:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 2.28.2007 ::

:: "Filmmaker shows relics from disputed Jesus tomb" ::

Reuters.UK
By Christine Kearney

NEW YORK - The director of the movie "Titanic" presented on Monday what he said was evidence the tomb of Jesus had been uncovered but scholars greeted the assertion with scepticism, some dismissing it as a publicity stunt.

James Cameron and a team of scholars showed two stone ossuaries, or bone boxes, that he said might have once contained the bones of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The findings are the subject of a documentary he produced called "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" and a book "The Jesus Family Tomb."

The two small caskets were part of 10 found in 1980 during construction in South Jerusalem. Several had inscriptions translated as Jesus, Mary Magdalene and "Judah, son of Jesus," Cameron told a news conference at the New York Public Library surrounded by scholars and archaeologists.

"This is the beginnings of an ongoing investigation," Cameron said. "If things come to light that erode this investigation, then so be it."

The filmmakers said that statistically there was a 1 in 600 chance that the names found on the inscriptions were not the family of Jesus.

They also argued that the name "Mariamene e Mara," the only inscription written in Greek, translated to Magdalene's real name.

If this was the tomb of Jesus, the revelations are likely to raise the ire of Christians because the discovery would challenge the belief that Jesus was resurrected and ascended to heaven.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 1:24:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Colombia circus performers protest shooting of clowns" ::

The Associated Press
Published: February 23, 2007
via International Herald Tribune

BOGOTA, Colombia: Some 50 acrobats, harlequins, animal trainers and other circus performers marched through the streets in eastern Colombia to protest the killing of two clowns with during a performance this week.

The clowns were shot dead in the middle of a nighttime performance Tuesday in Cucuta, about 400 miles (650 kilometers) from Bogota near the border with Venezuela.

During Thursday's protest, the performers chanted, "Justice for the assassins of laughter."

posted by me

:: 10:19:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Dems Mull Plan To Change Iraq Resolution" ::
Guardian Unlimited

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate Democrats pledged renewed efforts Sunday to curtail the Iraq war, suggesting they will seek to limit a 2002 measure authorizing President Bush's use of force against Saddam Hussein.

The top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the proposal had little chance of succeeding. ``I think the president would veto it and the veto would be upheld,'' said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana.

A day after Republicans foiled a Democratic bid to repudiate Bush's deployment of 21,500 additional combat troops to Iraq, Senate Democrats declined to embrace measures - being advanced in the House - that would attach conditions to additional funding for troops.

Sen. Carl Levin, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, said Democratic senators would probably seek to capitalize on wavering Republicans to limit the ``wide-open authorization'' Congress gave Bush in 2002.

``We will be looking at a modification of that authorization in order to limit the mission of American troops to a support mission instead of a combat mission, and that is very different from cutting off funds,'' said Levin, D-Mich.

A L S O

Defending Nation’s Latest War, Bush Recalls Its First
New York Times

posted by me

:: 12:33:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "31 indicted in Italian rendition case" ::

International Herald Tribune
AP. MILAN: An Italian judge indicted 26 Americans and 5 Italians on Friday for what will be the first criminal trial over the CIA's rendition program for suspected terrorists.

posted by me

:: 11:38:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "The House Debate: A Sampling" ::

From The New York Times

Since Tuesday, the House has been debating a nonbinding resolution that would express disapproval of President Bush’s plan to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq.

It declares the House to be resolved that ‘’Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq'’ and that ‘’Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.'’

A vote is expected later today.

Here’s a sampling, compiled by Jack Begg of The Times, of what House members have had to say from the floor:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California:

“Friday’s vote will signal whether the House has heard the American people: no more blank checks for President Bush on Iraq. Our taxpayer dollars must go to protect our troops, to keep our promises to our veterans, and to provide for the safety of the American people. In light of the facts, President Bush’s escalation proposal will not make America safer, will not make our military stronger, and will not make the region more stable; and it will not have my support.”

Representative John Boehner, minority leader, Republican of Ohio:

“What we are dealing with here today isn’t even a resolution to debate the war itself. It is a nonbinding resolution attacking a single strategy in the prosecution of a much larger war. “Nonbinding’’ means nonleadership. It is not accountable, and I don’t think it is the right message for our troops.”

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri:

“The series of irretrievable mistakes is a serious list: the skewed intelligence we received from the Defense Department Office of Special Plans; the postwar phase of conflict that did not have sufficient planning; not enough troops, as pointed out by General Eric Shinseki, the former Army Chief of Staff; allowing the uncontrolled looting and the breakdown of law early on after the occupation began; the dismissal of the Iraqi Army, rather than giving them a paycheck and a shovel or having them do security work that is important to the stability of that country; the deBathification, that put so many thousands of Iraqis out of business, out of work, including thousands of school teachers. The administration has consistently refused to adjust its overall strategy. I take no pleasure in this, but it is a moment of ‘I told you so.’”

