Pat Trembee's Day!

Today is Pat Trembee's 47th birthday. He is a psychologist for Contra Costa County, California. He has a associate degree in psychology and is attending Contra Costa Community College to further his education. He lives with Clark Attaway, his companion of 28 years!

Pat has lived a tough life; getting past alcohol, angst, and long term family troubles. He is a kind generous and at time cynical man, but always he is honest and without guile.

He has been a dear friend since 1978. All of us at Audiea wish him all the best!

Happy Birthday Pat!

S.F.'s Castro district faces an identity crisis: As straights move in, some fear loss of the area's character
Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer

To walk down San Francisco's Castro Street -- where men casually embrace on sidewalks in the shadow of an enormous rainbow flag -- the neighborhood's status as "gay Mecca" seems obvious.
But up and down the enclave that has been a symbol of gay culture for more than three decades, heterosexuals are moving in. They have come to enjoy some of the same amenities that have attracted the neighborhood's many gay and lesbian residents: charming houses, convenient public transportation, safe streets and nice weather.
The integration of gay and straight is increasingly evident not only in the Castro District but across North America, from Chicago to New York City to Toronto, where urban revitalization is bringing new residents at the same time some gays are settling in other parts of cities or the suburbs -- such as the East Bay.
But some gay and lesbian residents of the Castro are worried that the culture and history of their world-famous neighborhood could be lost in the process, and they have started a campaign to preserve its character. The city, meanwhile, is spending $100,000 on a plan aimed at keeping the area's gay identity intact.
Heterosexuals "are welcome as long as they understand this is our community," said Adam Light, a leader in the Castro Coalition, a group formed eight months ago to address the shifts in the neighborhood in recent years.
In San Francisco, the line between the Castro and nearby Noe Valley has blurred, said Aldo Congi, a San Francisco native and vice president of McGuire Real Estate who has sold property in the city since 1979. In the 1970s, the gay revolution in the Castro was shocking to straight people, including him.
"There used to be demarcation, where straight families would want to be in Noe and gay families or couples in the Castro," Congi said. "I think it's much more integrated now. I don't think there's any question about that."
While evidence of the change is largely anecdotal, estimates based on census data from 2000 and 2005 show that San Francisco and other major cities in the United States are losing gay and lesbian couples, while Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose gained couples, according to a UCLA demographer.
The Castro's gay and lesbian residents need to be actively involved in neighborhood planning if they want to see the area maintain its identity, said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, chair of the School of Public Affairs and Urban Planning at UCLA.
"It's very difficult to stop change," she said. "But you can try to direct it in ways that you like as opposed to ways that you hate."
San Francisco's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community also is helped by its storied history. Thousands of gays and lesbians came to the city at the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement in the late 1960s, settling first in the Haight, where they fixed up Victorian homes. In the 1970s and '80s, many of them moved over the hill to the Castro, where there was less crime.
"I think the only gay neighborhood that is going to survive is the Castro," said Don Reuter, a New York writer who has spent the past seven months documenting the status of gay enclaves in 12 U.S. cities. "In every city this is going on. We're unraveling. Our gay neighborhoods are unraveling," he said.
In Chicago, the core gay neighborhood has moved farther from the urban center as real estate prices have risen. Most gay and lesbian people who own homes now live on the northern edge of the city, said filmmaker Ron Pajak, who is documenting the history of the city's gay community.
A district of gay nightclubs in southern Washington, D.C., is being demolished to make room for a new stadium. And in Toronto, high-rise condos are replacing parking lots in the Gay Village, and more heterosexuals are moving into the neighborhood.
"You can't tell people where to live, and people are making all sorts of decisions," said Kyle Raye, Toronto's first openly gay city councilman who has represented the Gay Village area since 1991. "The lines are blurred; even the police love working (during gay pride events). There are significant social changes that have occurred."
