Writing about a well-researched subject is a daunting task. How can you, as an author, find something new and/or interesting to say about something that’s been written about a dozen, or several score, or even hundreds of times?

Craig Shirley has definitively answered that question: Give them the back story — and the back story on the back story.

In other words, sometimes, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

In “Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,” Shirley goes where, at last count, roughly 900 authors — including Lou Cannon, William F. Buckley Jr., Martin and Annelise Anderson, Steven Hayward, Richard Reeves, Paul Kengor, Andrew Busch, and Peter Schweizer, among others — have already gone.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review Online suggests well-informed conservatives (and those who wish to be better-informed) are reading this today.

An instant classic when it was first published 15 months ago, it has aged well, and looks even better upon reflection. Combine it with this, and you've got your day's education ... and entertainment.

Fans of Friday Night Fights may be in for a treat on a Tuesday night -- if they happen to be residents of the Virginia's 8th congressional district.

Tomorrow evening at 7:00 PM in the auditorium of the South Lakes High School at 11400 South Lakes Drive in Reston, Virginia, Rep. James Moran will hold a town hall meeting to discuss "current efforts in Congress to reform our nation's health care system."

Joining Moran will be a special guest, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

That's right -- the two most short-fused and hot-tempered men in the national Democratic Party are going to be together in the same room, fielding questions from constituents on the most volatile subject matter since Dan Rostenkowski, at a Chicago venue called The Copernicus Center, 20 years ago "learned that the earth does not revolve around the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee."

I'm a conservative, so that title could work for any number of pieces I might want to write.

In this instance, I'm referring to an exchange on last night's edition of MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews," which begins at about 9:27 into this clip featuring Matthews interviewing Rep. Bob Inglis and Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips:

Matthews: The conservatives talk reasonably when Democrats get in power, and say, "Well, we have an alternative that's more free market, it's less onerous, it's less, you know, big shot, big government stuff, and I accept all that. But when you guys are in power, you don't do anything on health care. And that's what happens, and that's why, for, God, almost a century of foot dragging on this. The Democrats get in power, whether it's Truman, whether it's Bill Clinton, or it's Hillary Clinton, or it's Barack Obama, they try something, it fails, because you guys are good at playing negative politics. You're really good at destroying Democrats' plans, chances to reform. But when you get in power, when you have George W. Bush in there, with both houses of Congress, or you've got Reagan in there, with complete ideological control, you don't do anything on health care."

Really?

State Sen. Kirk Dillard, Republican of DuPage County, Illinois, announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination for governor today, the very same day that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan announced she would not be running for governor (or for the U.S. Senate, for that matter).

Asked at his announcement speech what he thought of Madigan's declaration, Dillard replied, "She's been a good attorney general and if she wants to stay there, that's fine ... I look forward to having Lisa Madigan as attorney general when I'm the governor."

There's only one problem with Dillard's statement -- there's a Republican candidate by the name of Joe Birkett who's already announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination for, you guessed it, the Attorney General's office.

By the way, arguing against my last post, there actually was a president who had less experience in major public office before winning the presidency than would Sarah Palin, were she to win the White House after only two and a half years as governor -- Woodrow Wilson, who was elected president in 1912 after having been elected governor of New Jersey for the first time in 1910.

Of course, Wilson benefited from the split in the Republican Party -- former President Teddy Roosevelt chose to challenge incumbent president/Roosevelt successor William Howard Taft for the GOP nomination at the 1912 GOP national convention, and, failing to win, had left the GOP to form the Bull Moose Party to contest for the presidency in the general election.

Mary Lou Forbes passed away June 27.

She was my very first newspaper commentary editor.

She had taken over the Commentary section of The Washington Times in 1982, and she was kind enough to begin running pieces under my byline in 1986, courtesy of the op-ed marketing team at The Heritage Foundation.

Mark Sanford isn't the first major American politician to become entangled with an "exotic" Argentine woman.

On October 7, 1974, two U.S. Park Police patrolmen pulled over a limousine at 2 AM. The car had been barreling down Independence Avenue, between the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial, at 80 miles per hour with its headlights off.

Inside, they found a powerful member of Congress, a man who just two years earlier had competed for the Democratic nomination for the presidency -- Rep. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.