RIP Molly Ivins
deej
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Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins diesBy KELLEY SHANNON, Associated Press Writer 21 minutes agoAUSTIN, Texas - Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as "Shrub," died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.David Pasztor, managing editor of the Texas Observer, confirmed her death.The writer, who made a living poking fun at Texas politicians, whether they were in her home base of Austin or the White House, revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time. Last Paragraph from her last column:
A choice column:We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"
January 20, 2006:"I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy -- rough, tough Bobby Kennedy -- didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines who liked to quote poetry.What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls?Here's a prize example by someone named Barry Casselman, who writes, "There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008."This supposedly pits Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, emboldened by "a string of bad news from the Middle East ... into calling for premature retreat from Iraq," versus those pragmatic folk like Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman.Oh come on, people -- get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war -- from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us daily.You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine you have no idea what people are thinking. I'm telling you right now, Tom DeLay is going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven't got enough sense to OWN the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.Do it all, go long, go for public campaign financing for Congress. I'm serious as a stroke about this -- that is the only reform that will work, and you know it, as well as everyone else who's ever studied this. Do all the goo-goo stuff everybody has made fun of all these years: embrace redistricting reform, electoral reform, House rules changes, the whole package. Put up, or shut up. Own this issue, or let Jack Abramoff politics continue to run your town.Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just piss on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news."Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can."
Comments
RIP.
Molly was honest, sharp, candid and on-point. She will be missed.
here is the link
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7115608
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/16595619.htm
Irrepressible liberal columnist Molly Ivins dies
By JOHN MORITZ
STAR-TELEGRAM AUSTIN BUREAU
AUSTIN -- Molly Ivins, whose biting columns mixed liberal populism with an irreverent Texas wit, died Wednesday at her home in Austin after an up-and-down, seven-year battle with breast cancer. She was 62.
Ms. Ivins, the Star-Telegram's political columnist for nine years ending in 2001, had written for The New York Times, the Dallas Times-Herald and Time magazine and had been a sought-after pundit on television talk shows where she provided a Texas slant on issues ranging from President Bush's pedigree to the culture wars rooted in the 1960s.
"She was magical in her writing," said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ms. Ivins at the Austin bureau in 1992, a few months after the Times-Herald folded. "She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn't hurt so bad."
Ms. Ivins, a California native who moved to Houston as a child with her family, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. Two years later, after enduring a radical mastectomy and chemotherapy, doctors told her she had a 70 percent chance of remaining cancer-free for five years. At the time, she said she liked the odds.
But the cancer recurred in 2003 and again last year. In recent weeks, she had suspended her twice-weekly column for Creators Syndicate, allowing guest writers to use the space while she underwent further treatment. She made a brief return to writing in mid-January, urging readers to resist President Bush's increase in the number of troops in Iraq. She likened her call to an old-fashioned "newspaper crusade."
"We are the people who run this country," Ms. Ivins said in the column published in the Jan. 14 edition of the Star-Telegram. "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.
"Raise hell," she continued. "Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and are trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge."
She ended the piece by endorsing last Saturday's peace march in Washington: "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"
Ms. Ivins died at 5:24 p.m. Wednesday at her home in central Austin, representatives of her family said.
President Bush called Ms. Ivins a "Texas original" in a statement Wednesday.
"I respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase. She fought her illness with that same passion. Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed. Laura and I send our condolences to Molly Ivins' family and friends."
The spice of Texas
Born Mary Tyler Ivins on Aug. 30, 1944, in Monterey, Calif., Ms. Ivins was raised in the upscale River Oaks section of Houston. She earned her journalism degree at elite Smith College in Massachusetts in 1965. From there she ventured to Minnesota, taking a job as a police reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune.
Growing weary of the winters in the Upper Midwest and missing the spice of Texas food and its politics, Ms. Ivins moved to Austin to become co-editor of the Texas Observer, long considered the state's liberal conscience.
Nadine Eckhardt, the former wife of the late Texas novelist Billy Lee Bramer and who later married former U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt, said Ms. Ivins soon became a fixture in the Austin political and cocktail party scene in the early 1970s.
