Short profile of IVINS (cancer, hers/Richards', Repuke father)

[UTUSN]

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http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/politics/stories/MYSA092406.01B.mollyprofile.2ea37eb.html

Columnist Ivins keeps her humor

Web Posted: 09/23/2006 11:33 PM CDT

Lisa Sandberg
Express-News Austin Bureau

.... The best-selling author and nationally syndicated columnist has just helped bury a dear friend, former Gov. Ann Richards, who she lost to the same wretched disease — cancer — that afflicts her. ....

There. She may have poor balance, only a few patches of hair on her head and no assurance her breast cancer won't undo her in the end, but Ivins is still the sharp-witted irreverent provocateur who has excoriated politicians, even liberal ones, since the day she set her size-11 foot in the Texas Legislature nearly four decades ago.

At a gathering in May, former President Bill Clinton called her "a great journalist," who was "good when she praised me and painfully good when she criticized me."

Some consider a pummeling by Ivins a badge of honor. Texas Rep. Warren Chisum sure did, when she called him a Bible-thumping dwarf and vilified him in a column for buying life insurance policies for people dying of AIDS. ....

"Well, fellow Texans," she wrote in 2003, the year after the GOP seized both houses of the Legislature, "they can stick a fork in us, 'cause we're done." ....

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