberal governor of Massachusetts? Flop! Flip!

4. FRACKING SPURS ENERGY BOOM, BUT IS IT SAFE?

Susan: To frack or not to frack? Hydraulic fracking, the trendy new oil & gas production technique used in Colorado and other mountain states has been linked to groundwater pollution. Fracking pumps fluid into wells under pressure, fracturing rock and releasing oil and gas. OOOPS – here we go again.

John: One country on earth, America, impairs prosperity, quality of life, and national security by denying its people the full benefit of their own energy resources. Reason enough right there to fire Obama and the Democratic Senate in 2012. The phony panic over fracking is a green hoax as bad as global warming.

Susan: John, you’re too smart to ignore science. It’s not just the greens who worry about damage to the environment. Maybe you don’t care if your water is tainted by fracking or the air you breath full of particulates. Reality doesn’t go away because you chose to ignore it!

John: Hydraulic fracturing to release oil and gas reserves on a Saudi Arabian scale is producing tremendous benefits to Colorado, a dozen other states, and our whole country in terms of jobs, wealth, energy independence. More benefits await. Fracking only occurs with tight environmental safeguards. Don’t let Chicken Little shut it down.

5. HICKENLOOPER REPORT CARD

Susan: One year into his first term, John Teflon Hickenlooper continues to be popular. His aw shucks, a-partisan, can’t we all just get along approach to governing is particularly refreshing compared to the venal and mean-spirited personalities of most partisan-pols. His approach is good for Colorado.

John: A flat economy isn’t good for Colorado. Neither are mediocre schools and crowded prisons. Voters didn’t hire Gov. Hickenlooper to be the likable feller in a Western movie, the sequel to City Slickers. They hired him to be the chief executive of our state, and so far he’s done zilch.

Susan: I wish that Governor John Hickenlooper could wave his magic wand: create jobs, fix the schools and overhaul the prisons. Sadly – neither he nor any other elected official has that power. A healthy economy, great schools and a rational penal system depend on rational people negotiating rational decisions.

John: No question Hick is probably a great guy to have a beer with. He could brew the beer for you. But that was two jobs ago. After a year in his current job as Colorado CEO, the ambitious Hickenlooper has no accomplishments or vision to point to. That’s a C in my gradebook.

Show some backbone

(Denver Post, Nov. 27) “Thanksgiving and Christmas 2011, now those were tough times. The House and Senate couldn’t agree on raising taxes. Denver and Aurora couldn’t agree on the Stock Show. Democrats couldn’t get excited about Obama. Republicans couldn’t get excited about anyone. It was grim, I tell you. Worse than 1933, with unemployment over 20%, Hitler and Stalin menacing Europe. “Worse than 1942, with the world in flames, the Allies beset by Germany and Japan. Worse than 1968, with assassinations, race riots, failed presidencies, antiwar marches.

“No, youngsters, none of those dark days compared with the year we lost Steve Jobs. Elway was dissing Tebow. Big Air was cancelled. Black December, we called it. Be grateful you weren’t born yet.”

Will Grandpa be narrating such melodrama by a Colorado fireside decades from now? Hardly. So why the long face? We’ve survived worse than this. Purpose and grit will get us through. Coloradans have backbone. Our best days are ahead, there’s no doubt of it.

Yet four out of five Americans in a recent poll said the country is now in decline. Maybe we are beginning to see ourselves as a people that things happen to, rather than what we’ve historically been since Pilgrim times – a people who make things happen. It’s a huge difference; and fortunately, it’s still our choice.

Local reaction to failure of the congressional “supercommittee” to reach a deficit-reduction agreement, as reported last week by the Denver Post, portrayed Colorado as an almost helpless dependent of the federal budget. The state will be a less desirable place to live in dozens of ways, one gathered, if spending growth slows down to keep America from a Greek-style fiscal collapse. Woe is us.

The obvious rejoinder is twofold, it seems to me. First, let’s have some perspective here. Spending growth HAS to slow. Barreling along on the current unsustainable path is not an option. It would make all 50 of the states a worse place to live.

Second, since the budget binge is clearly ending, deal or no deal, let’s make a virtue of necessity and get busy positioning Colorado for greater economic self-sufficiency. The time should come when we’re NOT a groveling client of the Beltway. How about both parties in the legislature and the Hickenlooper administration vying to outdo each other on reforms toward that goal, come January?

New Year’s confetti will hardly be swept up, of course, when presidential politics goes white-hot with caucuses and primaries, Colorado included. Some say that movement on policy will then halt because of election-year posturing. But considering our state’s particular leverage in the 2012 race, why do we have to accept that?

We’ll not only be a battleground state again as we were in 2008. This time, Colorado could play the decisive role that Florida played in 2000. Strategists on both sides have spun out scenarios in which our nine electoral votes tip the balance of 269 to elect the incumbent or the challenger. (Lucky we stayed off the National Popular Vote bandwagon.)

So we will have, to put it mildly, the respectful attention of both Obama and his opponent – Romney, Gingrich, or whoever – all the way to November. As individual voters and especially through our organized groups, we should be thinking about what we want from them. I don’t mean our selfish wants, but our agenda for the civic good, for America’s renewal.

Our state is being paid yet another compliment, if you can call it that, as pundits left and right predict that the “fear and loathing” attack campaign Obama used to rescue Sen. Michael Bennet’s reelection here in 2010 will become his own national theme against the GOP in 2012. If true, too bad. Such scaremongering demeans our intelligence and our backbone. Will Coloradans stand for it? Stay tuned.

