Molly's gone...

Molly Ivins tribute
Molly Ivins Tribute

MOLLY IVINS BEGAN WRITING HER SYNDICATED COLUMN FOR CREATORS SYNDICATE IN 1992. ANTHONY ZURCHER IS A CREATORS SYNDICATE EDITOR BASED IN AUSTIN, TEXAS, AND HE HAS BEEN MOLLY'S EDITOR AND FRIEND FOR MANY YEARS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION. -- CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

MOLLY IVINS TRIBUTE
BY ANTHONY ZURCHER
Originally Published on Wednesday January 31, 2007

Goodbye, Molly I.

Molly Ivins is gone, and her words will never grace these pages again -- for this, we will mourn. But Molly wasn't the type of woman who would want us to grieve. More likely, she'd say something like, "Hang in there, keep fightin' for freedom, raise more hell, and don't forget to laugh, too."

If there was one thing Molly wanted us to understand, it's that the world of politics is absurd. Since we can't cry, we might as well laugh. And in case we ever forgot, Molly would remind us, several times a week, in her own unique style.

Shortly after becoming editor of Molly Ivins' syndicated column, I learned one of my most important jobs was to tell her newspaper clients that, yes, Molly meant to write it that way. We called her linguistic peculiarities "Molly-isms." Administration officials were "Bushies," government was in fact spelled "guvment," business was "bidness." And if someone was "madder than a peach orchard boar," well, he was quite mad indeed.


Of course, having grown up in Texas, all of this made sense to me. But to newspaper editors in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit and beyond -- Yankee land, as Molly would say -- her folksy language could be a mystery. "That's just Molly being Molly," I would explain and leave it at that.

But there was more to Molly Ivins than insightful political commentary packaged in an aw-shucks Southern charm. In the coming days, much will be made of Molly's contributions to the liberal cause, how important she was as an authentic female voice on opinion pages across the country, her passionate and eloquent defense of the poorest and the weakest among us against the corruption of the most powerful, and the joy she took in celebrating the uniqueness of American culture -- and all of this is true. But more than that, Molly Ivins was a woman who loved and cared deeply for the world around her. And her warm and generous spirit was apparent in all her words and deeds.

Molly's work was truly her passion.
She would regularly turn down lucrative speaking engagements to give rally-the-troops speeches at liberalism's loneliest outposts. And when she did rub elbows with the highfalutin' well-to-do, the encounter would invariably end up as comedic grist in future columns.

For a woman who made a profession of offering her opinion to others, Molly was remarkably humble. She was known for hosting unforgettable parties at her Austin home, which would feature rollicking political discussions, and impromptu poetry recitals and satirical songs. At one such event, I noticed her dining table was littered with various awards and distinguished speaker plaques, put to use as trivets for steaming plates of tamales, chili and fajita meat. When I called this to her attention, Molly matter-of-factly replied, "Well, what else am I going to do with 'em?"

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Molly's life is the love she engendered from her legions of fans. If Molly missed a column for any reason, her newspapers would hear about it the next day. As word of Molly's illness spread, the letters, cards, e-mails and gifts poured in.

Even as Molly fought her last battle with cancer, she continued to make public appearances. When she was too weak to write, she dictated her final two columns. Although her body was failing, she still had so much to say. Last fall, before an audience at the University of Texas, her voice began as barely a whisper. But as she went on, she drew strength from the standing-room-only crowd until, at the end of the hour, she was forcefully imploring the students to get involved and make a difference. As Molly once wrote, "Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for."

For me, Molly's greatest words of wisdom came with three children's books she gave my son when he was born. In her inimitable way, she captured the spirit of each in one-sentence inscriptions. In "Alice in Wonderland," she offered, "Here's to six impossible things before breakfast." For "The Wind in the Willows," it was, "May you have Toad's zest for life." And in "The Little Prince," she wrote, "May your heart always see clearly."

Like the Little Prince, Molly Ivins has left us for a journey of her own. But while she was here, her heart never failed to see clear and true -- and for that, we can all be grateful.

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read her past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Molly Ivins last column
Molly Ivins' last column
Originally Published on Thursday January 11, 2007

Stand Up Against the Surge

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.

