01/31/2007 Molly Ivins TributeMOLLY 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 ...
01/11/2007 Stand Up Against the SurgeThe 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 ...
01/08/2007 Iraq Exit is Up to UsThe president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck -- so it's up to us. You and me, Bubba.
I don't know why Bush is just standing there like a frozen rabbit, but it's time we found out. The fact is WE have to do ...
11/23/2006 Thanks -- No, SeriouslyAUSTIN, Texas -- It's time to give thanks, and I want to start off with a great, big thank you for the top American movement conservatives and all the fun we've had since Election Day. I know I promised not to gloat after this election was over, but I'm ...
11/16/2006 Farewell, RummyAUSTIN, Texas -- There's been so much in print about how Daddy 41's people are back in the saddle, I was terrified when I saw a photo of Dan Quayle among the pack. If they've called back Dan Quayle to lend intellectual heft, we're all dead ducks. ...
11/14/2006 Now They're all for BipartisanshipAUSTIN, Texas -- Having watched election coverage nonstop all week, I sometimes wake screaming, "Bipartisanship!" and scare myself.
Of all the viral members of the media who have been suggesting that the Dems cooperate with their ...
11/09/2006 Post-Election EtiquetteAUSTIN, Texas -- The sheer pleasure of getting lessons in etiquette from Karl Rove and the right-wing media passeth all understanding. Ever since 1994, the Republican Party has gone after Democrats with the frenzy of a foaming mad dog. There was the ...
11/09/2006 Post-Election EtiquetteAUSTIN, Texas -- The sheer pleasure of getting lessons in etiquette from Karl Rove and the right-wing media passeth all understanding. Ever since 1994, the Republican Party has gone after Democrats with the frenzy of a foaming mad dog. There was the ...
11/07/2006 Campaign '06 -- Goodbye and Good RiddanceAUSTIN, Texas -- Right to the end, this insane conversation between reality and Not Realty. The president of the United States STILL says we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq; STILL says we are creating democracy; STILL says we're preventing the ...
11/07/2006 Campaign '06 -- Goodbye And Good RiddanceAUSTIN, Texas -- Right to the end, this insane conversation between reality and Not Realty. The president of the United States STILL says we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq; STILL says we are creating democracy; STILL says we're preventing the ...
11/02/2006 Keeping Our Eyes On the BallAUSTIN, Texas -- I'm still worried sick. The R's have seized the news cycle! Which says more about how dim American politics are than anything I can think of.
Apparently, the Michael J. Fox affair didn't have enough meat to it, and even Rep. Mark ...
10/31/2006 GOP Ineptitude and Some Advice For Dems "There's no doubt in my mind, with your help, Dave Lamberti will be the next United States congressman." — President George Bush last week, endorsing Jeff Lamberti
AUSTIN, Texas — Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., ...
10/26/2006 A Campaign of SleazeAUSTIN, Texas — It's a race to the bottom. For misinformation and cruelty, not to mention plain old dreadful manners, it is so hard to beat Rush Limbaugh. We can only measure the Great Blowhard against himself.
Even by Limbaugh standards, ...
10/24/2006 The Good Economy MythAUSTIN, Texas — Oh, goody. According to the White House press office, President Bush will spend much of the next two weeks discussing what a swell economy we have. Did you know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at its highest point EVER? ...
10/19/2006 Election Day Still a Long Way OffStunning coincidence. The verdict in the long-running trial of Saddam Hussein in Iraq is now due two days before our congressional elections in November. Astounding. How ineffable.
Sometimes you know the Republicans have just lost the rag ...
10/17/2006 Iraq War Despair is Not an OptionAUSTIN, Texas — One reason despair is not an option is because things can always get worse, and then what'll we do? I was actually trying to figure that out when I came across a remarkable article written for the The Nation magazine (known for ...
10/12/2006 Dear LeadersAUSTIN, Texas — Nobody else seems to be asking the obvious question about Susan B. Ralston, former administrative assistant to Jack Abramoff and, until last week, assistant to Karl Rove. She got hired by Rove at $64,700 after the 2004 election ...
10/10/2006 The Not-So-Great Texas Gubernatorial DebateAUSTIN, Texas — I sacrificed an hour Friday evening to watch the Texas gubernatorial debate on your behalf, since I knew none of you would do it. Democrat Chris Bell looked and sounded like the only candidate who won't embarrass the state —...
10/06/2006 Where There's War, There's KissingerAUSTIN, Texas — The Old War Criminal is back. I try not to hold grudges, but I must admit I have never lost one ounce of rancor toward Henry Kissinger, that cynical, slithery, self-absorbed pathological liar. He has all the loyalty and principle ...
10/03/2006 Ring the Bell For a Texas DemocratAUSTIN, Texas — Chris Bell for governor! I know, I know, it's stop the presses, Ivins favors Democrat! But the Kinky Friedman candidacy is worn thin and no fun. Besides, we actually have a good chance to get Rick Perry out of office. After six ...
09/28/2006 Beyond the PaleAUSTIN, Texas — Oh dear. I'm sure he didn't mean it. In Illinois' 6th Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent Tammy Duckworth of planning to "cut and run"...
09/26/2006 New News is Bad NewsAUSTIN, Texas — Noshing on the news ...
— The National Intelligence Estimate, agreed upon by 16 Bush-controlled spy services within the U.S. government, says the war in Iraq is making the war on terrorism harder and worse. It gives ...
09/21/2006 A Tortured DebateAUSTIN, Texas — Some country is about to have a Senate debate on a bill to legalize torture. How weird is that?
I'd like to thank Sens. John McCain, Lindsay Graham — a former military lawyer — and John Warner of Virginia. I ...
09/20/2006 Bush at His WorstAUSTIN, Texas — Is it just me, or was that the worst presidential press conference in history? So I went back and read it over. Of course, in print you don't get the testy tone: I heard it on radio and thought the man was about to blow up —...
09/15/2006 Remembering Ann RichardsAUSTIN, Texas — She was so generous with her responses to other people. If you told Ann Richards something really funny, she wouldn't just smile or laugh, she would stop and break up completely. She taught us all so much — she was a great ...
08/29/2006 Cow Whisperers Against the WarAUSTIN, Texas — I know it's bad form to brag, but I am now a graduate of Texas A&M University, and you can't stop Aggie pride. I became a diplomee of the great institution in College Station after successfully completing the three-...
08/24/2006 The New "Activist" JudgesAUSTIN, Texas — Another bee-you-ti-ful example of the right-wing media getting it all wrong. Here they are having the nerve to mutter in public about "activist judges" because Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has pointed out that spying without ...
08/22/2006 Molly Ivins August 22AUSTIN, Texas — Royal Masset, a Texas Republican political consultant who has been accused of being less than brilliant, recently had this to say about Karl Rove: "I think we actually like Karl a lot more now than we did when he was more ...
08/17/2006 Molly Ivins August 17AUSTIN, Texas — The most cunning refinement yet in the administration's plot to scare the liver, lights and onions out of us with Tales of Terror Plots is the Department of Homeland Security's brilliant move to declare Indiana the national ...
08/15/2006 No Shortage of FearAUSTIN, Texas — We have nothing to fear but fear itself, especially since fear is now being fomented and manipulated for political purposes by a bunch of shameless hacks. Who is trying to make you afraid and why? This Karl Rove tactic is getting ...
08/03/2006 No Guts, No GraceSAN FRANCISCO — Do you think the Bush administration is going after the press? The San Francisco Chronicle says on the front page this morning, "Cameraman Jailed for Not Yielding Tape," whereas The New York Times is reporting, "U....
07/29/2006 Molly Ivins July 29AUSTIN, Texas — The congressional report by the committees on intelligence about 9-11 partially made public last week reminds me of the recent investigation into the crash of the Columbia shuttle — months of effort to reconfirm the obvious....
07/27/2006 24/7 Coverage Doesn't Cover ItAUSTIN, Texas — State of play in the Middle East: Lebanon, extensively damaged plus a half-million refugees; Syria, tired of being dissed; Israel, disproportionate. Are you kidding? Did it work last time they occupied Lebanon? Condi Rice, ...
07/25/2006 Reality-Based CandidateAUSTIN, Texas — Dear desperate Democrats,
Here's what we do. We run Bill Moyers for president. I am serious as a stroke about this. It's simple, cheap and effective, and it will move the entire spectrum of political discussion in this ...
07/20/2006 Molly Ivins July 20AUSTIN, Texas — Never let it never be said our president does not provide laughs, even as we wobble on the rim of war in the Middle East.
Look what a good time Vladimir Putin had with him. Bush, responding to questions from the ...
07/18/2006 The Suicide of CapitalismAUSTIN, Texas — In case you haven't got anything else to worry about — like war in the Middle East, nuclear showdowns, global warming or Apocalypse Now — how about the suicide of capitalism?
Late last month, the U.S. Court of ...
07/11/2006 The Politics of GreedAUSTIN, Texas — I don't get it. What's the percentage in keeping the minimum wage at $5.15 an hour? After nine years? This is such an unnecessary and nasty Republican move. Congress has voted seven times to raise its own wages since last the ...
07/06/2006 More Immigrant-Bashing on the WayWhile the rest of you were celebrating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I was keeping an eye on Karl Rove — because someone has to.
A "Bush Signals Shift in Stance on Immigrants" headline is the early warning sign ...
06/29/2006 Maybe If We Tried a SlingshotAUSTIN — — Y'all, this isn't gonna work.
North Korea is threatening to launch a long-range missile against us, and we're threatening to reply with an anti-missile missile.
Sorry to remind you, but our "missile defense ...
06/27/2006 Justice, Fairness and FlippingAUSTIN, Texas — And then along comes Cut'n'Run Casey. We spend all last week listening to cut'n'run Democrats talking about their cut'n'run strategy for Iraq, and the only issue is whether they want to cut'n'run by the end of this year or to cut'...
06/22/2006 Molly Ivins June 22AUSTIN, Texas — Yea, Bush! Way to go! I realize this is last week's news, but I'm a great believer in giving credit where credit is due. By designating the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a national monument, Bush has put one more level of ...
06/20/2006 Molly Ivins June 20AUSTIN, Texas — Gee, the Republicans seem to have lost their moral compass since Tom DeLay quit. Who knew it could get worse without that pillar of rectitude from Texas? What a snakes' nest of corruption and nastiness.