Disgusted with the Occupiers

The Occupy movement is a childish tantrum that is taking on Brownshirt overtones, says John Andrews in the November round of Head On TV debates. Wrong, replies Susan Barnes-Gelt: it's an authentic protest widely echoing that famous movie line, "Mad as hell." John on the right, Susan on the left, also go at it this month over the off-year election results, the presidential race, and the decline of newspapers. Head On has been a daily feature on Colorado Public Television since 1997. Here are all five scripts for November: 1. THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

Susan: In Paddy Chayefsky’s movie, Network, Peter Finch’s character yells, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” galvanizing the nation. That’s the Occupy Movement, a diverse group fed up with the narcissism and double-speak of the status quo. Elites ignore this message at their own risk.

John: America offers more freedom, more opportunity, more generosity, more openness, more participation, more creativity, more tolerance, and more upward mobility than any other nation on earth, and it offers those things to everyone, excluding no one. The Occupy protesters aren’t making a political statement, they’re throwing a childish tantrum.

Susan: The Constitutional government of the United States includes lofty principles and practices. On the other hand, when a handful of influence peddlers, plutocrats and special interests combine with mean-spirited, jingoistic extremists to create public policy, the people should speak out and leadership better listen.

John: The extremists in this picture are not our democratically-elected policymakers. They are the radical leftists and street thugs of Occupy Wall Street and all its copycats. This growing menace is similar to the Brownshirts who destabilized Germany in the early ‘30s, and equally purposeful. ACORN organized it to help Obama.

2. ON & ON IN RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE

John: In starting the presidential campaign way, way early, Republicans are bleeding their finances and bruising each other in a way that can only delight the Democrats. At least the eventual nominee will be battle-hardened -- and our side is going to need that, because Obama will have to go negative to win.

Susan: Battle hardened is one way to assess the current melee among Repub’s. I’d say the nominee will be in intensive care, on life support. $20+Mil in flip/flop ads against Romney will deplete his oxygen. And the rest of the field? Even IV miracle infusions won’t work.

John: After such a four disappointing years, Obama can’t run again on hope and change. His only chance this time is fear and loathing. Democrats will try to scare us away from Republican policies and disgust us with dirt on the GOP nominee. 2012 will be ugly, but I predict Barack is done.

Susan: Nothing can’t beat an incumbent. The only Republican with a shot at beating Obama is John Huntsman. He’s a smart, reasonable and moderate guy. Good for Dems that your party is lost in la la land, and will nominate a wing nut or flip flopper instead.

3. DOES NEWSPAPERS’ DECLINE DAMAGE DEMOCRACY?

John: Thomas Jefferson said a free society could get along better without government than without newspapers. The lifeblood of liberty is open debate, unfettered information, not politicians and laws and spending. These days the latter are madly increasing while newspapers are dying. Can democratic institutions survive in a Facebook nation?

Susan: A more pointed question is whether local and state government will survive without quality local coverage? Daily oversight of city halls, school boards and the state capitol are critical to public awareness. Spin machines and biased blogs have picked up where journalism’s failed. That’s a problem.

John: The Rocky is gone and the Denver Post gets thinner all the time. CU closed its journalism school. Commercial TV does some hard reporting, but a lot of frothy infotainment. Public channels like CPT provide good analysis but little firsthand coverage. What becomes of the media’s watchdog function to restrain government?

Susan: Sadly the local daily newspaper is going the way of the pay phone. Until the industry figures out how to attract and monetize the web, every interest from greedy corporations, K-Street lobbyists and corrupt elected’s will further inflame public distrust.

4. WHAT VOTERS SAID ON TAXES

Susan: With the exception of a couple local open space and public amenity approvals, tax proposals tanked this November. Even liberal Denver said NO! to statewide proposal to fund public education. Voters don’t trust government and won’t pay higher taxes unless they’re 100% sure the money is well spent. BIG trouble ahead for the Regional Transportation District.

John: Thank goodness for TABOR with its requirement for the spending lobby to ask permission before digging deeper into our pockets. So many families with paychecks gone or shrinking in this endless Obama recession are not about to approve a price increase from government. Raise taxes next year for light rail? No way.

Susan: RTD will need a complete overhaul – from senior management on down and out. Voters might support a transit initiative if they believed RTD’s board, leadership and consultants were credible. Taxpayers have lost faith in their institutions. Political and civic leaders better pay attention.

John: Voters sent a message that the political class in Denver and Washington should pay attention to. “Do it for the children,” a tax-increase pitch that seldom fails, fell flat. In defeating Prop 103 by almost 2 to 1, Coloradans told the legislature and Congress, “It’s the spending, stupid.”

5. WHAT VOTERS SAID ON SCHOOL BOARDS

Susan: In Denver, only school board incumbent Arturo Jiminez eked out a win over a slate of three reform candidates. Backed by big dollars from a few individuals, the election was more heat than light. Replacing Teresa Peña with Happy Haynes is a trade up and a new board chair could hold promise.

John: Teachers are great, but teacher unions are a negative force, and voters are realizing that. The union in Denver failed to recall Nate Easley earlier and now failed to take over the school board. In Douglas County they lost a referendum on vouchers. Only in Jeffco did the union diehards prevail.

Susan: Ah that it were so simple. Fixing public ed will take more than demonizing unions and deifying vouchers. Accountability from top to bottom is part of the answer. Longer school years and days, better-trained teachers, engaged families and improved instructional materials are important too.

John: Eighty percent of the people tell pollsters America is in decline. One symptom is the generation-long slump in learning performance while dollars per student were doubling. Selfish unions, distant bureaucrats, and leftist ideology have ruined our public schools. If you want proof, see the documentary film, “Waiting for Superman.”