Molly Ivins Quotes
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I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying - it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.
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When Michael Jackson, a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich, white woman, married Elvis Presley's daughter the Scientologist. Makes you proud to be an American, dudn't it?
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Sit up, join up, get on line, get in touch, find out who's raising hell and join them. No use waiting on a bunch of wussy politicians.
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The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point. Poor people do not shut down factories... Poor people didn't decide to use 'contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits.
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When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.
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In city rooms and in the bars where newspeople drink, you can find out what's going on. You can't find it in the papers.
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The impulse to make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free is an old one ... When we are badly frightened, we think we can make ourselves safer by sacrificing some of our liberties. We did it during the McCarthy era out of fear of communism. Less liberty is regularly proposed as a solution to crime, to pornography, to illegal immigration, to abortion, to all kinds of threats.
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We've got the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble when it comes to crime in this country. The FBI says burglary and robbery cost U.S. taxpayers $3.8 billion annually. Securities fraud alone costs four times that. And securities fraud is nothing to the cost of oil spills, price-fixing, and dangerous or defective products. Fraud by health-care corporations alone costs us between $100 billion and $400 billion a year. No three-strikes-and-you're-out for these guys. Remember the S&L scandal? $500 billion.
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Humanism is not alive and well in Texas. Different colors and types of Texans do not like one another, nor do they pretend to.
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...you could have knocked me over with Michael Huffington's brain.
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Texas is a fine place for men and dogs, but hell on women and horses.
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On the whole, I prefer not to be lectured on patriotism by those who keep offshore maildrops in order to avoid paying their taxes.
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Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?
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Americans are not getting screwed by the Republican Party. They're getting screwed by the large corporations that bought and own the Republican Party.
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Populism is the simple premise that markets need to be restrained by society and by a democratic political system. We are not socialists or communists, we are proponents of regulated capitalism and, I might add, people who have read American history.
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Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal - fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed.
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The government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from cyber-snooping, but we're not.
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Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided me the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life.
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It's hard to argue against cynics - they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side.
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Everyone knows George W. Bush has no clue, but no one there has the courage to say it. I mean, good gawd, the man is as he always has been: barely adequate.
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It's hard to convince people that you're killing them for their own good.
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The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.
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There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.
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Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, "Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked.