Introducing GrowUp.org

In statements, placards, and his latest book summarizing his policies and favorite speeches, Sen. Obama says he wants to "renew America's promise." But does he know what it is? Do we know? Editor: Jeff Bull of Denver is the founder of a new political website (and perhaps, as a result, a new movement comparable to, but more clearheaded than, the MoveOn movement) called GrowUp.org. I encourage you to check it out and sign up. This piece appeared the other day as one of GrowUp's periodic email bulletins. Read on, you'll like what's here...

The American promise is most fundamentally the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as described in our Declaration of Independence. Our government is to be primarily concerned with the rule of law, property rights, and equality of opportunity - as opposed to trying to ensure equality of outcomes by creating different rules for different people.

America was the first society to minimize class distinctions and actually encourage the opportunity of the poor to become rich. Work hard and anyone could achieve the American dream (i.e. fulfill the American promise). The founders argued forcefully against the idea of nobility and titles and class - there were to be no rulers over the people.

Yet today we hear more and more from the left about the crucial importance of class distinctions. About the need for government to take greater control of everything in order to save us from ourselves, our circumstances, or even from nature. We see an incredible expansion of victims (real or perceived) looking for retribution. A far cry from JFK's inaugural exhortation to "ask not what your country can do for you."

In his Democratic nomination acceptance speech, Senator Obama defined the American promise as "the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper." That communitarian theme unified his domestic and foreign policy positions. "That's the promise we need to keep," Obama continued. "That's the change we need right now."

The founders and early Americans that fought for the freedom inherent in America's promise would certainly shudder at a government interested in the temperature of your home, the type of transportation you use, or the food you eat. At a government that wants world opinion to dictate right and wrong to America. Senator Obama says that is appropriate.

We are certainly well beyond the purpose of government as originally intended, and it is hard for me not to fear the potential tyranny of such intrusions and beliefs. Don't you?

So why did this split occur and is there any way to unite the sides?

As conservative economist Thomas Sowell notes, both political sides "would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left." That's why so many young people (in age or maturity) are on the left. But the crux of the issue and source of the split, as Sowell concludes (and I think evidence abounds), is that "the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow."

Because of this different vision of the world and its future (ideal versus real), it has become increasingly clear that the sides do not merely disagree about the means to the same end, but also the end in itself. As conservative columnist Dennis Prager comments, "the right and the left do not want the same America," and "calls for a unity among Americans that transcends left and right are either naïve or disingenuous. America will be united only when one of them prevails over the other. The left knows this. Most on the right do not."

So if we no longer share the same, original understanding of America's promise, it is critically important that we look honestly and realistically at how it would be changed by an empowered left. How this election will impact our future.

The underlying theme and crucial difference is that the left thinks you need government to do more for you (and therefore, by definition, you to do less for yourself). See sidebar "The New New Deal?" for a great example. Note that in Senator Obama's "brother keeping" America, it is government taking from one brother to give to another. And you fear "Big Brother" now?

But I really appreciate Sachs' and Obama's honesty - and you should be honest with yourself. Is that what you want? How often do they have to tell you what they are going to do before you believe them? How much change like this does our country really need, or can it survive?

By voting for Senator Obama, please understand that you are conceding your inability to succeed without government patronage (which of course can only be provided by taking rights and money from someone else). That you cannot handle life in the freest country on earth, and you think that government, however benign, is going to make things better for you by taking more control from you.

But has increased government involvement and spending decreased poverty, or improved education, or reduced the cost of healthcare? Will more government involvement and spending really change the earth's climate or reduce natural disasters? Does our spending less on national defense end war or terrorism?

Please also understand that the party against the (productive, sometimes greedy) rich will get fewer of them. And the party for the (helpless, usually bitter) victim will get more of them. Not exactly the way out of economic (or even social) difficulties. Or honoring the real American promise. As if envy is less of a sin than greed.

As an ordinary American (along with another 299 million or so of you), I am petrified by where this is going. More governmental control in all areas of our lives. More class warfare. Dissent isn't just unpatriotic, it's racist. Forget the rampant privacy violations of the Patriot Act (actually, still waiting for one), just don't disagree with President Obama or the left will give you the Palin family or Joe the Plumber treatment.