It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. "You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically," he said.

His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Bush's call for a "surge" or "escalation" also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.

About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: "The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own ?- impose its rule throughout the country. ... By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed." But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.

A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country ?- we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls.
We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.

Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy's proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration's idiotic "plans" and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.

Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone." It's like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?

As The Washington Post's review notes, Chandrasekaran's book "methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq's fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis."

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!"

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Molly Ivins last column
Molly Ivins' last column
Originally Published on Thursday January 11, 2007

Stand Up Against the Surge

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.

It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. "You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically," he said.

His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Bush's call for a "surge" or "escalation" also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.

About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: "The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own ?- impose its rule throughout the country. ... By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed." But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.

A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country ?- we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls.
We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.

Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy's proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration's idiotic "plans" and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.

Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone." It's like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?

As The Washington Post's review notes, Chandrasekaran's book "methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq's fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis."

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!"

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Molly Ivins once witnessed a talk by Ann Coulter when Ivins was reporting on a conference of the Conservative Political Action Committee.

Excerpt from "Conservatives in Action" (Molly Ivins, February 8, 2003):

Molly's family
Molly Ivins Loses Battle With Cancer At Age 62
Published: January 31, 2007 10:00 PM ET
AUSTIN

Best-selling author and newspaper 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. Ivins was 62.

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.

"Molly was a hero. She was a mentor. She was a liberal. She was a patriot. She was a friend. And she always will be," the Texas Observer said in a statement upon her death. "With Molly's death we have lost someone we hold dear. What she has left behind we will hold dearer still."

Managing Editor David Pasztor said Ivins died Wednesday afternoon at her home while in hospice care.

More than 400 newspapers subscribed to her nationally syndicated column, which combined strong liberal views and populist-toned humor. Ivins' illness did not seem to hurt her ability to deliver biting one-liners.

"I'm sorry to say (cancer) can kill you but it doesn't make you a better person," she said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in September 2006, the same month cancer claimed her friend former Gov. Ann Richards.

To Ivins, "liberal" wasn't an insult. "Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal ?- fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed," she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, "You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You."

In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

"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," Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"

Ivins' best-selling books included those she co-authored with Lou Dubose about Bush. One was titled "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" and another was "BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush's America."

Dubose, who has been working on a third book with Ivins, said even last week in the hospital, Ivins wanted to talk about the book.

"She was married to her profession, she lived for the story," he said.

Ivins' jolting satire was directed at people in positions of power. She maintained that aiming it at the powerless would be cruel.

"The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point," she wrote in a 1997 column. "Poor people do not shut down factories. ... Poor people didn't decide to use `contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits."

In an Austin speech last year, former President Bill Clinton described Ivins as someone who was "good when she praised me and who was painfully good when she criticized me."

Ivins loved to write about politics and called the Texas Legislature, which she playfully referred to as "The Lege," the best free entertainment in Austin.

"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?" she wrote in a 2002 column about a California political race.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whom Ivins had playfully called "Gov. Goodhair", praised Ivins for her wit and insight. "Molly Ivins' clever and colorful perspectives on people and politics gained her national acclaim and admiration that crossed party lines," Perry said in a statement.

She referred to conservative Panhandle Rep. Warren Chisum, a favorite target, as "the Bible-thumping dwarf from Pampa."

Chisum said that if Ivins didn't agree with him, he was doing the right thing.

"She was magical in her writing," said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ivins in 1992. "She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn't hurt so bad."

Born Mary Tyler Ivins in California, she grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University's School of Journalism. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She worked her way up at the Chronicle, then went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, becoming the first woman police reporter in the city.

An Ivins bio on the Creators Syndicate Web site said Ivins counted as her highest honors that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M University.

In the late 1960s, according to Creators Syndicate, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change" and wrote about "angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

Ivins later became co-editor of The Texas Observer, a liberal Austin-based biweekly publication of politics and literature that was founded more than 50 years ago. Ivins was the featured attraction in October at a huge Texas Observer fundraising "barbecue," at which politicians, journalists and entertainers honored her.