Still, gay and lesbian residents in San Francisco are trying to draw lines around the Castro. Last week, the city began taking bids from consultants to create a plan to guide development of at least nine major properties and vacant lots on Market Street.
Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represents the area and is leading the city planning process, sees the effort as a "community visioning process" that will include the creation of smaller units of affordable housing for young people and the elderly.
"I think we can do things in the next four to five years that will sustain us for the next 40," Dufty said.
He also wants development that will create spaces for community institutions such as Theater Rhinoceros, which bills itself as the city's "queer theater," and organizations that assist people who have HIV and AIDS. But his biggest goal is to create a permanent home in the neighborhood for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society's archives, along with a museum.
"People from around the world go to the Castro, and there is precious little they can access to know our history," he said.
That history was not a factor when Rachel Beckert and her husband decided to move their family to a flat on Eureka Street in the heart of the Castro three years ago.
"The only thing that meant anything to me was the area would be nice," said Beckert on a recent day, as she watched her son and daughter ramble through the playground at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center a block from the center of the Castro Street shopping district. Eureka Valley is the historic name for the neighborhood that once had many Irish and German residents, some of whom still live there.
Beckert's brother, sister-in-law and their children moved into the flat below them. They picked the neighborhood for its location, safety and proximity to shopping -- attributes that attract many.
At first, Beckert wondered if her family's presence would provoke a backlash from gay and lesbian residents, but she says they have been friendly. She rejects suggestions that families like hers should live in other neighborhoods.
"You could also say this neighborhood used to be full of families," she said, adding that neighbors on both sides of her building lived in the Castro before it became a gay enclave.
The blocks surrounding the recreation center and the Beckerts' home have the highest concentration of gay and lesbian residents in the Castro -- as high as 95 percent, according to an estimate based on 2000 census data by Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, which tracks demographic data of gays and lesbians. According to the estimate, the proportion of gay and lesbian residents ranges from about 80 percent to 30 percent elsewhere in the area.
Using census data to look at population shifts over time is more difficult. Between 2000 and 2005, same-sex couples in San Francisco declined by about 5 percent, Gates estimates. The rate was 2 1/2 times that of heterosexual couples.
The trend is also apparent in Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Houston, Detroit and Austin, Texas, according to the estimate. The population of same-sex couples in Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose, meanwhile, appeared to increase during the period -- San Jose by 34 percent, Oakland by 14 percent and Berkeley by 8 percent.
Along Castro Street, merchants are seeing another trend: high turnover among shops as business owners struggle to afford rents that are among the highest in the city.
"We need to find and attract new businesses to the neighborhood," said Paul Moffett, president of the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro. "They may not be gay-owned, but the bottom line is we want a vibrant, successful and healthy business community. Whether gay, Chinese, African American or owned by women, it doesn't matter."
Perhaps the central question expressed in community forums about the future of the Castro is whether gays and lesbians should assimilate into mainstream culture as they gain acceptance -- or maintain a separate place.
"Having a specific neighborhood politicians can point to, can go to and shake hands or kiss lesbian babies, has really solidified the gay vote, our political muscle," said longtime community activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca at a forum in November.
He said places that are free from anti-gay violence and discrimination are important refuges. But other people believe anti-gay sentiment will fade over time.
San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau chief Joe D'Alessandro, who lives in the Castro with his gay partner and their six children, said he thinks gay enclaves marginalize the people who live there. He said the gay community in his previous home of Portland, Ore., a city without a historically gay neighborhood, is a model because gay and lesbian residents comfortably live in the mainstream.
"They do not live in a ghetto," D'Alessandro said, "and I think they're stronger because of it."
Castro forum on gay neighborhoods

