Its been a long time…
And its a sad occasion that’s actually gotten me off my ass to update this thing.
Yesterday, at the age of 62, Molly Ivins succumbed to breast cancer in her home, surrounded by people she loved. (You can go to my personal LJ sirriamnis for links to various obits and such.) She dictated her last column two weeks ago, it appeared 1/11/07, telling us that WE, not Shrub, are the true Deciders and urging the American People to get off their collective butts and do something about this mess.
I started reading Ms. Ivins when one of the uber-conservative guys my dad worked with gave him a copy of her first book, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” in a misguided attempt to needle him about being a Liberal. Needless to say the attempt failed, and Dad then passed the book on to me. I have since collected nearly all of her books, and often re-read them. My dearest hope is that some day I can write as well and accessibly as she has. When I discovered that I could find her columns online several years ago, I was ecstatic.
Molly Ivins could find the funny in anything. And it was very telling to me that in the second term of the Bush administration even she was finding it harder and harder to be funny. She handled herself gracefully and with great aplomb, and was a great one for straight talking. She left Texas to work for the New York Times at one point, but eventually went back home.
As a Progressive of a Populist bent, she was very big on campaign reform, and reining in the favors granted to big corporations by the government. She was also pro-choice, pro-education and anti-bullshit.
Her folksy way of writing irritated her editors at the NYTimes, but is part of what makes her so accessible to those who may previously have thought of all Liberals as ivory tower types, spewing fountains of big words meant only confuse and confound. She demonstrated that you could be a Liberal and still drink beer, still have dirt on your hands, and still like a good laugh.
Polimicks 
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