She joined The New York Times in 1976. She worked first as a political reporter in New York and later was named Rocky Mountain bureau chief, covering nine mountain states.

But Ivins' use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.

"She was just like a force of nature," Sargent said. "She was just always on and sharp and witty and funny and was one of a kind."

"For all of the things you think about her being so witty and sharp, what comes through in her writing to me is, ... she had a limitless optimism about human nature," he said.

Ivins returned to Texas as a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald in 1982, and after it closed she spent nine years with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2001, she went independent and wrote her column for Creators Syndicate.

Ivins won the William Allen White Award from the University of Kansas and the Smith Medal from Smith College in 2001.

She received the 2003 Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Progress and Service.

In 2003, she also won the Pringle Prize for Washington Journalism from Columbia University and the Eugene V. Debs Award in the field of journalism. In 2004, she received the David Brower Award for journalism from the Sierra Club.

In 1995, conservative humorist Florence King accused Ivins in "American Enterprise" magazine of plagiarism for failing to properly credit King for several passages in a 1988 article in "Mother Jones." Ivins apologized, saying the omissions were unintentional and pointing out that she credited King elsewhere in the piece.

She was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, and she had a recurrence in 2003. Her latest diagnosis came around Thanksgiving 2005. After her most recent recurrence, Ivins said she wasn't giving in to the illness.

"Maybe this is false bravado," she told the Austin American-Statesman in early 2006. "In some ways for me, this is like having a manageable disease. It's like diabetes. It doesn't mean it's not going to come get me in the end."

She is survived by her brother, Andy Ivins, of London, Texas; her sister, Sara Maley of Albuquerque, N.M.; two nephews and two nieces.

I loved Molly.

It feels like a close friend has died. I cried when I heard about it.
(Like a whole lot of people, I guess). I've spent the last several hours
teary-eyed and obsessively reading obituaries and tributes.

There is a condolence book on line which at this writing already has 72 pages of messages. If any of you are interested, here's the link:

http://www.legacy.com/DFW/GB/GuestbookView.aspx?PersonId=86227263

My personal viewpoint is that Molly will live on in our collective memory and journalistic folklore, long after the biggest name columnists, and tele-journalists of today are long forgotten.


Regards, jjorge

I'm missing Molly, too.

This is very sad news. I read her obit in the New York Times this morning. She used to work for the Times and at least they had the decency to report that she considered the editors a bunch of unimaginative stuffed shirts. Here writing was a breath of fresh air in an increasingly bland and timorous press.

Hi Acquiunk,

I also read the Times obit.
Molly complained that the Times had drained the life from her prose. The most notorious example was when she, working from the Times Rocky Mountain bureau, reported on a New Mexico town's bizarre annual 'chicken slaughter'.

She wrote a piece referring to it as a 'Gang Pluck'.

That of course sent the stuffed shirts into a frenzy and it was purged from the version that went to press. She left the Times two years later.

Incidents such as that, plus her other sin of walking around the office barefoot, reportedly earned her the enmity of the Times top brass.

Interestingly, although today's Times obit. mentions the chicken story, the reporter did so without using the forbidden words, 'gang pluck'.

'Unimaginative stuffed shirts?' You said it Acquiunk.

I Remember Molly
I Remember Molly
By Charley James
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Friday 02 January 2007

It seems like a hundred lifetimes ago now but, sure enough, over in the not-yet-dusty corner of my memory are the razor-sharp etchings of sitting in a bar on the seedy corner of Hennepin Avenue and 9th Street in Minneapolis after work one Saturday night, tossing back a few scotches with Dave Moore, when in flew a very young Molly Ivins.

Well, we were all very young; after all, it was only the mid- or late-1960s. Molly had just graduated from Smith College and was covering the cops for the Minneapolis Tribune, I was in my last year at university and working part-time in the newsroom at WCCO-TV, and Dave was still building his reputation as the Upper Midwest's younger yet equally trustworthy version of Walter Cronkite, just on a smaller stage.