The latest involves ...
06/15/2006 Eye to Eye in IraqAUSTIN, Texas — I think we need to stop President Bush from looking people in the eye. On Tuesday, he told the new prime minister of Iraq that he had come to Iraq to "look you in the eye."
Do we even know if the cultural ...
06/13/2006 Molly Ivins June 13AUSTIN, Texas -- Iraq and the media, the media and Iraq -- over and over. Last week was supposed to be a good media week for Iraq -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was dead. Taken out, we said, by a combination of American and Iraqi troops with Jordanian ...
06/08/2006 Molly Ivins June 8AUSTIN, Texas — It occasionally occurs to me that if I could understand the Bush administration's foreign policy, I might like it. After months of threatening Iran with everything up to and including nuclear war, we are now full of Sweet Reason ...
06/06/2006 Molly Ivins June 6AUSTIN, Texas — Thank goodness the Republicans are around to tell me what to worry about. The flag-burning crisis — here in Austin, there's that pall of smoke rising from the West every morning (it's from an area called Tarrytown, where ...
06/01/2006 Molly Ivins June 1AUSTIN, Texas — So, Haditha becomes another of the names at which we wince, along with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and My Lai. Tell you what: Let's not use the "stress of combat" excuse this time. According to neighbors, the girls in the ...
05/30/2006 Molly Ivins May 30HOUSTON, Texas — A Houston jury convicted both Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, despite the fact that Kenny Boy packed his Bible to the courtroom every day.
Since it is a long and noble Texas tradition for the accused to fight all allegations ...
05/23/2006 Molly Ivins May 23AUSTIN, Texas — Last week, Bush visited Yuma, Ariz., to tour a portion of the U.S.-Mexico Border by Border Patrol buggy. Maybe Jorge was doing a little measuring for the $3.2-million-a-mile fence the Senate recently approved, which I guarantee ...
05/18/2006 Molly Ivins May 18AUSTIN, Texas — Looking at the wreckage of the Bush administration leaves one with the depressed query, "Now what?" The only help to the country that can come from this ugly and spectacular crack-up is, in theory, things can't get ...
05/16/2006 Molly Ivins May 16AUSTIN, Texas — I hate to raise such an ugly possibility, but have you considered lunacy as an explanation? Craziness would make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you announce you are going to militarize the Mexican border, but you assure the ...
05/11/2006 Developments in Journalism's Internet FrontierAUSTIN, Texas — As I occasionally survey the pack of sycophantic shih tzus* in the Washington press corps, wriggling on their bellies to kiss the feet of those in power, I feel plumb discouraged about the future of journalism.
It's like a ...
05/09/2006 Molly Ivins May 9AUSTIN, Texas — Of course I am above sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. So serious a servant of the public interest am I, I can fogey with the best: On my better days, I make David Broder look like Page Six.
I don't care what anyone smoked 20 ...
05/04/2006 Republicans Wake a Sleeping GiantAUSTIN, Texas — Dec. 16, 2005, is a day that will live in infamy in the Hall of Fame of Unintended Republican Consequences.
A bunch of the guys were just noodling around in the House of Representatives in Washington, see, kind of fooling ...
05/02/2006 Molly Ivins May 2AUSTIN, Texas — Either the so-called "lobby reform bill" is the contemptible, cheesy, shoddy piece of hypocrisy it appears to be ... or the Republicans have a sense of humor.
The "lobby reform" bill does show, one ...
04/27/2006 Molly Ivins April 27AUSTIN, Texas — It's nice to know that the investigative reporter Jack Anderson is still under investigation, although seriously dead.
Anderson died last year, and for 19 years before his death he suffered from Parkinson's disease and was ...
04/20/2006 Molly Ivins April 20HOUSTON — "Compare and contrast," read the directions for essay exams in the old college blue books. Compare and contrast the trials of Zacarias Moussaoui and Jeffrey Skilling.
Moussaoui appears to be headed for the death ...
04/13/2006 Molly Ivins April 13AUSTIN, Texas — Personally, I think this is a really good time not to keep up. The more you try, the less sense it makes, although getting us used to having it all make no sense at all may be an extremely sneaky Karl Rove ploy to justify the war ...
04/11/2006 Molly Ivins April 11AUSTIN, Texas — We need to keep up with the daily drip, that endless succession of special favors for special interests performed by Congress, or we'll never figure out how we got so far behind the eight ball. While the top Bushies lunge about ...
04/06/2006 Molly Ivins April 6AUSTIN, Texas — In general, I'm against kicking 'em when they're down ... unless really awful people are involved. I figured Tom DeLay is so awful, plenty of people would gang up on him and I could pass.
Imagine my surprise when the ...
04/04/2006 Molly Ivins April 4AUSTIN, Texas — On the premise that spring is too beautiful for a depressing topic like Iraq, I thought I'd take up a fun subject — global warming.
Time magazine warns us to "Be Worried. Be Very Worried." On the other hand,...
03/30/2006 Molly Ivins March 30AUSTIN, Texas — Immigration 101 for beginners and non-Texans.
In 1983, I was a judge at the Terlingua Chili Cookoff, and my memory of the events may not be perfect — for example, for years I've been claiming Jimmy Carter was ...
03/28/2006 Molly Ivins March 28AUSTIN — The Pentagon has once again investigated itself! And — have a seat, get the smelling salts, hold all hats — the Pentagon has once again concluded the Pentagon did absolutely nothing wrong and will continue to do so.
...
03/23/2006 Molly Ivins March 23AUSTIN, Texas — I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying — it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.
Let's use this as a handy exercise in journalism. What is the unexamined assumption here? That the newspaper ...
03/16/2006 Molly Ivins March 16AUSTIN, Texas — President Bush has once more undertaken to explain to us "Why We Fight," which is also the title of an excellent new documentary on Iraq. According to the president, "Our goal in Iraq is victory." I personally ...
03/14/2006 Molly Ivins March 14AUSTIN, Texas — It's hard to keep up with George W. Bush's shuttles between internationalism and isolationism. You may recall he first ran for office declaring he was against nation-building and other such effete, peacekeeping efforts. None of ...
03/09/2006 Molly Ivins March 9AUSTIN, Texas — It was such a relief to me to learn we are making "very, very good progress" in Iraq. As the third anniversary of our invasion approaches, I could not have been more thrilled by the news reported by Gen. Peter Pace, ...
03/07/2006 Molly Ivins March 7AUSTIN, Texas — South Dakota is so rarely found on the leading edge of the far out, the wiggy, the California-esque. But it has now staked its claim. First to Outlaw Abortion This Century. The state legislature of South Dakota, in all its wisdom ...
03/07/2006 Molly Ivins March 7AUSTIN — Awwww! Noooo. Don't tell me it's over already. Come on, Republicans — this has been the best show we've had in years. Would Democrats quit picking on each another this early? Of course not! Forming their famous circular firing ...
03/02/2006 Molly Ivins March 2AUSTIN, Texas — The administration's competence problem is already at the yadda, yadda, yadda stage. They were supposed to protect us from terrorist attack, they said Iraq would be a cakewalk, that we only needed 50,000 troops. They failed to ...
02/28/2006 Molly Ivins February 28AUSTIN, Texas — With the Bush administration, it's important to have in mind the old carnival con game: Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it.
Among the many curious aspects of the administration's approval of the Dubai Ports ...
02/23/2006 Molly Ivins February 23AUSTIN, Texas — So, aside from the fact that it's politically idiotic and at least theoretically presents a national security risk, just what is wrong with the Dubai Ports deal?
As President George W. Bush actually said, "I want ...
02/14/2006 Molly Ivins February 14AUSTIN, Texas — Of course the jokes are flying all over Texas — what's the fine for shooting a lawyer? — and so forth. Dick-Cheney-shooting-Harry-Whittington is fraught, as they say, with irony. It's not as though the ground in Texas ...
02/09/2006 Molly Ivins February 9AUSTIN, Texas — Once upon a time, in the middle of a nasty constitutional crisis in Washington, a most unlikely hero emerged — a Texas lawyer from one of our state's notoriously discriminated-against racial minorities. Think how lucky we ...
02/07/2006 Moly Ivins February 7AUSTIN, Texas — I like to think that Republicans are having fun. They're such cards. What a wheeze, what a jape. Talking about energy independence in the State of the Union Address! President Bush said, "America is addicted to oil" and ...
02/02/2006 Molly Ivins February 2AUSTIN, Texas — "We're on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory. First, we are helping Iraqis build an inclusive government, so that old resentments will be eased and the insurgency will be marginalized. Second, we're ...
01/31/2006 Molly Ivins January 31AUSTIN, Texas — In a happy harmonic convergence, Groundhog Day falls only two days after the State of the Union Address this year. Some days, I'd feel better with Punxsutawney Phil in the Oval Office — at least he doesn't lie about the ...
01/26/2006 Molly Ivins January 26AUSTIN, Texas — Several great minds were asked to help think up interview questions for George W. Bush. I liked, "Are you the worst president since James Buchanan, or have you never heard of him?"
Sorry about the snarkiness ...
01/24/2006 Molly Ivins January 24AUSTIN, Texas — We live in interesting times, we do, we do. We can read in our daily newspapers that our government is about to launch a three-day propaganda blitz to convince us all that its secret program to spy on us is something we really ...
01/17/2006 Molly Ivins January 17AUSTIN — It takes a Texas Republican to get that fine, hairline reading on the ethical sensitivity scale we all prize so highly. Thus, it comes as no surprise that a couple of six-packs of Texas Republican congressmen have signed up to endorse ...
01/12/2006 Molly Ivins January 12AUSTIN, Texas — Boy, you really can't take your eyes off this bunch for a minute, can you? If they're not screwing up one thing, then they're screwing up another — busy little beavers. And then there are the administrative nightmares they ...
01/10/2006 Molly Ivins January 10AUSTIN, Texas — The governor of Texas is despicable. Of all the crass pandering, of all the gross political kowtowing to ignorance, we haven't seen anything this rank from Gov. Goodhair since, gee, last fall.
Then, he was trying to draw ...
01/05/2006 Molly Ivins January 5AUSTIN — We live in a great nation. The police blotter of the Mill Valley Herald in California informs us that the constabulary there had to be called out on account of a citizen "dressed like a penguin" who was "standing on a ...
01/04/2006 Molly Ivins January 4AUSTIN, Texas — My theory is that they don't tell him anything, that's why the president keeps sounding like he doesn't know what he's talking about.
There he was at Brooke Army Medical Center over the weekend, once again getting it wrong:...
12/29/2005 Molly Ivins December 29AUSTIN, Texas -- 2006 makes the ninth year in a row the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour. It's bad economics, it's bad policy, it's stupid, it's unfair, and it's high damn time to do something about it. It is also, as Sen. Edward ...
12/28/2005 Molly Ivins December 28AUSTIN, Texas -- The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Thirty-five years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon, who was crazy as a bullbat, and J. Edgar Hoover, who wore women's underwear, decided some Americans had unacceptable political opinions. ...
12/22/2005 Molly Ivins December 22AUSTIN, Texas -- It is clear we will need to practice hard on our credulity in the future just to get a grasp on how dumbfounding the entire Iraq War is. We need credulity up to the Wonderland White Queen's standards, believing as many as six impossible ...
12/20/2005 Molly Ivins December 20AUSTIN, Texas — Uh-oh. Excuse me. I'm so sorry, but we are having a constitutional crisis. I know the timing couldn't be worse. Right in the middle of the wrapping paper, the gingerbread and the whole shebang, a tiny honest-to-goodness ...
12/15/2005 Molly Ivins December 15AUSTIN, Texas — As one on the liberal side of the chorus of moaners about the decline of civility in politics, I feel a certain responsibility when earnest, spaniel-eyed conservatives like David Brooks peer at us hopefully and say, "Well, ...
12/13/2005 Molly Ivins December 13AUSTIN, Texas — Pre-procrastination Christmas booklist! Look at this, fellow procrastinators — almost two weeks before the actual day, and here I am to solve all your shopping problems with the annual one-stop, hit-the-bookstore with less ...
12/01/2005 Molly Ivins December 1AUSTIN, Texas — The Lord Impersonator is back again. This fella reappears every couple of years and causes no end of trouble. The jokester goes around persuading feeble-minded persons he is the Lord Almighty and that they are to do or say some ...
11/24/2005 Molly Ivins November 24AUSTIN, Texas — Since the political world ranges from poor to icky these days, you may think we are gratitudinally challenged this Thanksgiving. But a mere soupcon of sunny optimism goes a long way toward getting us to dwell on how lucky we are. ...
11/22/2005 Molly Ivins November 22AUSTIN, Texas — We've had two nifty opportunities to study the Bush spin machine at work here lately, both offering such a neat schematic of how it's done one is tempted to applaud. Or something.
The first was the counter-offensive ...
11/17/2005 Molly Ivins November 17AUSTIN, Texas — Today's fun challenge is "Spot the Next Brownie." In this fab game for the whole family, review a list of Bush administration cronies in office and see if you can pick the next Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown, ...
11/15/2005 Molly Ivins November 15AUSTIN, Texas — One of our better political commentators, Tom Tomorrow, has boiled down our entire current political debate to one question: "Are they stupid, or are they lying?" This seems to me pretty much how it goes, each side ...
11/10/2005 Molly Ivins November 10AUSTIN, Texas — I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often ...
11/08/2005 Molly Ivins November 8AUSTIN, Texas — As those silver-tongued poets at the Pentagon put it, we are in a target-rich environment. One cannot — honestly, one simply cannot — pass up the Brownie memos.
The e-mails sent to and from "Heckuva Job&...
11/03/2005 Molly Ivins November 3AUSTIN, Texas — While it's still an open contest for Worst Legacy of the Bush Years, the destruction of goodwill for America around the world is definitely a contender.
In the days and weeks following Sept. 11, the United States enjoyed ...
11/01/2005 Molly Ivins November 1AUSTIN, Texas — Leap I lightly, with the grace of a gazelle, over such mundane news items as indictments at the White House and Supreme Court nominations. All the better to continue my crusade to focus attention not on what's wrong, but on how ...
10/25/2005 Molly Ivins October 25AUSTIN, Texas — I am writing about the most extraordinary book by the most extraordinary woman, and I would have interviewed her at length, except she's going to be arrested if she ever sets foot back in our home state.
That's pretty much ...
10/18/2005 Molly Ivins October 18AUSTIN, Texas — You can only sit around wringing your hands and moaning about what a mess the Bushies have made of America for so long. Sooner or later, even the gloomiest doom-meisters are bound to get beaned by an acorn on the noggin, leading ...
10/13/2005 Molly Ivins October 13AUSTIN, Texas — The entire political world is agog: Tom DeLay indicted, Scooter Libby in danger, Karl Rove rumors abound, Miers' nomination in doo-doo. So I'm writing about ... pensions. They're just so sexy, I couldn't resist.
Of course, ...
10/06/2005 Molly Ivins October 6AUSTIN, Texas — Sometimes it helps to draw back from what's going on, to see if any patterns emerge from the chaos of daily events. In the news biz, attempts to see the Big Picture are known as thumbsuckers and regarded with appropriate contempt....
10/04/2005 Molly Ivins October 4AUSTIN, Texas — Uh-oh. Now we are in trouble. Doesn't take much to read the tea leaves on the Harriet Miers nomination. First, it's Bunker Time at the White House. Miers' chief qualification for this job is loyalty to George W. Bush and the team....
09/29/2005 Molly Ivins September 29AUSTIN, Texas — Jeez, that was quite a hissy fit Tom DeLay had, calling Ronnie Earle a rogue prosecutor, a partisan fanatic and an unabashed partisan zealot out for personal revenge.
Ronnie Earle? Our very own mild-mannered — well, ...
09/27/2005 Molly Ivins September 27AUSTIN, Texas — The Big Whew blew over Texas, leaving Port Arthur underwater and whole lot of stress across the state. It is highly stressful to be in a car with two adults, three children, the dog and the cat for a 12-to-20 hour trip from ...
09/22/2005 Molly Ivins September 22AUSTIN, Texas — So here are all the liberals going into a giant snit just because George W. Bush appointed a veterinarian to head the women's health section of the Food and Drug Administration. For Pete's sake, you whiners, the only reason he ...
09/20/2005 Molly Ivins September 20AUSTIN, Texas — What we need in this country — along with a disaster relief agency — is a Media Accountability Day. One precious day out of the entire year when everyone in the news media stops reporting on what's wrong with everyone ...
09/15/2005 Molly Ivins September 15AUSTIN, Texas — (With apologies to Ring Lardner and the "You Know Me, Al" letters.)
Dear Friend Dubya,
You know me, pal — your ol' buddy, governor of Texas and the man with the reelly, reelly good hair. I am writing ...
09/13/2005 Molly Ivins September 13AUSTIN, Texas -- Here's a good idea: Consumer groups and progressive congressfolks have joined in an effort to stop hundreds of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina from being further harmed by the new Bankruptcy Act, scheduled to take effect Oct. ...
09/08/2005 Molly Ivins September 8AUSTIN, Texas — George W. Bush has come up with his worst idea since he decided to have the military investigate torture by the military at Abu Ghraib prison. He, George W. personally, plans to investigate to "find out what went right and ...
09/03/2005 Molly Ivins September 3AUSTIN, Texas — Happy Labor Day, comrades. Hail to all who have yet to be outsourced, downsized, zero-budgeted, streamlined, cut back, laid off, globalized or otherwise pre-shrunk. Those of us who are lucky winners in the employment lottery can ...
09/01/2005 Molly Ivins September 1AUSTIN, Texas — Like many of you who love New Orleans, I find myself taking short mental walks there today, turning a familiar corner, glimpsing a favorite scene, square or vista. And worrying about the beloved friends and the city, and how they ...
08/30/2005 Molly Ivins August 30AUSTIN — Seems like every year at the end of summer there's this sense of coming back from somewhere, whether we've gone anywhere or not. Whatever the summer pattern is — a swim, the kids, a stroll —- it's as though we sort of blink ...
08/06/2005 Molly Ivins August 6, correctionIt has come to my attention that there was an inaccuracy in a parenthetical statement I made in my column about John Roberts, dated July 28, 2005. In fact, while it has been uncommon in recent years for Supreme Court nominees to have had as little ...
07/28/2005 Molly Ivins July 28AUSTIN, Texas — Sheesh, all I knew about John Roberts was that everyone says he has lovely manners — and already I was prepared to be against him. Knee-jerk liberal? No, congratulations to the White House, Sen. John Cornyn, Fred Thompson ...
07/26/2005 Molly Ivins July 26AUSTIN, Texas — Solidarity Forev ... ooops, make that, Solidarity Later.
Organized labor is weak, but unorganized labor is a hell of a lot weaker. That's what's splitting the AFL-CIO. You may think this is none of your beeswax, but if you ...
07/21/2005 Molly Ivins July 21AUSTIN — If you had done a poll in November 2000, or in November 2004, I don't think you would have gotten out of single digits with this proposition: "George W. Bush wants to radically revise American law, including complete repeal of the ...
07/19/2005 Molly Ivins July 19AUSTIN — Now it's getting funnier and funnier. There is an elephant in the living room and we're sitting around having a conversation about whether there's an elephant in the living room.
"I think there's an elephant in the living ...
07/14/2005 Molly Ivins July 14AUSTIN, Texas — As the judge in the Judith Miller-Matt Cooper case said, it just gets "curiouser and curiouser."
For starters, Judy Miller of The New York Times, who never wrote a word about Valerie Plame, is in prison, while ...
07/12/2005 Molly Ivins July 12AUSTIN, Texas — The trouble with deregulation is that it always takes some disaster like Enron before we realize there was a reason for the regulation to begin with.
We are about to repeat one of the huge mistakes of the 1920s and '30s ...
07/07/2005 Molly Ivins July 7AUSTIN, Texas — The stirring tale of Randy "Duke" Cunningham, congressman and bon vivant, becomes more entertaining by the day, and it is far more instructive than another case of a missing white female.
True, Duke Cunningham is ...
07/04/2005 Molly Ivins July 4AUSTIN, Texas — Once again, we celebrate America — despite absolutely everything, still a great nation after all these years. Happy birthday to us.
Yet again, we rejoice not so much in what makes America great, as in what makes it ...
06/30/2005 Molly Ivins June 30AUSTIN, Texas — As one who cares a whale of a lot more about personal rights than property rights, let me leap right into the fray over a Supreme Court decision on the side of the property rights advocates, many of whom I normally consider ...