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:30:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Murtha Vows To Stop Surge" ::

Antiwar Democrat Says He'll Use Power Of Purse To Restrict Bush
(The Politico) By The Politico's John Bresnahan.
via cbsnews.com

Rep. Jack Murtha, one of the most vocal congressional opponents of the war in Iraq, is vowing to block President Bush’s plan to send another 21,500 U.S. combat troops to Iraq by restricting the administration’s military options in a new wartime spending bill.

“We’re gonna stop this surge,” the Pennsylvania Democrat declared in an interview posted on the Website MoveCongress.org.

Stepping up his campaign against the White House, Murtha, chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, told Tom Andrews, a former congressman-turned-activist, in the online interview that he would attach so many conditions to an upcoming spending bill for Iraq that the Pentagon would not be able to find enough troops to carry out the president’s “surge” plan.

The Andrews group, the Win Without War Coalition, is part of a larger federation of anti-war groups sponsoring the site.

Murtha will oversee the $93 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan that the House will consider in mid-March. And he wants to impose new restrictions on how the president can deploy combat forces from the United States to Iraq, allow combat veterans to have at least one year stateside before returning to the frontlines and prevent the Pentagon from keeping soldiers and Marines already in Iraq in uniform after their enlistments expire.

“This vote will limit the options of the president and should stop the surge,” Murtha predicted of next month’s floor fight over the wartime supplemental appropriation. “We’re trying to force redeployment [of troops outside Iraq], not by taking money away but by redirecting it.”

Murtha is not pushing a total cutoff of funds for the war in Iraq. But he is considering measure to limit the military actions Bush can take against Iran, although the congressman was more cautious than his statements about Iraq.

“We are looking at the possibility of putting language in the bill that says you can’t go into Iran unless you have authorization [from Congress],” Murtha said.

Murtha also intends to push a provision to bar the creation of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and to raze the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

The strategy being employed by Murtha and other House Democratic leaders would force Bush and Republican congressional leaders to accept the new troop restrictions, or face the possibility the supplemental spending bill would falter, thus cutting off all funding for the war.

Read more here.

A L S O


The Democrats After November
by Mike Davis
ZNet.com

Was the November 2006 midterm election an epic political massacre or just a routine midterm brawl? In the week after the Democratic victory, partisan spinmeisters offered opinions as contradictory as those of the protagonists in Rashomon, Kurosawa’s famously relativistic account of rape and murder. On the liberal side, Bob Herbert rejoiced in his New York Times column that the ‘fear-induced anomaly’ of the ‘George W. Bush era’ had ‘all but breathed its last’, while Paul Waldman (Baltimore Sun) announced ‘a big step in the nation’s march to the left’, and George Lakoff (CommonDreams.org) celebrated a victory for ‘progressive values’ and ‘factually accurate, values-based framing’ (whatever that may mean). On the conservative side, the National Review’s Lawrence Kudlow refused to concede even the obvious bloodstains on the steps of Congress: ‘Look at Blue Dog conservative Democratic victories and look at Northeast liberal gop defeats. The changeover in the House may well be a conservative victory, not a liberal one.’ William Safire, although disgusted that the ‘loser left’ had finally won an election, dismissed the result as an ‘average midterm loss’.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:30:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Creationists defeated in Kansas school vote on science teaching" ::

· Guidelines challenging Darwinism banned
· Decision is latest blow to intelligent design activists

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Guardian UK

School authorities in the American heartland state of Kansas have delivered a rebuff to subscribers to the notion of intelligent design by voting to banish language challenging evolution from new science guidelines.

In a 6-4 vote on Tuesday night, the Kansas state board of education deleted language from teaching guidelines that challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, and approved new phrasing in line with mainstream science.

It was seen as a victory for a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, science educators and parents who had fought for two years to overturn the earlier guidelines.

The decision is the latest in a string of defeats for proponents of creationism, and its modern variant, intelligent design. It reverses the decision taken by the same authorities two years ago to include language undermining Darwinism - on the insistence of conservative parents and activists in the intelligent design movement.

In redrafting guidelines for science teaching, the board removed language suggesting that key concepts such as a common origin for all life on Earth and for species change were seen as controversial by the scientific community.

The board also rewrote the definition of science, limiting it to the search for rational explanations of what occurs in the universe. The move, though limited in its scope, was seen as significant because it rejected a key argument of subscribers to intelligent design: that providing children with arguments for and against evolution merely amounts to fair play.

