In days gone by newspaper columnists would now and then run columns consisting of bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam they had accumulated in their In basket, heaped there over the course of a week or a month or season or year. At some point the ink-stained wretch would rummage through the basket, addressing some of the notes and clippings and letters and throwing the rest away. They were at no loss for ideas, but having so many, they simply had to give some short shrift. The column that resulted was often as not titled something like "From the In Box."
I similarly accumulate windows in my Firefox tab bar. Today, it's time to clean them out. You get the picture.
First up is one of the best speeches ever given by somebody I know. I met Congressman Tom McClintock at a Club for Growth Winter Economic Conference a couple of years ago. At a question and answer session following a Mitt Romney after-dinner speech, I followed up one very pointed question of the speaker with my own about RomneyCare, and Mitt went a bit crazy on me. A year later Tom described that exchange to me as "not just one of the highlights of last year's conference, but the highlight."
Here is the speech Tom gave recently to a gathering of policy wonks in California. It's filled with Tom's own special brand of black humor -- I hear his distinctive voice as I read it -- but as usual, he is deadly serious about the problem. Regulation, taxation, and spending by Democrats and Republicans alike in California have dragged California farther and faster down Hayek's Road to Serfdom than any other state. Now we too stare down that road.
Though Tom's speech is a bit long, it's well worth your time. He prescribes for what has ailed Republicans as the party of opposition. The disease, he says, is too little opposition to progressivism. The cure, upon which we may now be embarked, is more.
I especially like his description of the period after the 2008 election when, as the principles of freedom and liberty were left for dead by all, the party rabble rose up, took to the streets in buckskin and warpaint* and rejected the establishment Republican prescription to hunker down, lick our wounds, abandon the brand of Reaganism, and go along with the Democrats in order to recover our standing with the American electorate. We were right and they were wrong. What part of right and wrong does the establishment wing of the party not understand!
Next tab up is the Club for Growth. Here you will find the Club's array of well-written, carefully thought-out policy analyses of the various Republican presidential candidates positions on economic freedom and growth. I commend to your attention the one dealing with the aforementioned technocrat -- turns out the Club used that term to describe Romney before even Bill Kristol. You will especially want to read Herman Cain's.
Speaking of the Club, the brochure for the 2012 Winter Economic Conference arrived in last week's snail mail. Eight pages long, it's filled with pictures of speakers from previous year's conferences, and even a few participants -- the upper half of your correspondent's face appears in a crowd shot behind the beautiful do of another. The conference will be held March 8-10 at one of Florida's finest hotels in the full flush of primary season; that weekend there will be no better place for a conservative political junkie to get a fix. It's not cheap, but it is an energizing high you'll never forget.
Three tabs closed. Too many to go to get to all. Huff, huff, puff, puff....
Here is an analysis of the The Awesome One's re-election prospects from a furriner-in-residence for the limey folks back home. Nile Gardiner's newpaper -- The Telegraph -- is a conservative broadsheet, i.e. not a tabloid, distributed daily throughout the United Kingdom.
Four tabs closed. Sss, sss, ssso..., fff, fff, fffar... to go.
The rise of Herman Cain is a truly amazing thing to watch. There are good reasons to like him as a person and a candidate. He's certainly not the establishment choice, nor is he the next guy in line. Here's an amazing Zogby poll of Republican primary voters released Friday showing Cain leading Next Guy by 20%! Even more amazing is that it shows him leading The Awesome One himself in the horse race question by 2 points among likely voters. Most amazing of all is perhaps that twenty percent of the Republican electorate remains stuck in next-guy-in-line mode, as proven by Mitt Romney's poll numbers over the last few months.
Seven tabs closed... can't... stop... now...!
Here is George Will on one of my favorite themes: that progressivists are loony. And the progressivists are out in force to prove him right.
Whew! And that's it for another edition of From the Tab Bar! Hope you made it this far.
If you did, you earned a little rum in your next Tab.
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* I recently was relayed criticism from a native-American reader for this allusion. It is a deeply respectful reference is to the original Boston Tea Party patriots, who according to Wikipedia, were "thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians."
