I came out with an answer and wanted to share it just in case anyone else runs into this. To solve the problem, I took my cue from what I do with QT & QT Creator when doing network programming.
On OSX, I opened up a terminal window and cd’d down to/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.3.app/Contents/MacOS. There you will find a file called idea which launches the IDE. I ran that as sudo (sudo ./idea). That took care of permissions on anything Intellij launched and I could debug and step through my code as needed.
sudo /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.3.app/Contents/MacOS/idea
Since this is a dev machine and I am in control of it security is not an issue in this case.
Hope it helps someone else out.