But Kansas remains a conservative state and many people harbour misgivings about teaching evolution to school children. The school board received a petition with nearly 4,000 signatures opposing Tuesday's decisions.

Overcoming such misgivings will be difficult, said Jack Krebs, a former maths teacher who is president of Kansas Citizens for Science.

"The bigger issue is the cultural divide. The intelligent design people and the anti-evolution people truly believe that science as it is practised is atheistic, and excludes God, and this is really the heart of the cultural battle," Mr Krebs said.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:45:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "House of Representatives begins Iraq debate" ::

Mark Tran and agencies
Guardian Unlimited

The US House of Representatives today kicked off a debate on Iraq that is expected to lead to a vote of no confidence in George Bush's conduct of the war.

By the end of the week, House members are to vote on a resolution opposing Mr Bush's decision to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq.

With the Democrats holding a 31-seat majority after the November midterm elections, and with the possibility of as many as 20 Republicans defecting, approval is assured, although the resolution is non-binding.

The measure states that the House "will continue to support and protect" troops serving in Iraq, but "disapproves" of the troop build-up.

It marks a nadir for Mr Bush since four years ago when the president, riding high in the polls, received congressional approval for military action.

In the heavily-debated vote in October 2002, the House approved Joint Resolution 114, giving him wide latitude for attacking Iraq, by 296 to 114. The resolution passed by 77 to 23 in the Senate.

The political landscape is now utterly transformed. A Gallup poll earlier this month found that 72% of respondents disapproved of Mr Bush's handling of the war - his highest disapproval rate since the 2003 invasion.

A USA Today/Gallup poll released today showed 60% of Americans opposing Mr Bush's troop "surge".

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:28:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Pentagon unit developed "dubious" prewar intel: report" ::

Reuters
By JoAnne Allen

WASHINGTON - Former U.S. defense policy chief Douglas Feith developed and issued "dubious" intelligence that was used to bolster the Bush administration's case for the invasion of Iraq, a Pentagon watchdog agency said in a report to be released on Friday.

The conclusion by Feith's office that there was a "mature symbiotic relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda was inconsistent with the view of the U.S. intelligence community, according to excerpts of the Pentagon inspector general's report released by Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"An alternative intelligence assessment process was established in the office of Under Secretary for Policy Doug Feith ... that was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. His staff then conducted its own review of raw intelligence reports, including reporting of dubious quality and reliability," the report said.

"They arrived at an 'alternative' interpretation of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC (intelligence community) and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the administration," the report concluded.

An unclassified summary of the report is to be published on Friday, when Levin's committee is briefed on its findings.

Top Bush administration officials cited alleged ties between Iraq and al Qaeda as a justification for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The bipartisan commission which investigated the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 later reported that no collaborative relationship existed between the two.

read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:52:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "27B Stroke 6" ::

RSA Conference Computers So Faux Secured
Blog @ Wired News

One should never trust a public kiosk computer, but at the RSA security conference, one expects the public computers will at least be locked down as well as the public library's boxes.

This year you'd be wrong as Sunbelt Software's president Alex Eckelberry and R&D vice president Eric Sites gleefully demonstrated to 27B by downloading adware from Zango and The Best Offers and by checking Google searches run by previous users.

Seems the Windows XP boxes -- supposedly protected by Sophos -- were actually just Windows XP machines running with full administrative privileges -- meaning any user could install whatever he might like -- including malware and key loggers. The machines didn't even have Sophos's Anti-Virus installed -- instead they used AVG Professional 7.5 (a perfectly good anti-virus program, but its made by Grisoft -- not Sophos).

Eckelberry, who kept muttering "this is so evil," as he added more software to the machine, later said the prank reminded him of his days of messing with computers in Radio Shack as a teen.

Of course, the Sunbelt Software guys -- who the guys who discovered the Microsoft VML exploit in the wild in September and who make software products such as firewalls, anti-spyware and spam killers -- promptly removed their handiwork before running off to an afternoon meeting.

An RSA event employee, contacted by Wired News prior to running this item, said a contractor hired to install the kiosks hadn't done the work to spec and that these computers, along with others, had been fixed.

UPDATE: The Washington Post's computer security correspondent/blogger Brian Kreb's take is here.

posted by me

:: 1:17:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Hackers attack heart of the net" ::

Hackers have attempted to topple key parts of the internet's backbone, in one of the most significant attacks of recent years.

The target was servers that help to direct global internet traffic.

In the early hours of Tuesday three key servers were hit by a barrage of data in what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack.

There is no evidence so far of damage, which experts are saying is testament to the robust nature of the internet.

