Peggy Noonan looks at the past few weeks of Senator Clinton’s campaign and the awakening that appears to be taking place in the electorate. Noonan does so under the light of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s true greatness; something Senator Clinton can never reach.

Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender.

Thatcher achieved what Senator Clinton thinks she can achieve: the status of a being a true leader, while also happening to be a woman. Leader first, woman second. That can’t be done by playing the gender card, making statements that play on traditional roles of a woman, and by repeatedly displaying through actions, an inability to deal seriously with matters of importance and otherwise.

Can we get a Thatcher here in the States?

I have to. I can’t support the measure, which Lance Armstrong says “holds the cure” to cancer. That’s disingenuous at best and probably an outright lie. I liken it to John Edwards saying that if Senator Kerry was elected President, then Christopher Reeve would be alive and walking.

I initially hesitated in support for the measure because it’s a $3 billion chunk of debt the taxpayers of Texas have to support. I won’t agree to cosign that loan. I don’t think it’s needed and Governor Goodhair, Lance Armstrong and others haven’t convinced me it’s going to work better than the research already underway.

My questions:

1. Will this deliver in ten years something private and currently-funded research won’t?
2. What happens if ten years comes and goes and nothing’s been cured?
3. Lowering the bar a bit, what happens if ten years comes and goes and nothing groundbreaking has been discovered towards a cure?

Read Ronald Trowbridge’s column in the Houston Chronicle and see what he, a cancer widower, has to say about this massive pile of pork.

One, the average cost of getting a cancer drug through the Food and Drug Administration’s clearance process is now $1.4 billion, roughly $700 million for research and development and $700 million for clinical trials. And it now takes an average of eight years for a drug to gain approval through the FDA’s Phases 1, 2 and 3 of clinical trials. Were the full $3 billion given tomorrow to Proposition 15’s newly proposed Cancer Prevention and Research Institute, the bond issue could fund, if elected, only two drugs that would take nearly a decade for market approval. And they’d better work, without a flaw or hitch.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are spending each year multiple billions of dollars on researching, testing and providing cancer drugs.

There’s more; please read it. (tip to Eric Berger)