06/28/2005 Molly Ivins June 28AUSTIN, Texas — The first thing I ever learned about politics was never to let anyone else define what you believe, or what you are for or against. I think for myself.
I am not "you liberals" or "you people on the left who ...
06/23/2005 Molly Ivins June 23SAN DIEGO — As that great American, Deep Throat, never said, "Follow the money." (The line is by William Goldman, who wrote the movie, "All the President's Men"). Keeping your eye on the shell with the pea under it is not ...
06/21/2005 Molly Ivins June 21AUSTIN, Texas — I hope this is not too Inside Baseball, but I am genuinely astonished by what the bloggers call "Mainstream Media." (In my youth, it was quaintly called "the Establishment press.")
The New York Times, ...
06/16/2005 Molly Ivins June 16AUSTIN — I was watching the PBS science program "Nova" the other night and spotted the liberal bias right away. I knew it would be there because Ken Tomlinson, the Bush-appointed chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public ...
06/14/2005 Molly Ivins June 14AUSTIN, Texas — Sometimes you look at the people Bush appoints to high public office and the only possible response is, "What were they thinking?"
Zalmay Khalilzad for U.S. ambassador to Iraq? Why not just send Richard Perle? ...
06/09/2005 Molly Ivins June 9AUSTIN, Texas — David Cay Johnston, the invaluable New York Times reporter who specializes in our tax system, has come up with some staggering figures on what he calls "the hyper-rich," the wealthiest one-thousandth of the population, ...
06/07/2005 Molly Ivins June 7AUSTIN, Texas — A jaw-dropping article in The Texas Observer (www.texasobserver.org) shows that two lobbying clients of Jack Abramoff paid $25,000 to Grover Norquist's group for a lunch date and meeting with President George W. Bush in May 2001. ...
06/02/2005 Molly Ivins June 2AUSTIN, Texas — So, the Texas Legislature decided it's OK for gay couples to be foster parents, but only if they're not married. I would explain what message that sends, if only I understood it.
Look at it this way: At least we can hunt ...
05/31/2005 Molly Ivins May 31AUSTIN, Texas — As a longtime fan of both George Bushes' eccentric grasp of English, I naturally enjoyed this gem from W.: "See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to ...
05/26/2005 Molly Ivins May 26AUSTIN, Texas — I often complain about the excess of irony in our national life, but this week, if you're not begoshed by the irony surplus, you haven't been paying attention. If we could just figure out a way to get energy out of the stuff, we'...
05/24/2005 Molly Ivins May 24AUSTIN — Here in the National Laboratory for Bad Government, it's Duck and Cover time — the Legislature is in session. The Can't-Shake-Your-Booty bill passed the House, saving us all from the scourge of sexy cheerleaders. But nothing else ...
05/17/2005 Molly Ivins May 17AUSTIN, Texas — As Riley used to say on an ancient television sitcom, "This is a revoltin' development." There seems to be a bit of a campaign on the right to blame Newsweek for the anti-American riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and ...
05/10/2005 Molly Ivins May 10AUSTIN, Texas — Meanwhile, back in Iraq. I was going to leave out of this column everything about how we got into Iraq, or whether it was wise, and or whether the infamous "they" knowingly lied to us. (Although I did plan to point out ...
05/05/2005 Molly Ivins May 5AUSTIN, Texas — When the history of this administration is written, I suspect the largest black mark against it will be wasting time. The energy bill just passed by the House is a classic example of frittering away precious time and resources by ...
05/03/2005 Molly Ivins May 3AUSTIN, Texas -- Attention, all campers! "Progressive indexing" is just another word for "cutting Social Security benefits." Do not be fooled by this idiot locution. Just as sure as "extraordinary rendition" now means "...
04/28/2005 Molly Ivins April 28AUSTIN, Texas — Being of the populist persuasion, I am a terminal fan of Thomas Frank, who has gone from "What's the Matter With Kansas?" to "What's the Matter With Liberals?" in the current issue of the New York Review of ...
04/26/2005 Molly Ivins April 26AUSTIN, Texas — I was all set to write a column about the nuclear option — the proposal to change the rules of the Senate in order to get President Bush's most questionable judicial appointments through — when, lo, word came that ...
04/21/2005 Molly Ivins April 21AUSTIN, Texas — Good news! If there is a distinct possibility a Bush nominee is a vile-tempered, lying, ineffective bully, the U.S. Senate is willing to hold off on the vote for two weeks.
John Bolton was an amazingly bad choice for ...
04/19/2005 Molly Ivins April 19AUSTIN, Texas — Spring fever is taking a weird form this year. Politicians say nice things for political reasons and then revert with a vengeance — a sort of political Tourette syndrome, they can't help what they say.
Tom DeLay, of ...
04/14/2005 Molly Ivins April 14AUSTIN, Texas — Happy tax day, fellow citizens!
My favorite authority on taxes is David Cay Johnston of The New York Times, who won a Pulitzer for reporting on the terminally unsexy topic of taxes. His book "Perfectly Legal — ...
04/12/2005 Molly Ivins April 12AUSTIN, Texas — Freshly returned from a week of intellectual sparring at the Conference on World Affairs, the annual gabfest in Boulder, Colo. (the late jazz critic Leonard Feather called it "the leisure of the theory class"), I find ...
03/31/2005 Molly Ivins March 31AUSTIN, Texas — Some days, it's hard to pick the outrage du jour, but hypocrisy is always an inviting target, and the United Nations oil-for-food scandal provides a two-fer. We have been hearing much right-wing huffing over the dreadful, ...
03/29/2005 Molly Ivins March 29AUSTIN, Texas — As a general rule about Bush & Co., the more closely a policy is associated with Dick Cheney, the worse it is. Which brings us to energy policy — remember his secret task force? In the long history of monumentally bad ...
03/24/2005 Molly Ivins April 24AUSTIN, Texas — This is one of those stories that I'd really like to start with a loud scream to give people some idea of how terrible it is. As a newspaper story, it has no soundtrack and comes without pictures. It appears to involve some ...
03/17/2005 Molly Ivins March 17AUSTIN, Texas — I write about the Terry Schiavo case both as one who has personally confronted the "pull the plug" question on several levels in recent years and as a staggered observer of this festival of political hypocrisy, ...
03/15/2005 Molly Ivins March 15AUSTIN, Texas — Calling all conservatives. Yo, libertarians. Also, wing-nuts, believers in black-helicopter conspiracies and mouth-foaming denouncers of government and all its works — yoo-hoo. Where are these people when you need them?
...
03/10/2005 Molly Ivins March 10AUSTIN, Texas — I must confess, I have sadly underestimated the Bush administration's sense of humor. Appointing John Bolton ambassador to the United Nations: boffo! What a laff riot! Hilarious comedy, a delicious romp, great setup for a sit-com....
03/08/2005 Molly Ivins March 8AUSTIN, Texas — In the magical upside-down world of right-wing blogs, it is now an accepted article of faith that Sen. Robert Byrd compared George W. Bush to Hitler last week. Republicans are demanding an apology, many have taken to high dudgeon,...
03/03/2005 Molly Ivins March 3AUSTIN, Texas — Gross! How to take a horrible bill and make it genuinely loathsome. Look at this — look at what they are doing with this bankruptcy bill.
The bankruptcy bill was a gift to big bankers and credit card companies to ...
03/01/2005 Molly Ivins March 1AUSTIN, Texas — I'm sorry, but every now and again a girl just finds it necessary to lay her head down on the table and howl with laughter. I wrote a column warning that USA Next, a Republican Astroturf (meaning "fake grass-roots") ...
02/24/2005 Molly Ivins February 24AUSTIN, Texas — I have been observing the flappette over the sexist remarks of Harvard's president, Larry Summers, with some amusement. Initially, it was hard to sort out whether we had a case of an educator trying to provoke an interesting ...
02/22/2005 Molly Ivins February 22AUSTIN, Texas — Among those still interested in fiscal sanity, and that includes quite a few Republicans, I bring your attention to two tax cuts that should be repealed right now for the sound reason that they are perfectly nuts.
A ...
02/17/2005 Molly Ivins February 17AUSTIN, Texas — Budgets are the guts of government. That's where you find the answer to the first of the three important questions about who runs a society: Who's getting screwed? Who's doing the screwing? And what the hell will they do to us ...
02/15/2005 Molly Ivins February 15AUSTIN, Texas — Sometimes the ironic timing of events in our public life is so striking as to cause one to wonder if the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky isn't trying to make a point. Thus, the word that the U.S. Senate voted for tort deform last ...
02/10/2005 Molly Ivins February 10AUSTIN, Texas — I feel snakebite about praising any proposal by George W. Bush. Every time I write a column saying, "Look, he's done something good!" he does something else that makes it either not so good or just plain bad. He welched ...
02/08/2005 Molly Ivins February 8AUSTIN, Texas — Last week, The New York Times quoted a Harvard Law student who favors the privatization of Social Security as saying the accounts-formerly-known-as-private are "a no-brainer."
Funny, I'd say that pretty well ...
02/03/2005 Molly Ivins February 3AUSTIN, Texas — I don't get it. The divide between the rhetoric and the reality in this administration is larger than I can span. The dissonance between the noble ideals expressed and the nasty actions is too raw for me.
For example, Bush ...
02/01/2005 Molly Ivins February 1AUSTIN, Texas — Here's hoping.
The trouble with being a congenital optimist is that gloom-mongering feels so uncomfortable. The election in Iraq Sunday, like the one in Afghanistan last year, was moving, inspiring and hopeful. When there'...
01/27/2005 Molly Ivins January 27AUSTIN, Texas — I wouldn't say it's the most earth-shaking issue around, but I'm fascinated by this fight the administration is picking with the media over "private accounts" versus "personal accounts."
Here's the ...
01/25/2005 Molly Ivins January 25AUSTIN, Texas — A substantial nit to pick with President Bush's second Inaugural Address and some questions about his theme.
"From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and ...
01/20/2005 Molly Ivins January 20AUSTIN — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helpfully explained it all for us. The problem is that we are living in an alternative reality. What we think we know is not true. We have always had enough troops in Iraq. There are 120,000 trained ...
01/18/2005 Molly Ivins January 18KEY WEST, Fla. — Tough gig here. A weekend in Key West holding forth on the subject of humor with a lot of funny people. A pundit's work is never done.