Molly wanted to meet Dave because of "The Bedtime Newz," which aired Saturday nights following a late movie. I helped Dave write the show, so he invited me to tag along. At the time, "The Bedtime Newz" was becoming a cultural icon in Minneapolis. Deciding that no one really wanted to watch another serious report on the day's events at midnight on Saturday, Dave started playing around with the stories and the commercials. The show became a satire/parody/send-up of the news, and this was a full decade before Lorne Michaels and Chevy Chase created the "Saturday Night Update."

A few things still stand tall in my mind about that first encounter with Molly: Her Texas twang - the first time I'd ever heard one for real and not in a Western TV show or movie - and her sharp yet humane, witty observations that later became her hallmark. She drank ferociously, yet never once teetered on the bar stool or stumbled when she politely excused herself to use the john - Molly didn't say "powder room" or any other euphemism that proper ladies were expected to utter in those days. And she was already beginning to hone her irascible view of politics and politicians.

That evening, Molly dazzled and wowed both Dave and me. As the three of us separately drove off in the early morning bitter cold, I knew I wanted to know this woman better.

A week or two later, I called her at the Trib and asked if she wanted to meet for another drink "but at an even seedier place than Mousey's," referring to the joint where Dave and I had met her originally. She accepted. Whether it was for the friendship, the liquor, or the opportunity for a transplanted Texan to savor more of the Twin Cities' low-life, I'll never know, but I began counting the days.

We met at some dive on the edge of downtown, not far from the train yards, where hard-drinking journalists rubbed elbows with union guys, down-and-outers and the decent, hard-working, thoroughly unpretentious Midwestern people Garrison Keillor eventually turned into American folk heroes.

Although Molly covered the cops, during her second or third whiskey she said was much more interested in politics. At the time, Minneapolis's mayor was a liberal Democrat named Art Naftalin. In Minnesota, the party is called the Democratic-Farmer Labor party. Before being elected, he taught political science at the University of Minnesota, a post to which he returned after several terms in office. Somehow, the conversation got around to Naftalin.

"He's a brilliant guy," I remember Molly saying. Having gone to high school with one of Naftalin's sons, I had a special interest. "Got terrific ideas, could really do something for the city. Poor Art's problem is that he's a typical academic who doesn't have a clue how to get anything done."

At one of those late-night drinking soirees, we talked about our careers. I wanted to end up as a correspondent for CBS News, still the tiffany network with Cronkite and a stable of really solid journalists who had been schooled in the Ed Murrow tradition. I assumed Molly would want to land at the New York Times.

"Hell, no," she said. "I want to go back to Texas and cover politics. With LBJ, John Connolly, Ralph Yarborough and a legislature full of cattle ranchers, oil men, honest-to-God bigots and good ol' boys to write about, why would I want to go to New York?"

We continued to meet about once a month. I noticed that Molly was gradually increasing the circle of people who would get together to swap stories. She included cops, people from the DA's office, other reporters and a few gadabouts, and there were always assorted hangers-on who would appear and disappear for no apparent reason. Turns out, she was beginning her lifelong habit of drawing people into her ever-widening circle.

After 10 months of being included in Molly's salon, I accepted a reporting job on the West Coast and moved away. Molly soon returned to Texas, got lured to New York by the Times - which, I suspect, was a mutually-unhappy and cheerless relationship that fortunately ended after a couple of years. We kept in touch with decreasing frequency, eventually losing contact altogether.

Actually, Molly lost contact with me but I didn't with her. I became a regular reader of hers once she turned her attention from Texas politics to focus on George W. Bush - a childhood friend and neighbor in Houston - and other topics of despair. She was what every great journalist needs to be: Honest, truthful, possessing a low tolerance for bullshit and always ready to spit vinegar - tempered by a gracious yet pointed wit.

Bill Moyers summed up Molly best when he paid tribute to her this morning in a piece on the Texas Observer web site. He said he imagines her in Heaven with all of the other great journalists - Lincoln Steffans, Horace Greeley, Johnny Apple and a long list of others. Moyers said he hopes they're having a great time leaning over the marble railing and laughing at people like Tom DeLay down below in Hades.

I hope she is having fun and is building a new circle around her, drinking whiskey and giving Heaven hell.