Websites unreachable

The so-called root servers involved in the attack act as a kind of global address book for the internet by translating website name information into IP addresses to enable computers to visit particular sites.

The servers involved were each operated by a separate body - the US Defense Department, the net's oversight body ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and UltraDNS, which manages traffic for websites ending in "org" and some other suffixes.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:54:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Feb. 3, 1468 ::

Gutenberg Dies
By Tony Long
From Wired News

1468: Johannes Gutenberg dies in Mainz, Germany, where he was born sometime around 1400 (actual birth date unknown). Gutenberg, a goldsmith by trade, made one contribution to technology in particular and to civilization in general, but it was a doozy: the printing press, which made the mass production of printed material possible and revolutionized human communication.

Although movable type existed in China as early as the 11th century, Gutenberg's printing press began a chain of events that altered the social and scientific history of Europe.

His press, featuring movable letters made of either wood or metal, was inspired by the screw-type wine presses then common in the fertile Rhine Valley. He essentially mechanized the craft of woodblock printing, a painstaking, time-consuming process. His technology continued evolving over the centuries, and with these refinements Gutenberg's invention has remained the cornerstone of printing to this day.

Gutenberg began using his printing press in 1450 after returning to Mainz, and in 1455 he produced what has come down to us as the Gutenberg Bible, a beautifully executed folio that would have taken a talented monk months, if not years, to complete by hand. Copies of this bible sold for 30 florins, an enormous sum of money at the time.

At least 59 copies are known to still exist, including one at the Library of Congress and two at the British Museum.
(Source: About.com, Gutenberg.de)

posted by me

:: 4:17:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Remembering Molly Ivins" :

John Nichols

The Guardian UK

Tony Blair has long been the favourite international leader of a Texan named George Bush. But not all Texans have shared the sentiment. Indeed, the US is in mourning over the passing of a Texan who thought the British prime minister a bit too willing to play the poodle in his relationship with the American president.

Molly Ivins, the wisecracking veteran journalist from the Lone Star State and the most widely-circulated liberal columnist in the United States, succumbed Wednesday evening at age 62 to what she referred to as "a scorching case of cancer". That cancer silenced the Bush administration's sharpest critic at precisely the moment when the rest of the US media is finally rising from bended knee to challenge the president. It also removed from the American discourse one of the few popular commentators who regularly reported on - and frequently reported from - Britain.

Ivins, a small "r" republican, took her shots at regal Brits, just as she did regal Americans, in a column that appeared in almost 400 newspapers several times a week. But she was, like most American liberals, a bit of an anglophile. And she let it be known that she expected an Oxford-educated prime minister, especially one from the Labour Party, to give foreign policy cues to the untraveled and incurious president she anointed Shrub.

She would be disappointed. Aghast at the British leader's inexplicable willingness to go along with Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq, Ivins labeled him "Tony Blair, the first casualty of the war". And as the full folly of that war became evident, and as Blair continued to follow Bush's march into the quagmire, Ivins took to teasing the isolated leaders as "the Axis of Feeble".

Ivins had expected more from Blair, who she assumed would recognize his American friend's frailties, even if the prime minister might have had a hard time comprehending what she referred to as her fellow Texan's "eccentric grasp of English". Reporting on the first 100 days of Bush's presidency, the columnist ticked off a long list of missteps and misdeeds - "gratuitously went out of his way to pronounce the Kyoto treaty dead," "needlessly and uselessly enraged the Chinese through ignorance of Taiwan policy" - and then noted: "On the plus side, after his first meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, Bush said, 'we both use Colgate toothpaste.' The Brits spent weeks trying to decipher the meaning of that remark."

When Bush finally began meeting with foreign leaders, Ivins informed her readers that there was "a joke making the rounds in Europe: Bush, Tony Blair, and Jacques Chirac are holding an economic summit. While Chirac maunders on about something, Bush leans over and says to Blair, 'The trouble with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.'" At the time, she assumed that Blair would gently set the president straight on such matters. Eventually, however, the caustic commentator came to the conclusion that the prime minister was aiding and abetting the president.

A respected journalist who worked for many years as a New York Times bureau chief - finally writing her way out of the job when she referred to a "community chicken-killing festival" in a small town as a "gang-pluck" - Ivins wrote columns that drew on the absurdities of politics in her native Texas. And when the most absurd Texan of all became president, she found that tens of millions of Americans wanted her take on the new commander-in-chief. She did so in the form of what remains the best biography of the president: Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W Bush (written with her friend Lou Dubose). She could have settled into an easy career of Bush bashing. Instead, frustrated by the a White House press corps that she said was characterized by "no principle, no guts, no grace", Ivins kept investigating and reporting - often, in the months after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, providing the only skeptical assessment of the president to appear in newspapers across the country.