Actually, being earnest about humor is deadly — if you have to explain a joke, ...
01/13/2005 Molly Ivins January 13AUSTIN, Texas — Cheez, I go to all this trouble not to call the president of the United States a liar — perhaps misinformed, did not seem to know about, no one has told him, etc. — and then he just comes flat out with a ...
01/11/2005 Molly Ivins January 11AUSTIN, Texas —- Excuse me, but is that smoke in your ear?
I wouldn't go calling anyone a liar, but as we say in our quaint Texas fashion, this administration is stuffed with people who are on a first-name basis with the bottom of the ...
01/06/2005 Molly Ivins January 6AUSTIN, Texas — In the Texas legislature, they are called "prior-roarities," such a happy coinage. What should come prior?
When the pitter-patter of falling year-end columns comes again, not necessarily next year, but certainly ...
01/04/2005 Molly Ivins January 4AUSTIN, Texas — Oh boy! Starting the year off briskly, lending it such tone already, such cachet, such je ne sais quoi — those Republicans are so special, aren't they? Their first move, first rat out of the trap, top priority: ...
12/30/2004 Molly Ivins December 30AUSTIN, Texas — Oh 2004, 2004, bird thou never wert. Was it really that horrible a year, or does it only seem that way?
Abu Ghraib, the endless trials anent Kobe Bryant and Scott Peterson, war in Iraq looking worse every day, Howard Dean ...
12/23/2004 Molly Ivins December 23AUSTIN, Texas — And a Merry Christmas to all, including people who have white Christmas trees decorated entirely with purple balls. Merry Christmas to the Red states and the Blue states, to the R's and D's, and to all the troops stationed in ...
12/21/2004 Molly Ivins December 21AUSTIN, Texas — It's hard to make Iraq into a suitable Christmas topic, unless one bears news of Our Boys getting home-knit socks and home-baked cookies from Lard Lake or Fluterville. Mere mention is enough to drive full-grown adults to doctored ...
12/16/2004 Molly Ivins December 16AUSTIN, Texas -- "The aide (a senior adviser to President Bush) said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible ...
12/14/2004 Molly Ivins December 14AUSTIN, Texas — Relatively recent writings on Social Security, both to reform and not reform, convince me of two things. One is that we should be looking for maximum skepticism in our sources on this subject. And the second is that anybody who ...
12/02/2004 Molly ivins December 2AUSTIN — It is both peculiar and chilling to find oneself discussing the problem of American torture. I have considered support of basic human rights and dignity so much a part of our national identity that this feels as strange as though I'd ...
11/30/2004 Molly Ivins November 30AUSTIN, Texas — Goody, goody, gumdrop. We could get Phil Gramm back again, this time as secretary of the treasury. Oh how I've missed that little ray of sunshine, the bleeding heart from Bryan, the man who thinks poor people are all fat. As ...
11/25/2004 Molly Ivins November 25AUSTIN, Texas — As we take this long weekend to digest our Thanksgiving dinners and the ensuing leftovers, let us also devote some time to digesting a few political developments that have flown in under the wider media radar recently.
&...
11/23/2004 Molly Ivins November 23AUSTIN, Texas — Dan Green of New York City says of the election results, "You can't be depressed now, the worst is yet to come." Following that good advice, I intended to keep my indignation dry and save the outrage for when it is ...
11/18/2004 Molly Ivins November 18AUSTIN, Texas — My, my, gonna be a long four years.
House Republicans have rewritten the ethics rules so Tom DeLay won't have to resign if indicted after all. Let's hear it for moral values. DeLay is one of the leading forces ...
11/16/2004 Molly Ivins November 16AUSTIN, Texas — Whilst the punditry wanders weak and weary in the deep fogs of the "moral values debate," what say we pay some attention to what is going on, eh?
According to Newsday, "The White House has ordered the new ...
11/11/2004 Molly Ivins November 11AUSTIN, Texas — Awwww, Ashcroft! My man. The one I liked best of the whole Cabinet, the most consistently entertaining, the most the most deliciously inept, the most amazingly wrong-headed. Ashcroft, my personal Bush administration icon. And ...
11/09/2004 Molly Ivins November 9AUSTIN, Texas —- Here's my two cents worth on "What Is to Be Done?" First of all, let me rush to join the Bill-Clinton-for-Party-Chair bandwagon (which I believe started with a Los Angeles Times editorial). Granted, that means Hillary ...
11/04/2004 Molly Ivins November 4AUSTIN, Texas — Do you know how to cure a chicken-killin' dog? Now, you know you cannot keep a dog that kills chickens, no matter how fine a dog it is otherwise.
Some people think you cannot break a dog that has got in the habit of killin'...
11/02/2004 Molly Ivins November 2AUSTIN, Texas — Look at it this way. Voting whitens your teeth, sweetens your breath and perks up your sex life. Voting is new and improved, stops the heartbreak of psoriasis and improves your gas mileage. Voting makes you feel virtuous, is your ...
10/28/2004 Molly Ivins October 28AUSTIN, Texas — I finally put my money down on Tuesday, a whole week out. Kerry over Bush by two to three points in every state that matters except Florida. For those who find this an appalling, Bill Bennett-like display of disrespect for both ...
10/26/2004 Molly Ivins October 26ST. LOUIS — Oh, you sweet, innocent, carefree citizens in non-swing states. You have no idea how much fun and slime you are missing.
In the swingers, wolves stalk us mercilessly (as the pro-wolf lobby points out indignantly, no one has ...
10/19/2004 Molly Ivins October 19AUSTIN, Texas — Four more years?
Seems like every group and its hamster has put out some kind of dossier on the last four years. Top Bush Lies. One Hundred Mistakes Bush could admit to. Best scandals. Biggest Bush flip-flops. Iraq. The ...
10/14/2004 Molly Ivins October 14AUSTIN, Texas — Now is the time for all good men — and women — to race to the aid of their country. Liberals and libertarians unite! The Sinclair Broadcasting Group has moved this election into the realm of creeping fascism, state ...
10/12/2004 Molly Ivins October 12AUSTIN, Texas — President Bush may not be dumb, but he sure does think the rest of us are.
You have to assume your audience is a bunch of borderline morons to tell as many whoppers as he does. True, short-term memory loss is creeping up ...
10/05/2004 Molly Ivins October 5PHILADELPHIA — We all had our debate moments, but the one that stunned me was, "It's (Iraq is) hard work. I see it on the TV screens."
Watching it on TV, boy that is tough work all right. And what was the "hard work" ...
09/30/2004 Molly Ivins September 30AUSTIN, Texas — This column is not about the presidential debate. It's about Other Stuff. Particularly eye-catching are the updates on the price of gasoline, your overtime pay, why the company most likely to hold the mortgage on your house could ...
09/28/2004 Molly Ivins September 28AUSTIN —- Alice, we're in the Twilight Zone of Wonderland. Whee! John Kerry is disrespectful of our allies! Donald Rumsfeld thinks an election in three-fourths of Iraq is good enough. The No. 1 best seller in our nation is an untrue, vicious and ...
09/23/2004 Molly Ivins September 23AUSTIN — Thomas Frank, author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" is a subscriber to the theory that so-called "values politics" and lifestyle issues are just sophisticated versions of that old carnival con the shell game, in ...
09/21/2004 Molly Ivins September 21MASON, Texas —- Letter from a non-swing state. Every political reporter and his hamster is covering the swing states. Here's the news from the rest of the country. This column is dedicated to all the Democrats in the red states and all the ...
09/16/2004 Molly Ivins September 16AUSTIN, Texas — You open the paper and read the news from Iraq these days, and all you can say is, "Damn, damn, damn."
I'm flat out of ideas about how we can fix this, but I maybe see a couple of wrong roads we should give a ...
09/14/2004 Molly Ivins September 14SARASOTA, Fla. — Media watch alert: a curious double distortion in the media mirror, as the situation in Iraq unravels before our eyes. Iraq gets less media play for two reasons — one an old media fault, and the other political.
As ...
09/11/2004 Molly Ivins September 11AUSTIN, Texas —- Oh for heaven's sake, doesn't anyone know how to research a story anymore? I have never seen anything as silly as this ridiculous Republican chorus that, aha!, Ben Barnes is a Democrat and so we know he's lying!
The ...
09/09/2004 Molly Ivins September 9AUSTIN, Texas — This is the Tommy Corcoran column. Tommy the Cork, so dubbed by FDR, was a Washington wise man. His various biographers called him the ultimate insider, the super lawyer and the master fixer. He came to Washington in 1926 to ...
09/07/2004 Molly Ivins September 7AUSTIN, Texas — The wire services are reporting that we just lost seven Marines in Fallujah. To use Linda Ellerbee's line, "And so it goes ..."
The way it does not, NOT go is as claimed last week at the Republican convention. I ...
09/02/2004 Molly Ivins September 2AUSTIN, Texas — Stephen Colbert, correspondent for ³The Daily Show,² the only news program to watch during the Republican convention, found the theme of this convention like a homing pigeon: ³Unmitigated gall.²
This convention alone would ...
08/31/2004 Molly Ivins August 31AUSTIN, Texas — Another record. We have already lost more American soldiers (488) in Iraq in 239 days of this year than we did in 287 days last year (482), when there was a war on and before our mission was accomplished.
The grind of the ...
08/26/2004 Molly Ivins August 26AUSTIN, Texas — We were bound to get at least one good laugh out of Swift Boat Veterans for Humongous Lies, and what a pip it is. Upon being identified as the lawyer both for the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Swift Boat Liars, Benjamin Ginsberg ...
08/24/2004 Molly Ivins August 24AUSTIN, Texas - It's an early Labor Day SURPRISE! Congratulations, if you make between $23,660 and $100,000, you have just very likely lost your right to overtime pay, courtesy of the Bush administration.
If this comes as news to you,...
08/19/2004 Molly Ivins August 19AUSTIN, Texas — Remember what it was like just before the war? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — Colin Powell told us to the pound how many tons of this, that and the other — Saddam had a reconstituted nuclear program, ...
08/12/2004 Molly Ivins August 12AUSTIN, Texas — In the national ³Crossfire² that passes for political debate these days, we observe much arm-waving over whether the latest ³terrorist threat² warnings are on the level or merely designed to take voters¹ minds off bad job news, ...