Why has Senator Obama raised unprecedented funds for his campaign? The reason so much money is invested in politics in general and this election in particular is that politicians, bureaucrats, and judges have unprecedented control of our lives and are looking for more. The only way to decrease the money in politics is to decrease the size and scope of government.

That's not the change the left and Senator Obama believe in. Their goal is nothing short of a new American promise where a strong government and a weak people try to create heaven on earth. As Obama stated, "I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth." We need to all remember where the path of good intentions leads - and it's not to heaven.

It is the freedom to succeed (and fail) that has made our country the last best hope of earth. Not universal health insurance or carbon offset credits. Will we stand and fight for what's left of that freedom, or sit and accept our helpless place waiting for our government superiors to save us? All hail the One? Is our country that bad? Are you that helpless?

May God still bless America.

America at the tipping point

Today, Daniel Henninger has a brilliant piece in the Wall Street Journal that lays bare the true significance of an Obama victory. Rather than being representative of a repudiation of "the last eight years", a victory for Obama will usher in a new and philosophically revolutionary change in the basic tenets of both the American economy and society. An Obama administration -- aided with huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate -- will not be a "one-off" example of an over-reaction to the financial crisis that demands an immediate (but temporary) change in direction to right the ship.Rather, as Henninger so eloquently puts it, with this election the U.S. is at a "philosophical tipping point". This is spot on, and echoes the theme of many of my posts for the past several months. America is about to take a sharp 90 degree left turn, away from our history of free-market capitalism based on a risk/reward calculus, and toward a model of state-controlled system based on a no-risk/high security formula. It's a fundamental shift, as Henninger states:

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

This move toward "welfare capitalism" is exactly where Obama will take us over the next four years. And it is a tipping point because it is largely irreversible; the Great Society has now been with us for over 40 years, and its core elements -- Medicare and Medicaid -- are programs that make up a huge percentage of our entitlement spending. It is easy to giveth -- but it is much harder politically to "taketh away".  This is the issue we will face with Obama -- who plans an historic expansion of public-funded healthcare, energy development and welfare programs. As I've written previously, this will result not just in new taxes, but in the growth of a huge and growing dependent class that lives off government but does nothing to help fund it.The impact of this will be to move America back in the pack, to the economic alsorans of France, and Germany. As Henninger again writes:

Now comes Barack Obama, standing at the head of a progressive Democratic Party, his right hand rising to say, "Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be for-profit cowboys. It's time to spread the wealth around."What this implies, undeniably, is that the United States would move away from running with the high GDP, high-growth nations rising today as economic and political powers and move over to retire with the low-growth economies we displaced -- old Europe.As noted in a 2006 World Bank report, spending in Europe on social-protection programs averages 19% of GDP (85% of it on social insurance programs), compared to 9% of GDP in the U.S. The Obama proposals send the U.S. inexorably and permanently toward European levels of social protection. This isn't an "agenda." It's a final temptation.

A temptation to remake America in the model of the "progressives left" -- which sees capitalism as a model that fundamentally offends them. It offends the notion that America should be about equality of outcome, not opportunity. At the heart of this is a super-charged version of those who believe that "self-esteem" matters more than keeping score, and the idea that some will win while others lose is not acceptable. Never mind that in our economy, those who win do so not because of some hereditary right that is baked in as a birthright, but rather because of their drive to succeed. The left wants to discount the winners so as not to offend those who are less able (or willing) to succeed. This is at the core of the progressive movement: don't brag, walk softly, don't make anyone else feel badly and -- most importantly -- spread your wealth around so as not to make anyone feel inferior.

What this ignores, of course, is that human nature desires independence and self-sufficiency, not dependence on others. Those who actively support this kind of system are the progressive intellectuals who live in a world of theory, rich liberals who feel guilty about their success, and students whose brains have been scrambled by the left-wing politics of the universities. But the vast middle -- who will vote for Obama on November 4 because they have been hoodwinked into thinking that he is more Bill Clinton than Jacques Chirac -- don't want a handout. They want opportunity. And opportunity is not granted by a statist model of economics, but rather by life-giving tax cuts and a light regulatory burden that will ignite the economy and create new jobs. That's the right tonic for America and those who have too little -- not a government handout in the form of a cash payment that serves only to affirm their lower lot in life.