Ivins traveled to Britain to find fodder for her columns, and she was the first prominent US journalist to write extensively and aggressively about the so-called Downing Street Memo. "I read some of the European press and most of the liberal publications in this country. I read the [New York] Times, the [Washington] Post, the Wall Street Journal and several Texas papers every day. It's my job," she informed readers. "But when I read the first Downing Street Memo, my eyes bugged out and my jaw fell open. I could not believe what I was reading."

To her, the evidence of collusion between the Bush administration and Blair's aides to assure that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of attacking Iraq was "the smoking gun" and she wrote the hell out of the story in a series of columns. For many Americans, living in communities where their local media reported little or nothing about the memo, Ivins's columns were revelations. As she noted, "The memo was a huge story in Britain, but is almost unreported here."

"I don't know if these memos represent an impeachable offense," she wrote. "But they strike me as a hell of lot worse than anything Richard Nixon ever contemplated. He used the government for petty political vindictiveness. Heck, I'd settle for that again, over what we're looking at now."

Read more here.

A L S O

A voice liberal with wit, passion
Austin American-Statesman

President Bush: Molly Ivins Will Be Missed
Playfuls.com

posted by me

Labels: "Molly Ivins"

:: 6:39:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Bubba, we -- yes, we --have to stop the war now "::

1/07/2007 03:01 AM CST
By Molly Ivins, Creators Syndicate

The president of the United States does not have the sense that God gave a duck -- so it's up to us. You and me, Bubba.

I don't know why George W. Bush is just standing there like a frozen rabbit, but it's time we found out. The fact is that WE have to do something about it. This country is being torn apart by an evil and unnecessary war, and it has to be stopped. NOW.

This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it's doubly wrong for him to increase U.S. troop levels in this hellhole by up to 20,000, as he reportedly will soon announce.

What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny?

Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?

It's monstrous to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people the charges against them if they're arrested. This administration has done away with rights enshrined in the Magna Carta, and we've let them do it.

This will be a regular feature of mine, like an old-fashioned newspaper campaign. Every column, I'll write about this war until we find some way to end it. Every column, we will review some factor we should have gotten right.

So let's take a step back and note that before the war, one of its architects, Paul Wolfowitz, testified to Congress that Iraq had no history of ethnic strife.

Sectarian and ethnic strife is a part of the region. And the region is full of examples of Western colonial powers trying to occupy countries, take their resources and take over the administration of their people -- and failing. The sectarian bloodbath we see daily completely refutes Wolfowitz.

And let's keep in mind that when the Army arrived in Baghdad, we, the television viewers, watched footage of a bunch of enraged and joyous Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein, their repulsive dictator, in Firdos Square. Only one thing was wrong: The event was staged, instigated by a Marine colonel and a psychological operations unit that made it appear spontaneous.

When we later saw the whole square where the statue was located, only 30 to 40 people were there (U.S. soldiers, press and some Iraqis -- and one of several U.S. tanks present pulled the statue down with a cable). We, the television viewers, saw the square being presented as though the people of Iraq had gone into a frenzy, mobbed the square and spontaneously pulled down the statue.

We need to cut through all this smoke and mirrors and come up with an exit strategy, forthwith.

The Democrats have yet to offer a cohesive plan to get us out of this mess. Of course, it's not their fault -- but the fact is that we need leaders who are grown-ups and who are willing to try to fix it. Bush has ignored the actual grown-ups from the Iraq Study Group and the generals and all other experts who are nearly unanimous in the opinion that more troops will not help.

It's up to you and me, Bubba.

We need to make sure that the new Congress curbs executive power, which has been so misused, and asserts its own power to make this situation change.

Now.

posted by me

:: 10:20:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Remembrances" ::

Molly Ivins Dies at 62 After Bout with Breast Cancer

npr.org

by Robert Siegel and Wade Goodwyn

Syndicated columnist and best-selling author Molly Ivins has died of breast cancer at the age of 62. As editor of the Texas Observer during the 1970s, Ivins became famous for her biting wit as she chronicled the political antics of the Texas legislature.

A liberal who often skewered the political establishment, Ivins wrote a book about President Bush titled Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. It became a best seller.

Ivins became famous writing about Texas, but she got her early seasoning in Minnesota as a police reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

She then made her name in Texas as an editor for the Observer, an independent political journal. "I never saw anything funnier than Texas politics," Ivins once said of her time covering the good-ol'-boy networks of state politics.

posted by me

:: 10:11:00 AM [+] ::
...