08/10/2004 Molly Ivins August 10KANANASKIS, Alberta — Make that a big Canadian, "Oh dear." These nice Canadians, whom George W. Bush once managed to triumphantly identify as "our most important neighbors to the north" are famous for their reticence. Canada, ...
07/29/2004 Molly Ivins July 29BOSTON — For some reason, the guys in the media pack seem to be having a much harder time getting Teresa Kerry than us news hens. Many of them are stuck on the "loose cannon" view-with-alarm interpretation, not having noticed that the ...
07/27/2004 Molly Ivins July 27BOSTON — OK, here's my brilliant Insider Insight du jour: The D's aren't going to get much of a bounce out of this convention because this race is already so tight there just ain't enough swing votes to bounce anywhere.
The popular ...
07/22/2004 Molly Ivins July 22AUSTIN, Texas — We cannot let pass without salute Martha Stewart¹s remarks after being sentenced to five months in prison. In the long history of amazing things said by people in peculiar circumstances, you must admit, this ranks right up there. ...
07/13/2004 Molly Ivins July 13AUSTIN, Texas — I like Bill Clinton's book. I feel as though I should immediately apologize for saying that. I mean, it's gotten a bunch of bad reviews — all sorts of superior people have peed all over it and pointed out he shouldn't have ...
07/08/2004 Molly Ivins July 8AUSTIN — Last week on PBS's "NOW With Bill Moyers," there was a long interview with Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and message-meister. Luntz recently advised Republicans to explain "the policy of pre-emption and the war in ...
07/01/2004 Molly Ivins July 1AUSTIN, Texas — Happy birthday, America! Ye Olde Fourth of July rolls around again and finds the Great Nation in, frankly, a somewhat pissy mood. Lots of blame game, name-slinging and general unpleasantness. But there's always an upside. The ...
06/29/2004 Molly Ivins June 29AUSTIN, Texas — When it comes to religion, I've always believed it's more important to walk the walk than to talk the talk. I come from a tradition (Episcopal) that considers it rather in bad taste to wear your religion on your sleeve, ...
06/24/2004 Molly Ivins June 24AUSTIN, Texas — Heads up, team, the voting machine situation requires sustained attention, but not panic or paranoia. There is time to act, but act we must.
Yes, it is high time to "view with alarm" (an editorial page cliche ...
06/22/2004 Molly Ivins June 22AUSTIN, Texas — As I.F. Stone used to say, "All governments lie," so that's no shockeroo. What's peculiar is the reaction in the media.
— You may recall that when even the administration finally admitted Saddam Hussein had ...
06/17/2004 Molly Ivins June 17AUSTIN, Texas — No sooner do we win a long struggle to clean up politics and restore democracy in this country than we find the whole thing under attack, and we have to go out and re-fight the same battle all over again. Good thing we're not ...
06/15/2004 Molly Ivins June 15AUSTIN, Texas — Such comfort. At the close of the G-8 summit, described by President Bush as "very successful" (except we didn't get anything we wanted), the president offered us comfort on the uncomfortable topic of torture: "...
06/10/2004 Molly Ivins June 10AUSTIN, Texas — When, in future, you find yourself wondering, "Whatever happened to the Constitution?" you will want to go back and look at June 8, 2004. That was the day the attorney general of the United States — a.k.a. "...
06/08/2004 Molly Ivins June 8AUSTIN, Texas — As Lily Tomlin observed, "No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up." But as Con Ed used to say, dig we must. Courtesy of David Sirota at the americanprogress.org website, we find the following matches ...
06/03/2004 Molly Ivins June 3AUSTIN, Texas — CBS News has acquired tapes of Enron employees boasting about how they were "f——-g over" California during the late, great "energy crisis" there.
My favorite segment in these charming ...
06/01/2004 Molly Ivins June 1AUSTIN, Texas — Here's a special story about a big payday. Richard Strong, formerly of Strong Capital Management Co., will receive 85 percent of a sum estimated to be between $400 million and $700 million dollars. That's a lot of lettuce.
...
05/27/2004 Molly Ivins May 27AUSTIN, Texas — Too bad for anyone who tuned in to President Bush's speech Monday night hoping to hear something that would cheer us up — like a plan. That was as depressing as divorce. There he was, still peddling the phony idea that ...
05/20/2004 Molly Ivins May 20AUSTIN, Texas — It's pretty easy to get to the point where you don't want to hear any more about Abu Ghraib prison and what went on there. But there are some really good reasons why Americans should take a look at why this happened.
05/18/2004 Molly Ivins May 18AUSTIN, Texas — It's quite difficult to convince people you are killing them for their own good. That's our basic problem in Iraq.
You can try explaining that you are killing them in order to bring freedom and democracy to their nation &...
05/06/2004 Molly Ivins May 6AUSTIN, Texas — Let's get real. On Fox So-Called News, former Army Sgt. Tony Robinson was allowed to claim without contradiction that what happened at the prison at Abu-Ghraib was no worse than "fraternity hazing." Rush Limbaugh ...
05/04/2004 Molly Ivins May 4AUSTIN, Texas — For all I know, we may have just done something smart in Fallujah by hiring ex-Iraqi troops to take it over, but it's sure not what we said we were going to do when we started to go in. Then, the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison ...
04/29/2004 Molly Ivins April 29AUSTIN — Sinners of Texas, unite! We have nothing to lose but our vices! In case you hadn't noticed, our only governor, Goodhair Perry, is fixing to tax the bejeezus out of us. It's not as though the state's topers, gamblers and smokers aren't ...
04/27/2004 Molly Ivins April 27WASHINGTON, D.C. — And a grand time was had by feminists from all over the nation Sunday, out exercising our right to peaceably assemble and to petition our government for redress of grievances. While we still can.
The women who organized ...
04/22/2004 Molly Ivins April 22AUSTIN — There was the president at his press conference looking just like a turtle on a fence post. "They (weapons of mass destruction) could still be there. They could be hidden." Saddam Hussein is still an "ally" of the 9-...
04/20/2004 Molly Ivins April 20AUSTIN — Women of America. This Sunday, April 25. Washington, D.C. The March for Women's Lives. Be there.
This is it. It's all on the line now. Everyone who thinks she's too old, too tired and has done this too many times before, be there....
04/15/2004 Molly Ivins April 15AUSTIN, Texas — My, what a full plate we have here as a result of President Bush's primetime press conference. Most importantly, the president believes in freedom. Also, we are trying to change the world (did we sign up for that? did the rest of ...
04/13/2004 Molly Ivins April 13AUSTIN, Texas — Say, that was some "historical memo" there, containing, as the president said, no "intelligence that said there was going to be an attack on America." Except for the title and contents, of course.
It's ...
04/08/2004 Molly Ivins April 8AUSTIN, Texas — You may be wondering why House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is raising money for a legal defense fund and telling his fellow Republicans in Washington to be prepared to name his replacement in the event he is indicted. DeLay and ...
04/06/2004 Molly Ivins April 6AUSTIN, Texas — Iraq. What. A. Mess.
As Cousin Eddie Faulk used to say during Vietnam, "If those folks don't like what we're doin' for em, why don't they just go back where they come from?"
Eric Alterman sums up the ...
04/01/2004 Molly Ivins April 1AUSTIN, Texas — Strange peaches. All of us out here in the boonies should be aware this is a truly weird political year. For one thing, nobody has ever seen this much money involved. What can $200 million do in a political race, answered, we ...
03/30/2004 Molly Ivins March 30AUSTIN, Texas — O Karl Rove, Karl Rove, birder thou never wert. If George W. Bush loses the election narrowly in November, put it down to the birders. You read it here first. What was Rove thinking when he allowed William Haynes II to be ...
03/25/2004 Molly Ivins March 25AUSTIN, Texas — I'd like to thank Richard Clarke for doing the most obvious, decent and necessary thing this country needed from its government after 9-11, and that is to apologize to the families of those who died in those attacks and to admit: ...
03/23/2004 Molly Ivins March 23AUSTIN, Texas — Naturally, when I heard President Bush is now claiming to be in the forefront of the fight against corporate crime, I thought it was an April Fools' joke. But no, there it is in print — he made a big speech about it in ...
03/18/2004 Molly Ivins March 18AUSTIN, Texas — My, we are off to an elegant start here, aren't we?
First, we have John Kerry in a classic open-mike gaffe referring to his Republican opponents as "crooked" and "lying." While this was not a high point ...
03/16/2004 Molly Ivins March 16AUSTIN, Texas — How much fun can one administration have? More dead GIs. New record trade deficit. Stock market plunges. Ally in Spain goes down to defeat. The new Spanish prime minister says the occupation in Iraq is a "continuing disaster&...
03/11/2004 Molly Ivins March 11AUSTIN, Texas — Gosh, we are having such a swell time here in Texas. For starters, once again the speaker of the Texas House is under investigation by a grand jury. We're so proud. We have nothing against this guy personally, we're just rooting ...
03/09/2004 Molly Ivins March 9AUSTIN, Texas — Living proof that the Democrats haven't gotten any smarter since the last time they ran a candidate for president. Much huffing (and a huffy Democrat is a terrifying sight) over the fact that George W. Bush used images of 9-11 ...
03/04/2004 Molly Ivins March 4AUSTIN, Texas — So the Democrats have a candidate at last, and he is about bent over double with gravitas. I think that means he doesn't a have humorous bone in his body. It's a good thing there's at least one serious person in this race — ...
03/02/2004 Molly Ivins March 2AUSTIN, Texas — Anyone see any reason to think Haiti will be better off without Jean-Bertrand Aristide? Just another little gift from the Bush foreign policy team, straight out of the whacko-right playbook.
Jesse Helms always did think ...
02/26/2004 Molly Ivins February 26AUSTIN, Texas — Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have gone and gotten themselves in big trouble. For those of you who do not follow the business pages, I only wish we were talking about pregnant teen-agers. Fannie and Freddie are the two government-...
02/24/2004 Molly Ivins February 24AUSTIN, Texas — With so many delights on our political plate, it's hard to know where to begin. Take that knee-slapping joke by Education Secretary Rod Paige: He called our largest teachers' union "a terrorist organization." In fun, of ...
02/19/2004 Molly Ivins February 19AUSTIN, Texas — Oh boy, a close race in Wisconsin. This is swell! Go, Democrats. A few days ago, a Respected Party Elder advised me to stop dissing John Kerry on account of, "He will be our nominee." He may be "our nominee," ...