Bill Moyers tribute to Molly
A Tribute to Molly
By Bill Moyers
The Texas Observer
Thursday 01 February 2007

What a foot-stompin' reunion there must be at this very moment in that great Purgatory of Journalists in the Sky. I can see them now - Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Upton Sinclair, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Ida B. Wells, David Graham Phillips, George Seldes, I. F. Stone, Walter Karp, Willie Morris - welcoming our darlin' to their bosoms. Oh, my, how she comes trailing clouds of truth-telling glory! Look at her - big-hearted as ever, leaning over the balustrade and reaching down to the tormented of Hades, moistening Tom DeLay's lips, patting down Rick Perry's hair, erasing George W's sandstone scribblings. In the celestial light she glows as irrepressibly and vividly as she did here on Earth, where she made the mighty humble, the wicked ashamed, and the good ol' boys reach for the barrel to hide their forlorn nakedness. And, oh, the stories she must be telling as we speak.

At a PBS meeting a few years ago, she ended her talk with a joke that would have gotten anyone else arrested or excommunicated. But she was carried out on the crowd's shoulders, as right now she is being ushered into the Council of Ink-Stained Immortals, where the only religion is truth. Save some room up there, Molly: You have inspired us earthbound wretches to keep trying to live up to your legacy in the hope of joining you there one day.

Moyers tribute
A Tribute to Molly
By Bill Moyers
The Texas Observer
Thursday 01 February 2007

What a foot-stompin' reunion there must be at this very moment in that great Purgatory of Journalists in the Sky. I can see them now - Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Upton Sinclair, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Ida B. Wells, David Graham Phillips, George Seldes, I. F. Stone, Walter Karp, Willie Morris - welcoming our darlin' to their bosoms. Oh, my, how she comes trailing clouds of truth-telling glory! Look at her - big-hearted as ever, leaning over the balustrade and reaching down to the tormented of Hades, moistening Tom DeLay's lips, patting down Rick Perry's hair, erasing George W's sandstone scribblings. In the celestial light she glows as irrepressibly and vividly as she did here on Earth, where she made the mighty humble, the wicked ashamed, and the good ol' boys reach for the barrel to hide their forlorn nakedness. And, oh, the stories she must be telling as we speak.

At a PBS meeting a few years ago, she ended her talk with a joke that would have gotten anyone else arrested or excommunicated. But she was carried out on the crowd's shoulders, as right now she is being ushered into the Council of Ink-Stained Immortals, where the only religion is truth. Save some room up there, Molly: You have inspired us earthbound wretches to keep trying to live up to your legacy in the hope of joining you there one day.

This article (originally a speech) describes Molly's importance as one of the few political columnists who are:

, "... solo voices of dissent that (have not been).... smothered by a choir of nervous careerists, psalm singing and well behaved, happy to oblige, eager to please, careful to say nothing disrespectful or uncivil..." -ie. the Washington press corps.






A Salute to Molly Ivins
by LEWIS LAPHAM

[from The Nation November 13, 2006 issue]

Eight hundred of the faithful gathered in Austin on a Sunday evening in early October to serenade Molly Ivins and pony up for the feisty and indispensable Texas Observer. Garrison Keillor presided, and late into the night the indicted and unindicted ascended the podium to recite Mollyisms ("If his IQ were any lower, they'd have to water him twice a day") and recall highlights from her career (including "gang pluck"--her description of a chicken festival she covered for the New York Times). Still, by the end of the program no one had topped Molly's own "overrated" list--"young pussy, Mack trucks and the FBI." The essence of Molly Ivins was captured wonderfully by Lewis Lapham, former editor of Harper's, who is launching a new venture, Lapham's Quarterly, and whose most recent book is Pretensions to Empire. His remarks are reprinted below with the collegial consent of our friends at the Observer. --The Editors

Mary Margaret Farabee asked me to introduce some sort of serious note into the evening's festivities, to place Molly Ivins in her proper relation to the founding of the country and the best uses of the First Amendment. Given the weight of the assignment, I'm probably well advised to begin with James Fenimore Cooper, the well-known author of The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, who in the 1820s abandoned his political allegiance to the New York monied interests and cast his lot with President Andrew Jackson's Western notions of popular government and free expression. Cooper in the 1830s published The American Democrat, arguably his finest book, in which he made the point that among all the country's political virtues, candor is the one most necessary to the health and well-being of our mutual enterprise. We can't know what we're about, or whether we're telling ourselves too many lies, unless we can see and hear one another think out loud.

