RIP Margaret Thatcher

Wall Street Journal

From The President, The Pope and the Prime Minister

Human Events article by John Hayward

The Grocer's Daughter by Sarah Palin

Margaret Thatcher and the Triumph of Conservatism by Jeffrey Lord

And on a different note, this is an article about another influential person from that time, CIA director Bill Casey.  Make sure you click on the link in the article which sends you to Herb Meyer's speech.  It is fascinating!

Lastly, on what seems to be a completely unrelated note, I started watching "Call the Midwife."  It's based on the memoirs of a woman who was a midwife (hence the title) in East London in the late 1950's.  It is very well done.  But in the two episodes that I've seen, writers have inserted public service messages in the most awkward way.  The scene goes something like this: a woman is about to die from pregnancy complications, and some doctor comes in and says, "It's a great thing that we have the NHS now, sending ambulances and providing life-saving treatments for these poor people!"  Not only is the dialogue out of place (like the Subway advertisements in "Chuck"), it's laughable.  Go to James Taranto's "Best of the Web," which he writes five days of the week for the WSJ, and you'll see countless examples of the great "progress" Britain's National Health Service has enjoyed.  We're heading that direction ourselves under ObamaCare.

Sadly, one of Margaret Thatcher's few failures was her inability to dismantle the NHS.  It was too entrenched by then.  It illustrates the perils of passing unwieldy legislation to begin with--once it's there, it's nearly impossible to remove, no matter how terrible it is.  That said, I pray for leaders here in the US who will continue to work for the repeal of Obamacare--my belief is that rather than losing elections, they will win by doing so.  Margaret would have agreed.  She said this of her own party's tendencies to "go wobbly":  "I was utterly convinced of one thing: there was no chance of achieving that fundamental change of attitudes which was required to wrench Britain out of decline if people believed that we were prepared to alter course under pressure.”