02/17/2004 Molly Ivins February 17AUSTIN, Texas — Anyone who is not enjoying American politics at this point is missing an important gene and a sense of humor. Whee, we're off! Like a dirty shirt, like a herd of turtles, it's the 2004 presidential campaign.
My ...
02/12/2004 Molly Ivins February 12AUSTIN, Texas — Friends of liberty, raise hell! To the barricades, or at least to the post office and the emails. A British citizen named Katharine Gun faces two years in prison for revealing that the U.S. National Security Agency tried — ...
02/10/2004 Molly Ivins February 10AUSTIN, Texas — Just for the record, since the record is in considerable peril. These are Orwellian days, my friends, as the Bush administration attempts to either shove the history of the second Gulf War down the memory hole or to rewrite it ...
02/01/2004 Molly Ivins February 1LONDON — In a way, it was heartbreaking to watch the Mother of Parliaments deal with half of a particularly nasty problem in an impressive way. It was sad and depressing for an American because the United States seems so unable even to begin to ...
01/22/2004 Molly Ivins January 22AUSTIN, Texas — Love those Iowa results. Nothing better than a huge political scrum where the front-runner stumbles, the guy everyone wrote off for dead six weeks ago comes roaring back, an unknown emerges, an old war-horse drops out — a ...
01/20/2004 Molly Ivins January 20AUSTIN, Texas — My fellow Americans, the state of the union's finances is enough to make an Enron accountant gag. When George W. Bush took office, he was handed a going concern. Projected annual surpluses from 2002 to 2011 were $5.6 trillion. In ...
01/15/2004 Molly Ivins January 15AUSTIN, Texas — My long-reigning favorite Bushism has now been edged out by a fresh contender I cannot resist. The old fave goes back to Oct. 4, 2001, when Bush, still trying to reassure a shaky nation, said, "We need to counter the ...
01/13/2004 Molly Ivins January 13AUSTIN, Texas — In Texas, where the border is a constant presence in our lives, no one is mistaking President Bush's immigration proposal for a brilliant new departure in immigration policy, or even for a ploy to get Hispanic political support. ...
01/08/2004 Molly Ivins January 8AUSTIN, Texas — Mr. Bumble observed that the law is an ass, and he'd never even seen the congressional redistricting plan drawn by Texas Republicans. Sigh. I just hate when Tom DeLay and Karl Rove get away with a dirty deal like this. The ...
01/06/2004 Molly Ivins January 6AUSTIN, Texas — Good grief, the tree's not down yet, the bills aren't due and the diet doesn't start until the bowl games are over, so what's with the unseemly haste? Not even time to take a deep breath here in 2004, and already we're like the ...
12/25/2003 Molly Ivins December 25AUSTIN — Vice President Cheney's Christmas card this year not only offers best wishes in this holiday season but also bears the following quotation from Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to ...
12/23/2003 Molly Ivins December 23AUSTIN, Texas — My fellow procrastinators, never let it be said that we do not think about Christmas shopping. Actually doing anything about it is such a radical step we can safely put it off for a few more days. But I feel contemplation counts ...
12/18/2003 Molly Ivins December 18LOS ANGELES — Well! I am certainly glad to see that we are telling off the French, Germans and Russians. I couldn't agree more with the Bush administration that those treacherous, undependable countries should be punished for their past ...
12/16/2003 Molly Ivins December 16LOS ANGELES, Calif. — For those of us who are in a bit of lather about the state of the union these days — and who hate to shop anyway — the holidays offer a swell opportunity to help save the country and the earth, while getting rid ...
12/11/2003 Molly Ivins December 11AUSTIN, Texas — I can't tell whether this administration is flaunting its cynicism, its contempt for science or its conviction that when in power you help your contributors and fry your enemies. Although how millions of small children and unborn ...
12/09/2003 Molly Ivins December 9AUSTIN, Texas — I do not think it premature to conclude that the entire financial industry of this country is riddled with fraud. As Allan Sloan of Newsweek observed, this is not a case of "a few bad apples," it's the Cockroach Theory &...
12/04/2003 Molly Ivins December 4AUSTIN, Texas — No one has been waiting with bated breath for me to make up my mind about the Democratic presidential candidates, but I have, and you might be interested in how I got there. I'm for Howard Dean — because he's going to win.
12/02/2003 Molly Ivins December 2AUSTIN, Texas — Call them — irresponsible ... Call them — unreliable ... Throw in — undependable, too ... Yes, it's undeniably true — the Congress of the United States makes Bart Simpson look like Averell Harriman.
...
11/27/2003 Molly Ivins November 27AUSTIN, Texas — This being the season, let us give thanks for freedom. As President Bush said in London: "Freedom is beautiful. It is a fantastic thing to come to a country where people are able to express their views." Indeed, freedom ...
11/25/2003 Molly Ivins November 25AUSTIN, Texas — Wow! Not one, but two huge, horrible, last-minute life-changing bills, and the second is even worse than the first! Record-shattering bad legislation immediately eclipsed by record-shattering bad legislation. These Republicans ...
11/20/2003 Molly Ivins November 20AUSTIN, Texas — I suggest the epitaph for this entire era should be, "The fish rots from the head down." The latest round of corporate scandals — Hollinger, the growing mutual fund mess and the foreign exchange dealers who ripped ...
11/18/2003 Molly Ivins November 18AUSTIN, Texas — Sins of omission, sins of omission, so often so much more grave than our sins of commission. And we rarely pay for them in a timely fashion — it is usually further on down the road that the gravity of whatever it was we ...
11/13/2003 Molly Ivins November 13AUSTIN, Texas — Sheesh, it's hard to keep up with this administration. Just a few days ago, we were going to stick it out, no matter what. Like Horton the Elephant, we would be faithful, 100 percent — never give up, never surrender.
...
11/11/2003 Molly Ivins November 11AUSTIN, Texas — As Lily Tomlin observed, no matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep it up. But the Congress of the United States is doing its best to keep us up to snuff in this department, and we would particularly like to thank all ...
11/06/2003 Molly Ivins November 6AUSTIN, Texas — What a great country. We've just had a fierce public debate over a docudrama no one has seen, culminating in a form of censorship. Not having seen the bio-pic about the Reagans was no bar to the punditry, which held forth ...
11/04/2003 Molly Ivins November 4AUSTIN, Texas — I'd really like to know: What were they thinking? What did the traders, directors and managers of mutual funds think they were doing? Did they think, "Everybody does it?" Did they figure, "It's not really stealing; ...
10/28/2003 Molly Ivins October 28AUSTIN, Texas — There is something faintly risible about the American habit of thinking we can fix problems through better public relations. We seem to think a positive mental attitude and high approval ratings can solve anything from shingles ...
10/23/2003 Molly Ivins October 23AUSTIN, Texas — What I like about the new radical, right-wing Republican takeover of this country is how easily they blow past all our defenses against deja-vu, they-all-do-it cynicism.
There you are — thinking you're way too old ...
10/21/2003 Molly Ivins October 21AUSTIN, Texas — What I like about the new radical, right-wing Republican takeover of this country is how easily they blow past all our defenses against deja-vu, they-all-do-it cynicism.
There you are — thinking you're way too old ...
10/16/2003 Molly Ivins October 16AUSTIN, Texas — I'm a card-carrying member of The Great Liberal Backlash of 2003, one of the half-dozen or so writers now schlepping around the country promoting books that do not speak kindly of Our Leader's record. As a group, we are making ...
10/14/2003 Molly Ivins October 14AUSTIN, Texas — Holy smoke! I know hellzapoppin' with the news here lately, but let's try keeping our eye on the shell with the pea under it. Fascinating as all this inside-D.C. stuff is about Rummy and Cheney, and who leaked the CIA agent's ...
10/09/2003 Molly Ivins October 9AUSTIN, Texas — Not that any of us is in a position to criticize the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky, but don't you think She's been going a little heavy on the irony lately?
All those folks who had conniption fits over Bill Clinton's ...
10/07/2003 Molly Ivins October 7NEW YORK, N.Y. — Much as I hate to interrupt what is apparently a deeply felt triumphalism on the American right, now that it's over, does anyone see any reason for our having invaded Iraq?
I realize that's what we all kept trying to ...
10/02/2003 Molly Ivins October 2NEW YORK CITY — Are you confused yet? Two weeks ago, President Bush said, "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties." In September 2002, he said, "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam." But Bush ...
09/30/2003 Molly Ivins September 30NEW YORK, N.Y. — For Democrats only: I think our field is shaping up quite nicely. Several of our candidates are starting to look promising indeed. Of course, only a political junkie would have sat through the entire two-hour debate, and the ...
09/25/2003 Molly Ivins September 25SEATTLE — Life rolls on in George W. Bush's America, forcing us to invent a new word — greeed, with three E's in the middle — to cover cases like that of Richard A. Grasso, who recently resigned as chairman and CEO of the New York ...
09/23/2003 Molly Ivins September 23AUSTIN, Texas — Among the more amusing cluckings from the right lately is their appalled discovery that quite a few Americans actually think George W. Bush is a terrible president.
Robert Novak is quoted as saying in all his 44 years of ...
09/18/2003 Molly Ivins September 18AUSTIN, Texas — The administration is now in The Full Ostrich on Iraq: Dick Cheney put on a fabulous performance last Sunday on "Meet the Press," in which he insisted everything in Iraq is trickety-boo, right as rain and cheery bye. I ...
09/16/2003 Molly Ivins September 16WASHINGTON, D.C. — Always interesting to come into The City Where Everybody Says Exactly What Everybody Else Says just to run my own reality check. If I'm out of step with the conventional wisdom, I'm doing fine. The minute I find myself saying ...
09/11/2003 Molly Ivins September 11AUSTIN, Texas — Well, fellow Texans, they can stick a fork in us, cause we're done. Not only has Governor Goodhair called yet another special session (cost now at over $5 million) to implement Tom DeLay's dirty redistricting deal, but we're ...
09/09/2003 Molly Ivins September 9AUSTIN, Texas — Sigh. You write an article advocating what you think would be useful, constructive suggestions about Iraq, and you get an avalanche of right-wing reaction about "failuremongers" and "nattering nabobs of negativism.&...
