I met Molly Ivins in 1992 and she was already famous. It was a couple of days before the election, and everyone knew Bill Clinton was going to win, and Molly was having a bourbon with a bunch of other reporters at the Capitol Hotel in Little Rock. She was really tall and she had shocking red hair and she looked like she could kick your ass if she wanted. And she was funny. Lord, was she funny.

She also was a liberal-progressive, wrote for all of the really lefty magazines, but her humor was so irresistible that Creators Syndicate picked her up for general newspaper use — something that didn’t happen much to liberals then and still doesn’t happen much today.

She was a Texan, and was perhaps the world’s best skewerer of all politicians with a last name of Bush, and journalism would be a whole lot better off if it had more people with her passion, no matter what their ideology.

Molly Ivins died this afternoon. She was 62 and had been fighting breast cancer for years. You can read her last column here and a tribute from her editor here.