A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

SHE DIDN'T SAY THAT, DID SHE? Molly Ivins, a proud graduate of Smith College, has lost her fight against breast cancer at the age of 62. The fearless columnist returned to the Pioneer Valley to speak at the Class Day ceremonies preceding the 1994 graduation of many of us in ALOTT5MA-land, both bloggers and readers, and I'll let Russ take it from there:

Ivins told a pretty salty story (esp. when you consider all the old blueblood grandmas in the audience). When she was covering the Texas legislature ("the leg," she calls it), she covered passage of an anti-sodomy bill (probably the law overturned in Lawrence, I now realize). Afterwards, apparently there was a lot of (literal) back-slapping among the right-wing good ole boys behind the measure. One of her fellow progressive journalists, watching them all shake hands and pat each others' backs etc., turned to her and said, "Hey, I thought it was illegal for a prick to touch an asshole in this state."

Video of her telling the story is over here (contains bawdy language, and the story starts about halfway in), and an archive of some of her recent work is here. From the NYT obit:

After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that America was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”

“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”

The Texas Observer has a lengthy tribute as well. One has to love a woman who autographed her books with the note, Raise more hell!