09/04/2003 Molly Ivins September 4AUSTIN, Texas — It is insufficient to stand around saying, "I told you Iraq would be a disaster." Believe me, saying, "I told you so" is a satisfaction so sour it will gag you when people, including Americans, are dying every ...
09/02/2003 Molly Ivins September 2AUSTIN, Texas — At the beginning of the summer, several of us who are not exactly upbeat about our prospects in Iraq urged the administration to Do Something before it was too late — like, by the end of the summer.
Now what? Our ...
08/28/2003 Molly Ivins August 28AUSTIN — This poignant Labor Day, when the numbers are bad, the policies are worse and the jobs are disappearing, it's not so much the economy that riles me as the disrespect and the gratuitous contempt with which this administration treats ...
08/26/2003 Molly Ivins August 26AUSTIN — One problem I have with Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts. I realize that is superficial, shallow and unbecoming to a semi-serious-minded liberal like myself, but there it is. The other is that he ...
08/21/2003 Molly Ivins August 21AUSTIN, Texas — When in the midst of a Blame Typhoon, with charges and counter-charges being hurled in all directions, I find it most useful to consult those two polar stars of utter wrongheadedness, Tom DeLay and The Wall Street Journal's ...
08/19/2003 Molly Ivins August 19AUSTIN, Texas — It's the All-American Blame Game! A Finger-Pointing festival. A perfectly circular firing squad of, "Told you so." Bureaucrats perfecting their CYA moves. Politicians jumping on the opportunity to make points against ...
08/14/2003 Molly Ivins August 14AUSTIN, Texas — Hang in there, Texas Eleven. You are not forgotten.
Gov. Goodhair Perry says the AWOL senators are holding up "issues of great importance to the people of Texas." That's funny. There has been one and only one ...
08/12/2003 Molly Ivins August 12DUBLIN, N.H. — What a summer for national credulity fitness. My credulity gets a lot of exercise, since I cover Texas politics. Like Alice in Wonderland's White Queen, years of practice have enabled me to believe as many as six impossible things ...
08/07/2003 Molly Ivins August 7CAMDEN, Maine — Let us stop to observe a few mileposts on the downward path to the utter degradation of political discourse in this country.
A recent newspaper advertising campaign by "independent" groups supporting President ...
08/05/2003 Molly Ivins August 5AUSTIN, Texas — There are messy-desk people and there are clean-desk people. I'm a major messy. About every six months, I am seized by a desire to Get Organized, so I start doing archaeological excavations into the midden heap on my desk. The ...
07/31/2003 Molly Ivins July 31AUSTIN, Texas — Oh great, now we have a bunch of Texas Democrats hiding out in Albuquerque (which is very difficult to spell), and I'm here holding the bag, trying to explain what this particular spate of lunacy in our state is all about. Spare ...
07/24/2003 Molly Ivins July 24ANCHORAGE — Many and varied are the wonders, the splendors and the peculiarities of the Other Great State. The funniest thing said by Alaskans is, "Gonna be another scorcher" (means "could get into the 70s").
In Alaska,...
07/08/2003 Molly Ivins July 8AUSTIN, Texas — Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty. I'll be go to hell. Danged if Charlie Wilson didn't win the Cold War singlehandedly.
That would be the same Charlie Wilson we've known all these years as a rascal, reprobate and ...
07/03/2003 Molly Ivins July 3AUSTIN, Texas — Happy birthday, America! Two-hundred twenty-seven years old and still ready to boogie til we puke. What a great country. Another glorious year in the land of the free and the home of the brave, with only the usual idiocy ...
07/01/2003 Molly Ivins July 1AUSTIN — Congratulations to the Supreme Court on its 6-3 decision in the Texas sodomy law case and to all those, including the gay rights groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, who have fought so long and hard to rid the legal system of ...
06/26/2003 Molly Ivins June 26AUSTIN, Texas — You've got to hand it to those clever little problem-solvers at the White House. What a bunch of brainiacs. They have resolved the entire problem of global warming: They cut it out of the report!
This is genius. Everybody ...
06/19/2003 Molly Ivins June 19AUSTIN, Texas — My, my, my, the great Iraqi Gold Rush is on, and who should be there at the front of the line, right along with Halliburton and Bechtel, but our old friends at WorldCom, perpetrator of the largest accounting fraud in American ...
06/17/2003 Molly Ivins June 17AUSTIN, Texas — Watching some dipstick the other day on Fox News carry on with great certainty about Hillary Clinton and her evil motives — and I don't think this guy actually spends a lot of time tete a tete with Mrs. Clinton ...
06/12/2003 Molly Ivins June 12AUSTIN, Texas — In the "physician, heal thyself" department, please note the response of White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer to a bulletin from North Korea that said: "The intention to build up a nuclear deterrent is not ...
06/10/2003 Molly Ivins June 10AUSTIN — Remember the guy in "The Graduate" who tells Dustin Hoffman, with heavy emphasis, "Plastics"? This column is sort of in the same vein. Psst, kids, there's money in wind . If I were a fresh graduate looking ...
06/05/2003 Molly Ivins June 5AUSTIN, Texas — "I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that." George W. Bush, diplomat extraordinaire, to Ariel Sharon, The Washington Post, June 3, 2003.
The effort to find peace ...
06/03/2003 Molly Ivins June 3AUSTIN, Texas — I rarely find fault with Washington journalist Josh Marshall and his thoughtful Blog "Talking Points Memo," but I beg to differ on this occasion.
"My God," writes Marshall, "when they say down the ...
05/29/2003 Molly Ivins May 29AUSTIN, Texas — This is a gross scandal. The Center for Public Integrity has a stunning study out on the concentration of ownership in telecommunications. The even more stunning news is that the Federal Communications Commission, which ...
05/27/2003 Molly Ivins May 27AUSTIN, Texas — It was horrible and sickening, but I could not stop watching the final days of the Texas Legislature. Fellow Texans, the ripple effects of this disaster will come to haunt us all.
Just for starters, this budget is going to ...
05/22/2003 Molly Ivins May 22NEW YORK CITY — Much as I hate to interrupt what is apparently a deeply felt triumphalism on the American right, now that it's over, does anyone see any reason for our having invaded Iraq?
I realize that's what we all kept trying to ...
05/16/2003 Molly Ivins May 16BOISE, Idaho — When last we left the saga of Texas' few living elected Democrats, they had fled the state pursued by minions of the law — legislators on the lam. These courageous citizens, fleeing vile Republican oppression in their state ...
05/13/2003 Molly Ivins May 13AUSTIN, Texas — They just went too far, that's all. This session of the legislature has been as brutal, callous and indifferent to the welfare of the weakest, the most frail, youngest and oldest Texans as it is possible to get. The level of pure ...
05/08/2003 Molly Ivins May 8AUSTIN, Texas — "We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and be proud, and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies, and say, Damn, we're Americans!'" — Jay Garner, retired general and the ...
05/01/2003 Molly Ivins May 1AUSTIN, Texas — Don't worry about a thing! The Texas Legislature is riding to the rescue. Oh, sure, we still have a $10 billion deficit, but the House just outlawed gay marriage. At last, we're safe from the hideous threat of gay marriage, which ...
04/29/2003 Molly Ivins April 29AUSTIN, Texas — The sour joke is: "Of course we know the Iraqis have weapons of mass destruction. We have the receipts." At this point, the administration would probably be delighted if it could find the WMDs the Reagan administration ...
04/24/2003 Molly Ivins April 24AUSTIN, Texas — Boy, there is no shortage of creatively terrible ideas from the Republican Party these days. Those folks are just full of notions about how to make people's lives worse — one horrible idea after another bursting out like ...
04/22/2003 Molly Ivins April 22AUSTIN, Texas — New nominations for the hotly contested "What Were They Thinking?" title, also known as, "Is There Anybody Here With a Lick of Sense?
— American Airlines' executive team wins Boneheads of the Month. ...
04/08/2003 Molly Ivins April 8AUSTIN, Texas — Oh good. It looks as though we're going to have as big a fight over postwar plans for Iraq as we did over the war itself. Just what we need, more of everybody being at everybody else's throat.
Defense Secretary Donald ...
04/03/2003 Molly Ivins April 3Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards observed the other day that the price of gasoline has gone so high in Texas that women who want to run over their husbands have to carpool.
Thought we needed a laugh before plunging back into the war. Here's a ...
03/27/2003 Molly Ivins March 27AUSTIN, Texas — See if this doesn't make you wince. The Washington Post reported last Saturday on how the Bush administration's attempts to bully Turkey had backfired. Courtesy of John Marshall's website, TalkingPointsMemo.com, I found this ...
03/25/2003 Molly Ivins March 25AUSTIN, Texas — There was Donald Rumsfeld on Sunday morning repeatedly warning the Iraqis that prisoners of war are protected by the Geneva Convention and showing pictures of POWs is wrong. That would be the same Donald Rumsfeld who refused to ...
03/20/2003 Molly Ivins March 20AUSTIN, Texas — Don't you hate when war starts in springtime? We are now united in desperately hoping that the war will be both easy and short.
The most depressing thing about this war is that we are going into it with the support of the ...
03/18/2003 Molly Ivins March 18AUSTIN, Texas — Q: What is the country most likely to supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorists?
A: Russia.
Just thought we ought to keep a grip on reality here. It gets harder when one finds a headline like this on the ...
03/13/2003 Molly Ivins March 13AUSTIN, Texas — OK, sign me up for the Bush program. I'm aboard. Who else can we insult, offend, bribe, blackmail, threaten, intimidate, wiretap or otherwise infuriate?
Getting the Canadians, who are famous for their phlegm, seriously mad ...
03/11/2003 Molly Ivins March 11AUSTIN, Texas — After every military engagement, the Pentagon conducts a review to discover what they did right, what they did wrong, what worked and what didn't. It is an admirable tradition and one that needs to be copied by the profession of ...
03/06/2003 Molly Ivins March 6AUSTIN — Texas, Our Texas, all hail the mighty state! Gov. Goodhair Perry has promised to use $10 million of state money to help map the bovine genome, the genetic code of a cow, a project to be carried out at Baylor and Texas A&M. Through a ...
03/04/2003 Molly Ivins March 4AUSTIN, Texas — As we wend our weary way toward war, dragging the Turks — whose price will be our betrayal of the Kurds (fourth time we've double-crossed Kurds, counting Henry Kissi
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