My new Townhall.com column is on the return of Rev. Wright and the Romney fundraising surge.

Stand against sharia and the death penalty for Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, sentenced to death in Iran for apostasy. June 23rd, Marriott Manhattan Beach from 6 pm to 9 pm. Email AFDISIOA@aol.com to register. Hamas-CAIR is holding a 'civil rights' event in support of sharia (at a hundred bucks a ticket), 'A Summer Night of Civil Rights', down the block from our human rights event. It sounds more like a summer night for Islamic supremacism. Stand against subversion, diversion, and deception. AFDI/SIOA, FMU to Host “Summer Night for Human Rights” in Defense of Iranian Pastor Sentenced to Death for Leaving Islam Yahoo News NEW YORK, May 16: The prominent human rights organization American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and its Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) program, along with Former Muslims United (FMU)...

Neoconservative worrywarts repeatedly caution that we should not lull ourselves into believing that a post-Arab Spring Egypt will be a hospitable place for liberal democracy. They argue that the forces of Islamist extremism are alive and well and might eventually replace Mubarak’s odious dictatorship with an ever more odious Islamist theocracy. They point to the big wins that the Muslim Brotherhood enjoyed in the parliamentary elections last December as evidence for their views. But Reason Foundation Senior Analyst examines the run up to the presidential elections in Egypt and suggests that neocon worries might be overblown. The Egyptians, she notes: are engaged in a complicated and delicate balancing act, using the Islamists to check the military and vice versa. They are intuitively...

Yesterday, your budget for fiscal year 2013 was defeated in the senate 99–0. Earlier, it had been defeated in the house by a vote of 414–0. Last year, your budget for fiscal year 2012 was defeated in the senate 97–0. Meanwhile, more than $5,000,000,000,000 in debt has been accumulated by your administration. The federal deficit is more than $1,300,000,000,000. Despite the fact that Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security are the largest drivers of the deficit, you have failed to propose any credible entitlement reforms that effectively address the exploding expenditures. Last year, for the first time in history, the AAA credit rating of the United States was downgraded. What evidence do you have that your administration has any credibility with Congress in dealing with fiscal matters? What evidence do you...

I will admit up-front that I am far from an unbiased observer when it comes to Jonah Goldberg.  I am a fan.  And I have been lucky enough to get to know him some over the years and consider him a friend.  So feel free to factor that in to what follows. But even with that caveat, there is a small part of me that is disappointed in his latest book  The Tyranny of Clichés .  Don’t get me wrong, it is a quick, entertaining and informative book; full of useful arguments, insights and food for thought.  At its most basic it is a challenge to conservatives to fight back and not allow the left in this country to continue to make lazy, ideological loaded statements and arguments in the name of pragmatism and a fake “just the facts, ma’am” attitude. For more on the book’s message and arguments, and on my rather...