But this is not Obama's view of the world. And if he wins on Tuesday, we will see America make a choice that will fundamentally alter the philosophical underpinnings of our great capitalist democracy.

It will be a choice we will long remember-- and long regret.

His moral relativism discredits Obama

Democrats like Obama the Intellectual like to denigrate "folksy" and "unintellectual" Republicans as "clinging to guns or religion," but what they really abhor about their "lowbrow" Republican counterparts is the willingness to stand in moral judgment. I am not in any way arguing that every time a Republican uses a moral argument it is a correct application. However if we are not willing to even engage in moral discourse, we will travel a very dangerous path. Only a moral realist holds that there are right and true moral universals that exist across all cultures, nations, languages and time, regardless of human comprehension or behavioral conformity to these moral truths. Only a moral realist can believe, for example, that slavery or murder is objectively wrong and was never right despite cultural norms that once permitted it.

A moral relativist, on the other hand can assert, as does Dr. Richard Shweder, respected professor at the University of Chicago where Obama taught, “…even the presumption that infanticide is immoral is too presumptive and provincial to count as a moral universal.”

Only a moral realist truly affirms human rights. Yet the conviction that we all occupy one moral universe is not "high-minded" enough for elite universities, and unless one manages to escape higher education with one's moral compass unadjusted, what was abhorrent before exposure to postmodern deconstructionist thought will afterward be considered benign or even commendable.

Lest we forget, imprisonment of innocents, human experimentation, slavery, murder, and even genocide were legal in Germany during WWII, and it was the educated who formed the Einsatzgruppen “intervention groups” tasked with carrying out systematic mass murders of Jews, gypsies, and others. If there existed no moral realists during that time, there would have been no one willing to risk their own lives to protect society's outcasts. Meanwhile, many "good" German people chose to do nothing. Moral relativism instantiates what Martin Luther King referred to as "the appalling silence of the good people" and produces indifference - or at best diffidence - in the face of evil.

"We must face this challenge. We can face this challenge. We must totally defeat it, and we're in a long struggle." says McCain.

Says Obama the Intellectual, without a hint of irony, "Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, because a lot of evil's been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil."

As Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing." Yet Obama the Intellectual represents a perspective that is not merely morally diffident, but posits moral equivalences between actions that should be easily recognized as morally unequal. He additionally manages to associate with people who would be (correctly) unambiguously identified as racist (Wright and Farrakhan), felonious (Rezko) and terrorist (Ayers and wife, Dohrn) if they were evangelical, white, and “unintellectual.”

Cries of “we gotta be careful of guilt by association” and “these are attempts to connect Obama with events that happened when he was eight years old” obfuscate the real issue: how can we trust the judgment of someone who found none of his “controversial associates” beyond the pale? Even in condemning Ayers, Obama follows with “But…” and describes unrepentant Ayers as simply “a professor of education at the University of Illinois.”

Have we become so numb to the word "terrorist" that it has no effect when used to accurately describe FBI Most Wanted former fugitives, Ayers and Dohrn who helped blow up over 20 buildings (including one in which Ayers' former girlfriend accidentally blew herself up with a nail bomb)? Dohrn reportedly commended Charles Manson's followers while exhorting her compatriots to be “less wimpy” and was allegedly involved in the 1981 Brinks armed robbery in which two men were injured and three were murdered, leaving nine children fatherless.

Dohrn spent seven months in jail for refusing to cooperate with authorities. When two of their dear friends were sent to prison for murder and armed robbery, Ayers and Dohrn became guardians of the convicts' baby son whom they raised to be an intellectual - like themselves. When interviewed by Slate regarding his Rhodes scholarship in 2002, Yale graduate Chesa Boudin claimed he was dedicated to the same principles as "all" his parents.

It was in their living room that Obama the Intellectual’s breathtaking political ascent had its genesis in 1995, and seven years later, Ayers sat on a panel with Obama entitled, “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis.”

Intellectualism guarantees neither good judgment nor sound moral principles. One need only look at Colorado’s own Ward Churchill. But Churchill merely raved about terrorism. Ayers and Dohrn actually delivered. Churchill has at least one thing in common with the dynamite duo, though: Both Ayers and Dohrn are also university professors.

Come to think of it, “folksy and unintellectual” doesn’t sound so bad.

