oh wow.

Kinda hope it was painful.

I'm seeing Billy Bragg tonight. Should be interesting to hear what he has to say about her passing.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/08/thatcher-liberator/

I thought this was worth a read. My mom loved her and she had such a presence when we lived there that it's tough to get a real firm grip on how i feel about her. So many musicians i love hated her with a passion but i've never truly been swayed either way.

Celebration Video (NSFW)

I was born in 1974 in a working class background in perhaps the poorest industrial city in Britain and my journey from child to young adulthood more or less ran parallel with Margaret Thatcher's period of power.

I remember what the Britain of my childhood was like. It was very, very poor and even as powerful a force as nostalgia cannot warp my memories sufficiently to say there was some pre Thatcherite paradise. The country was in an awful state and something had to be done with the first priority being to curtail the power of the trade unions which were a blight on the political process as well as being enormously corrupt.

However Margaret Thatcher went beyond politics and political decision making. She equated trade unionism as being one and the same as working class society. She did not understand British working class society and culture at all, and as her attitudes hardened she came to loathe it, using government as a weapon of war on that class of people in it's entirety. Growing up in that time there was a real and desperate sense of targeted persecution by a government that ideologically hated you and everyone you knew. Much of British industry was unprofitable but the fact that Thatcher closed almost everything down, regardless of profitability highlighted her true agenda. She hated and wanted to obliterate the working class.

Her policies destroyed the industrial base of the country and created mass unemployment from which the country has never recovered, resulting in a huge increases in benefit pay outs which have crippled the nations finances, her taxation policies bankrupt most of the major cities in the country perhaps deliberately to punish the left leaning city councils which, post trade unions, were her strongest opponents, poverty was 'eradicated' by allowing people to go into huge levels of debt to live lifestyles they could not afford with resulting economic catastrophe, she sold off social housing and nationalized industry at ridiculously cheap prices in what was essentially theft on a colossal scale from the state.

However her worst legacy was to destroyed a once proud working class and replaced it with an appalling underclass of dismal, hopeless, uneducated, apolitical nihilists who's coda rhymes with that of Thatcher herself - society is worthless. Perhaps their parents didn't have much but at least they worked, made things, had a sense of community and most importantly a sense of pride in themselves.

In the end Thatcher became so demented even the right wing saw she had to be ousted from power, such was the damage and division she had caused in British society. That day was celebrated like a liberation. Yesterday many people openly celebrated her death. I hated her in life but there is something ghoulish and uncivilized about welcoming the death of another human being. Perhaps that is Thatcher's ultimate legacy - a heartless uncaring society that revels in the hatred of others.

she was pretty much a female George W, right?

From what I understand, more a female Dick Cheney.

local dog walkers Thatcher Memorial

in the US we walk our dogs on the Soccerpath

This is amazing.
http://www.boweryboogie.com/2013/04/snl ... -bizzaros/

yeah, i got a kick out of that - right in armisen's wheelhouse

not sure if i would use the word hottie here

Not even the person who phsyically typed that article title would actually notice her walking past them on the sidewalk.

i'm sure there were a couple dozen that were hotter.