Which is what I take to be the purpose of the First Amendment as well as its embodiment in the life and times of Molly Ivins. The working of her mind, like her writing on the page, speaks to the principle named not only by Cooper but also by Archibald MacLeish, the poet and once-upon-a-time Librarian of Congress who identified the dissenter as "every human being at those moments in his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself." Molly has had so many of those moments that by now I think we can accept her resignation from the herd as permanent.

The country was founded by dissenters, and if as a doubter of divine authority Molly inherits the skepticism of Tom Paine, as a satirist she springs full blown, like Minerva, from the head of Mark Twain. Twain thought of humor, especially in its more sharply pointed forms of invective and burlesque, as a weapon with which to attack pride victorious and ignorance enthroned. He placed the ferocity of his wit at the service of his conscience, pitting it against the "peacock shams" of the established order, believing that "only laughter can blow...at a blast" what he regarded as "the colossal humbug" of the world. So also Molly, a journalist who commits the crimes of arson, making of her wit a book of matches with which to burn down the corporate hospitality tents of empty and self-righteous cant. Molly's writing reminds us that dissent is what rescues the democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors, that republican self-government, properly understood, is an uproar and an argument, meant to be loud, raucous, disorderly and fierce.

Never in its history has the country been more in need of voices capable of engaging such an argument. Over the last twenty-odd years it has become embarrassingly obvious that we have produced a corporate news and entertainment industry distinguished by its timidity, by its deference to the wisdoms in office, by its subservience to the price tags of economic privilege; the solo voices of dissent have been smothered by a choir of nervous careerists, psalm singing and well behaved, happy to oblige, eager to please, careful to say nothing disrespectful or uncivil.

In concert with the Bush Administration's increasingly abrupt seizures of arbitrary power, the increasingly polite interpretations of the First Amendment have cleansed the news media of strong language and imperfect hair, inoculated the Washington talk-show circuit against the infection of caustic adjectives and the suspicious movement of subversive nouns. Among the topics currently deemed "risky" by a Princeton Review survey on essay questions to be submitted for college application, in no particular order, were drugs, sex, religion and a host of other contentious issues. The handsomely illustrated cover stories in Time and Newsweek read like advertisements for cosmetics or detergents, the words deserving of the same labels, "risk-averse," "salt-free," "baby-soft." The airbrushed vocabulary shores up the interests of oligarchy with the comforts of cynicism.

As we know from any reading of the morning papers, liberty is never at a loss for ambitious enemies, but the survival of the American democracy depends less on the magnificence of its Air Force or the wonder of its fleets than on the willingness of its citizens to stand on the ground of their own thought. Unless we try to tell one another the truth about what we know and think and see, we might as well amuse ourselves--at least for as long as somebody in uniform allows us to do so--with fairy tales.

Several years ago on its editorial page the New York Times issued the complacent announcement that "great publications magnify beyond measure the voice of any single writer." As often happens in the Times, the sentence employed the wrong verb. The instruments of the media multiply or amplify a voice, serving much the same purpose as a loudspeaker in a ballpark or a prison. What magnifies a voice is its humor, its wisdom and compassion, opposing the colossal humbug of the world's injustice with the imaginative labor of trying to tell the truth. Not an easy task, but the courage required of the writer, if he or she seriously attempts it--and the response called forth in the reader, if he or she recognizes the attempt as an honest one--increases the common stores of energy and hope. That is what Molly Ivins does, who she is and why we're here to say a not-so-simple thank you.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061113/lapham

Ah, just to say I'll back up and read. Not that I didn't read all the others, but that Lapham sometimes throws me, so I tend to attend him, and, I haven't subscribed to Harper's for some time more than a year now, miss it.

Molly Ivins Visits the Police Blotter
I really miss Molly Ivins and was wowed to find this. ---BBB

Molly Ivins Visits the Police Blotter
By E&P Staff
Published: April 07, 2007

Last November 16, E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post delivered the annual Theodore H. White Lecture at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The same evening, under the auspices of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Molly Ivins was awarded the David Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism, named in honor of the famed Boston Globe columnist.