Dr. Pamela Zuker received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Psychology from the University of Chicago where she performed research at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). She also holds degrees in Anthropology and Clinical Psychology, and practiced marriage, child, and family therapy before focusing on positive psychology. Her current research is on the role of meaning in adult life. She lives in the Roaring Fork Valley with her husband and two children.

Islamic guilt trip rolls on

Religious bias filings in the workplace are on the rise, according to the Wall Street Journal. Here's the link for their 10/16 story.. One must put this in proper perspective: such filings by Muslim groups constitute “classic cultural jihad”. Muslim groups will put continual pressure on employers and local officials to accommodate their culture and traditions with the intention of slowly but surely replacing ours entirely. This is the publicly announced long term Muslim goal.

The normal reaction of most decent Americans is to be non-confrontational, to try to compromise, to dialog, and to “reach out and understand”. The Muslims interpret this as weakness and push even harder. The key: Muslims feel morally superior to us, and have nothing but contempt for us. They have no problem cynically using our traditions of religious liberty and common decency to posture as “persecuted victims” and to strive to destroy the very liberties of which they are taking advantage.

If we wish to even have an America in 50 years, we will have to resist each and every encroachment. Look at Holland! They have tried to appease Muslim demands for 30 years. The result: Dutch culture is on the verge of disappearing into an Islamized Western Europe.

Locking in dependency is Obama's aim

I've been thinking a lot about Barack Obama and his tax plan. I'd prefer to spend my Saturdays thinking about college football, but since an Obama Presidency may force me to get a second job, well, here I am. Steve Charnovitz has a great letter today in the Wall Street Journal, commenting on the Journal's excellent piece entitled Obama's 95% Illusion. Here's what he said: Your editorial is very helpful in pointing out that Sen. Barack Obama's plan would allow 44% of U.S. taxpayers to enjoy no federal income tax liability. Such a policy is wrong in principle. If America is going to use an income tax to pay for the federal government, then all income earners should have to pay some tax.

Whenever any citizen is exempt from having to pay taxes, the untaxed citizen has little incentive to insist upon a responsible government. If we allow the tax rolls to fall to 56%, then we will soon be dangerously close to a tipping point where the majority of the public has no stake in insisting that politicians stop wasteful federal purchases and subsidies to special interests.

There are a couple of important things related to this letter that I think need to be addressed:

First, it is increasingly clear that Barack Obama's primary constituency is the non-tax payer. Because Obama's tax plan gives cash payments to those who don't pay any taxes at all, it amounts to another form of welfare. As the Journal points out:

The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.

So, Obama's plan is geared to increasing the number of non-tax payers. He is not trying to assist them in getting jobs that would help them earn enough money to pay taxes in the first place. Rather, by transferring wealth from tax payers to non-tax payers, Obama is actually enshrining a new and larger underclass -- dependent on government handouts for their livelihood. This is, of course, regressive. But it meets Obama's desire to make a large voting class permanently indebted to the Democrats.

Second, we are on a slippery path to having a majority of the nation being dependent on the innovation, hard work and entrepreneurship of a shrinking tax paying class. This is both unfair and unhealthy for the country. A permanent dependent class will be an economic burden and ultimately a killer for economic growth, because it will require new and ever higher taxes to support. What is the motivation for innovation if you know that 50, 60 or 70% of your income will go to supporting people who either don't work or don't pay taxes? How is that equitable?

It isn't equitable. And even worse, it totally ignores human nature. Multiple studies of welfare recipients have shown clearly that people want to be self-sufficient -- there is no pride in taking handouts. People want to feel proud about their lives and the work that they do. I don't believe that they want to be treated like children. The welfare reform of the 1990s proved that putting in place incentives for people to find work is effective. When given the right motivation, people find jobs for themselves. It's basic human behavior.

Unfortunately, Obama and the "well intentioned" Democrats have never understood this basic fact. The opposed welfare reform because they didn't think people could pull themselves up and provide for themselves. Their basic assumption is that we are not capable of taking care of ourselves. And now they are planning a system that will be a massive new entitlement program -- funded on the backs of those who get up every morning and go to work. It is destructive and will result in a massive new dependent class which society will have to deal with for generations.

Is this the kind of country America will become? A Democratic-socialist state with ever higher taxes and ever lower productivity?

This is the America that Barack Obama envisions. His tax plan proves it.