A Texan I Shall Miss

Aloha, Molly Ivins. She was one of the first to call a bush a shrub. She had our President pegged as a Pinhead while he was just a Pinhead of a Governor. She was a straight shooter, whether she was writing about politics or the disease that finally caught up to her. "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, the same month cancer claimed her friend former Governor Ann Richards.
She was even less afraid of being labeled a liberal: "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." From November, 2003: "The day President Clinton tried to take out Osama bin Laden with a missile strike, every right-winger in America said it was a case of 'wag the dog.' He was supposedly trying to divert our attention from the much more breathtakingly important and serious matter of Monica Lewinsky. And who did he think he was to make us focus on some piffle like bin Laden?"
You've got to love a gal who will use a word like "piffle." And now, alas, her voice has been stilled. We eagerly await another to rise and rail at the injustices of the world, and poke holes in the gasbags that push the buttons and pull the strings. Until then, "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. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"
Aloha, Molly, and vaya con Dios.