Now the Center has produced a booklet containing Dionne's lecture, along with the Q and A that followed. But it also holds the transcript of what turned out to be, perhaps, Molly Ivins' last public remarks away from her native Texas. She succumbed to cancer, which she had been fighting for some time, on January 31, 2007.

Ivins' comments ranged far and wide, as was her wont, with many addressing the decline of newspapers and her ideas on how to combat that (halting newsroom cuts, for example). But in defending the press, she also highlighted some of its witty attributes, such as odd headlines, leads and police reports.

"I swear to you," she testified, "if you put out a newspaper and all it said on its front was 'guaranteed one good laugh a day,' you would have a successful newspaper." Then she claimed that she had served for many years as "the daily chuckle editor" at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The following excerpt proves that Ivins was as funny as ever in her final days.

Now, before I depress everybody horribly, I thought I would talk about newspapers as entities that have important cultural pools, and that need to be kept intact.

One is of course that newspapers keep alive the tradition of collecting news, little gems from the police blotter, and in any small town newspaper you'll find the police blotter, and it's really full of interesting things. Well, actually, often not very interesting things, "Dog heard barking, 6:00 a.m."

But there are some gems, and the newspaper people are the only people in the world who save them. There was one not long ago from Mill Valley, California: "Perp arrested, charged with disturbing the peace for playing a ukelele while wearing a penguin costume."

Now this is the kind of thing that should not be let go.

And just to prove to you that it's not some crazy out in Mill
Valley, we had one the other day, a small town in South Carolina, the perp was extremely drunk. And he had decided in his drunken state that it would be fun to screw a pumpkin, and so he did. And the police came up to him and said, "sir, are you aware that you're screwing a pumpkin?"

And he said, "damn, is it midnight already?"

Now, the other thing that you find of course cherished in
newspapers is great leads, great leads written but not printed, great leads written and printed. I've always been terribly fond of one that appeared in The Odessa American.

It was a hot summer day in Odessa, which is definitely
redundant, and some local mother rear-ended a sporting goods van, and the back doors popped open on the sporting goods equipment, tennis rackets and stuff spilled all over the street. And for every reporter who has ever written a weather story, I know you will enjoy: "Golf balls the size of hail rained on the streets of Odessa on Tuesday."

The most famous lead ever written and printed I believe is
from Chicago, and you're going to have to help me, some of you here, it was the Leopold and Loeb case, and these two students of the University of Chicago had indulged in a thrill killing, and they had not been sentenced to death, but one was in the hoosegow and the other had promptly
died.

And the one who was in the hoosegow was also gay and he had approached a fellow prisoner who was not appreciative of his gesture who shanked him to death. And the lead was, "Nathan Leopold, a graduate of the University of Chicago, who should have known better, ended his sentence with a proposition Tuesday."

One I like that was never printed anywhere, and this often
happens in sex ring stories?-they usually tend to follow a certain pattern: Sure enough, the New Jersey State Police had uncovered a sex club, a clubhouse that contained whips and boots and spurs and all kinds of interesting paraphernalia, and this was duly reported. Then, as often happens in these stories, the second day they found a small black book containing the names of those who frequented this interesting establishment, and sure as a buckeye, the names of many people who were prominent in New Jersey society and political circles appeared in this book.

So the second day lead, which went out over the "A" wire but never appeared anywhere was: "The names of the whipped cream of New Jersey society were found Thursday
in a small black book."

I think one of the things you should never forget about journalism is when you have done good, when you have nailed some skunk's hide to the wall, you should sit there and gloat over it a great deal. That's a big part of the fun. And those Washington journalists who say, "well, yes, I know I caused him to resign, and I really feel bad
about it" -- oh, shut up.

There are certain subjects that are guaranteed to set people off -- abortion, death penalty, they run in a subject area. I have a collection called my best hate mail, but I have to admit my all time favorite piece of mail is a fan letter and it begins: "Dear Ms. Ivins, you are the favorite writer of all us guys here on cellblock H."