From Tom Paine
By Isaiah J. Poole

It wasn’t always fun being in charge of the editorial page of a newspaper in State College, Pa., where splotches of light blue floated precariously in a sea of red, but the days I got to publish Molly Ivins’ columns were always the most joyous.

Today progressives are paying tribute to Ivins , who left us January 31 after a long battle with cancer at the age of 62, as both a progressive firebrand and a light of hope.

It took my getting a job outside the Beltway to be exposed to Ivins regularly. It may be that papers like The Washington Post found her a little too plain-spoken and sharp-elbowed for inside-the-Beltway discourse. She knew that when it comes to the hypocrisy, double-dealing and shortchanging of the people’s interest in governments from Washington to her beloved Texas, it takes more than a genteel butter knife to cut through it. Most importantly, she proved the effectiveness of straight-talking progressivism in swaying minds.

I saw that in the letters and e-mails I got from readers after we began publishing Ivins’ work regularly. More than any other columnist, her visceral-but-humorous style moved readers. She gave voice to people outside of the Beltway and blue-state havens, who, especially in the wake of 9/11, needed encouragement to stand firm in their convictions against abuses of power in Washington. In recent years, she was unapologetically against the war in Iraq, against the PATRIOT Act, against the unethical shenanigans of congressional Republicans and against the timidity of Democrats who rolled over and allowed Republicans to get away with stealing our democracy. She was not a columnist who told us which way the wind was blowing. She was determined, with all of the breath that she could muster, to change the direction of the wind, and to get us to join her.

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