American Idol Recap: A Shock in the Mire
23 May 2012, 12:54 pm
Part one of the season eleven of American Idol finale begins in its usual ponderous way: a quill pen writing our finalists’ stories on parchment, as each one says: “I can’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers.” This would be more effective if every single show this season hadn’t ... More »

Entrepreneurs Are Drawn By Vision; Managers Are Driven By Process; Transforming Healthcare Will Require Both
17 May 2012, 1:45 am
This week’s much-anticipated Facebook IPO has stimulated a healthy national discussion about the nature of innovation and the role of entrepreneurship. 

Religious belief: How it helps conservatives
10 May 2012, 2:02 pm
Progressives often marvel at how focused, coordinated and aggressive our conservative opposition is. They seem to fall into lockstep and march, building large organizations and executing complex strategies with an astonishing rate of success. We may be smarter, better educated and more reality-based -- but they seem to have a cohesion and a discipline that eludes us. What's going on here? There ...

Obama’s faith-based failure
4 May 2012, 11:02 am
"Compassionate conservatism" may seem a relic of the Bush era, but one of its signatures -- the so-called faith-based initiatives -- quietly persist under President Obama. The Obama administration’s Friday night news dump of recommendations for reforming faith-based initiatives was yet another frustrating disappointment in the sad history of the president’s faith-based effort. More than a year ...

Joel Osteen worships himself
30 April 2012, 7:02 pm
If history is told by the winners, then Joel Osteen — the relentlessly upbeat spiritual caretaker of the national attitude — is history’s designated chaplain. In a marathon Sunday faith rally in the heart of the nation’s capital, Osteen, who presides over America’s largest megachurch congregation, the nondenominational Lakewood Church in Houston, exhorted the tens of thousands of believers ...