Good-Bye, Molly Ivins

I was getting ready to go to bed because I have to get up very early in the morning, but I checked the news and noticed a very sad fact. Molly Ivins has died. Only 62, she's been felled by breast cancer.

I first found her writing when I was going to college in Texas. This was when she'd started to write columns and after she'd reported for papers from Houston to Minneapolis, with a side trip to the New York Times. She could skewer an opponent with the best of them, but she always did it with a good dose of humor (more often than not at the expense of her opponent). Coming from Texas, she knew what the nation was getting into when the Prez came into office, and she tried to tell us, but too few were willing to listen. We'll miss her very much.

As usual, the appreciations have started to come in. Time's is here (and it's better than you might expect after they diminished her by putting the headline "Bush Nemesis Molly Ivins Dies" on the AP obit and neglected to mention anything she did before he became Texas governor). The Houston Chronicle has a collection of quotes. The Creators Syndicate has, in place of her last column, this remembrance by Creators Syndicate editor Anthony Zurcher. But if you really want to remember her in the way I'm sure she'd most like to be remembered, you could do far worse than to go read her last column from three weeks ago: "Stand Up Against the Surge."