Citizen Leadership

Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership

Wanted: Dictators’ Retirement Home

What to do with Moammar Gadhafi? Like so many dictators and merely nervous absolute monarchs, the current head of Libya must realize that his time is up. But, also like others, Col. Gadhafi seems intent on taking as many of his own people with him as possible. What, after all, are his options? No other country wants him, although the Read More ›

Don’t Go Wobbly in Libya

The wily Col. Gaddafi declared a cease fire after the U.N. resolution authorizing use of force. If he stuck by it, President Obama, speaking at his press conference this afternoon seemed prepared in turn to avoid any military action against Gaddafi, thereby leaving him in power and establishing a tense division of the country between Gaddafi and the rebels. but Read More ›

Starbucks and the Foodie Revolution

Starbucks, the international coffee chain that has helped revolutionize the cultural phenomenon of coffee, is 40 years old this month, and reminiscences are appearing. Like Daniel Jack Chasan, who has a story up at Crosscut, I also actually knew a couple of the young men who started the first Starbucks, located in the Pike Place Market. Gordon Bowker and Zev Seigel were Read More ›

“Strong Democracy” and Muammar Gaddafi

Prof. Benjamin R. Barber of Rutgers, a Distinguished Fellow at a progressive think tank called Demos, is a leading exponent of what he calls “strong democracy,” direct rule by the people. Weak old fashioned (small “d”) democracy that is set within traditional (small “r”) republican institutions is objectionable to Dr. Barber. America’s Founders wanted a government of checks and balances Read More ›

There Should be Consequences for Political Truancy in State Governments

Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators apparently have found loopholes in the state ethics laws that permit them to shirk their official responsibilities. If the 14 senators who have fled the state in order to deny Republicans a quorum to conduct business in the legislature are not stopped, disruptions of this sort are going to become widespread. Over time, similar stunts will be pulled, with variations, by both parties in states across the nation. The truants from Madison would have appalled the leaders who wrote any American state constitution, including Wisconsin’s. In days before fast travel by cars and airplanes, the chance of a hookey-playing senator seeking effective sanctuary in another state was not anticipated. Constitution writers considered that the authority to Read More ›

Photo by Ben Noble

The Original American Idol

Today we merge Washington’s birthday with the birthdays of other presidents and submerge them all in clothing and appliance sales. But it was not always so. Americans in past centuries celebrated Washington’s birthday as a winter version of the Fourth of July. Americans in Cambridge, Williamsburg, Richmond and Milton, Conn., were already celebrating Washington’s birthday even before the end of Read More ›

Reality Shatters Obama’s Happy-Talk Agenda

With America’s chief Arab ally teetering on the brink of chaos and collapse, with unemployment stubbornly stuck above 9 percent, with an entire economic system facing cataclysmic breakdown unless Congress simultaneously cuts spending and raises the debt ceiling, will President Barack Obama persist in his feeble efforts to rally the nation with expensive programs for solar panels and high-speed rail? Read More ›

A Presidency to Nowhere

This article, published by the Wall Street Journal, mentions Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder: The speech’s prelude could have been delivered by Ronald Reagan or written by the conservative entrepreneurial Utopian George Gilder. The rest of the article can be found here.  

“Stamp Out Hate”: Ode to the N.Y. Times

Day after day, in editorials and columns, the way the New York Times and similar media organs attempt—against any evidence—to link the Jared Loughner murders in Tucson to political conservatives. It has become the kind of slander that even one of the few moderates at the Times, David Brooks, descries as “vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.” He was not Read More ›

Mental Illness Makes Sense of Arizona Killings

The wrong lessons, as usual, are being taken from the weekend attacks in Tucson, AZ. The first reports on the shooting of some 18 people in Arizona—with six dead, including a federal judge, and the critical wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Tucson—led almost at once to speculation that the shooter might have been someone influenced by the tea parties Read More ›