"That's where she became the Molly Ivins as we've come to know her," said Eckhardt, Ms. Ivins' friend for nearly 40 years. "The Observer had such wonderful writers doing such wonderful stories at the time, and Molly was always right in the middle of everything."
Her writing flair caught the attention of The New York Times, which hired her to cover city hall, then later moved her to the statehouse bureau in Albany. Later, she was assigned to the Times' Rocky Mountain bureau in Denver.
Even though she wrote the Times' obituary for Elvis Presley in 1977, Ms. Ivins said later that she and the Times proved to be a mismatch. In a 2002 interview with the Star-Telegram, Ms. Ivins recalled that she would write about something that "squawked like a $2 fiddle" only to have a Times editor rewrite it to say "as an inexpensive instrument."
So Ms. Ivins returned to Austin in 1982 to become a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald and reconnect with such political figures as Ann Richards, who would later become governor, and Bob Bullock, then the hard-drinking state comptroller who later wielded great power as lieutenant governor.
Trademark language
Her column provided Ms. Ivins the freedom to express her views with the colorful language that would become her trademark. She called such figures as Ross Perot, former U.S. Sen. John Tower and ex-Gov. Bill Clements "runts with attitudes." As a candidate for governor, George W. Bush became "Shrub," a nickname she never tired of using.
Surprised became "whomper-jawed." An angry person would "throw a walleyed fit."
Ms. Ivins, who was single and had no children, told readers about her cancer in a matter-of-fact afterward in an otherwise ordinary column.
"I have contracted an outstanding case of breast cancer, from which I fully intend to recover," she wrote in her Dec. 14, 1999, column. "I don't need get-well cards, but I would like the beloved women readers to do something for me: Go. Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Done."
Ms. Ivins wrote three books and co-authored a fourth. She was a three-time finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and had served on Amnesty International's Journalism Network, but the iconoclastic writer often said that her two highest honors were being banned from the conservative campus of Texas A&M University and having the Minneapolis police name their mascot pig after her when she covered the department.
According to family representatives, Ms. Ivins is survived by her sister, Sara Ivins Maley of Albuquerque, N.M., her brother, Andy Ivins of London; sister-in-law Carla Ivins, nephew Drew and niece Darby; niece Margot Hutchison and her husband, Neil, and their children Sam, Andy and Charlie of San Diego, Calif., and nephew Paul Maley and his wife, Karianna, and their children Marty, Anneli and Finnbar of Eltham, Victoria, Australia.
Funeral arrangements were pending.
Staff writer Jay Root contributed to this report.
THE WORD ON MOLLY
Here are some examples of the way Molly Ivins used the language and the way others used the language to describe her:
On covering politics: "I believe politics is the finest form of entertainment in the state of Texas: better than the zoo, better than the circus, rougher than football, and even more aesthetically satisfying than baseball."
On her own politics: "Yes, I've called myself a little-'d' democrat. I am a populist, maybe even a left-wing Libertarian. It used to be if you didn't have a hyphen in your definition, you clearly had not thought about it."
On experience: "The longer I cover politics, the more I respect good compromises. I didn't used to."
Her way of paying a compliment: "He (Democrat Jim Mattox) was a wonderfully good attorney general. And somewhere underneath all that ruthless-pol, no-holds-barred fighter stuff there lurks a decent human being."
Her views on President Bush, whom she had known since their high school days: "Although Bush rather promptly becomes defensive and prickly when questioned, he is by and large perfectly affable."
Gov. Rick Perry on Ivins: "Molly Ivins' clever and colorful perspectives on people and politics gained her national acclaim and admiration that crossed party lines."
Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief on Ivins: "She has a really big heart and she really cares a lot about Texas. I don't think anyone has escaped the wrath of her pen."
Former state Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington: "When you've got a New York City mind-set with a Texas twist, it's really hard to get it right."
Conservative syndicated columnist Cal Thomas: "She's tough, she's pugnacious, she makes us pay attention. I think she argues her position very well. Obviously, she is wrong all the time, but she'd say the same about me."
Compiled by staff writer John Moritz