From NY Times
The Way We Live Now: Narrowing the Religion Gap?
By GARY ROSEN
Try a quick political thought experiment. First, form a mental picture of the Democratic front-runners for president — Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now do the same for the leading Republican contenders — John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Next (and this is the key step), imagine each of them in church, sitting in a pew, head bowed, or better still, at the pulpit, delivering a homily or leading the congregation in worship.
Strange, no? It’s not hard to envision Clinton and Obama among the faithful. She is a lifelong Methodist and self-described “praying person,” and he belongs to a church where some years ago he found himself (in his own words) “kneeling beneath that cross” in submission “to His will.” Both slip easily into the earnest, humble-of-the-earth mode of liberal God talk.
But McCain and Giuliani? You somehow imagine them fidgeting during the hymns and checking their watches. The senator is an Episcopalian, the former mayor a Catholic, but neither man, you have to think, would be caught dead in a Bible-study group or could possibly declare, à la George W. Bush, that his favorite philosopher is “Christ, because he changed my heart.” In the piety primary, the Democrats win hands down.
None of this is likely to reverse the “religion gap” in our politics — that is, the fact that regular churchgoers identify by a wide margin with the G.O.P. Come election time, the personal religiosity of the Democratic candidates won’t matter nearly as much as the positions they take in all the drearily familiar theaters of the culture war. What a matchup between churchgoing Democrats and secular-minded Republicans may supply, though, is welcome moderation in our debates over issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. God knows, both sides of the ideological divide have fundamentalists in need of taming.
On the right, the culprits are familiar, having become stock characters in our politics. In his unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain called them “the agents of intolerance,” singling out Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. For a taste of their views, you can visit the Web site of Concerned Women for America (C.W.A.), which bills itself as the “nation’s largest public-policy women’s organization.” Its mission is “to protect and promote biblical values among all citizens,” the Bible being “the inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.” As for dissenters from C.W.A.’s stand on issues like the “sanctity of human life,” a handy link to Bible passages explains “why you are a sinner and deserve punishment in Hell.”
A number of observers on the right, including Jeffrey Hart of National Review, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and the blogger Andrew Sullivan, have performed a service lately by denouncing the G.O.P.’s pact with such authoritarian bullies. But the problem can be exaggerated. Whatever their private views, most of today’s big-time social conservatives speak in public as faith-based policy wonks, not as preachers of fire and brimstone. Consider James C. Dobson, the controversial founder of Focus on the Family. In a recent article titled “Two Mommies Is One Too Many,” he objected to the impending parenthood of Mary Cheney and her partner. The core of his argument? What he trumpets as “more than 30 years of social-science evidence” showing that children do best with a married mother and father.
Is Dobson persuasive about the supposed evils of gay parenthood? Not to me. But the case he makes is based on an asserted set of facts — facts that are open to challenge and dependent on neither revelation nor church writ. Yes, he also avers in passing that traditional marriage is “God’s design for the family and is rooted in biblical truth,” and this is probably what motivates him. But is there anything wrong with so frankly religious a premise? Does it somehow disqualify his arguments?
Here is where the dogmatists of the secular left come in. Looking to fend off Bible-toting conservatives, the philosopher Richard Rorty argued more than a decade ago that in a modern democracy, faith should be a strictly private matter and has no place in public discussion. Traditional religion, he wrote, is a “conversation stopper,” a source of values before which nonbelievers can be only mum. The same rigid divide informs a recent manifesto “in defense of science and secularism” signed by such academic luminaries as Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer and Edward O. Wilson. They urge the country’s political leaders “not to permit legislation or executive action to be influenced by religious beliefs.”
So categorical a rejection of faith in the public square is impossible to reconcile with our political traditions, of course. It sweeps away not just today’s social conservatives but also abolitionism, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement. Dr. King without the almighty? Unthinkable. Conceding the extremism of his earlier view, Rorty himself has backtracked. Citizens should feel free to speak as believers, he now suggests, so long as they don’t simply “cite authority, scriptural or otherwise.”
It’s a reasonable standard. After all, very few of us, whether religious or secular, can easily articulate our views about fundamental things. On questions of human dignity and human ends, we tend to sputter and assert, setting out propositions that are difficult to justify to those who don’t share them. Invoking secular values like “autonomy” or “self-realization” can be just as much of a “conversation stopper” as appealing to the Bible. What we owe one another are concrete explanations, grounded in terms we might hope to share.
Can the rising field of presidential hopefuls move beyond the collision of orthodoxies to which we have grown accustomed? Maybe in some small way, if only because of the peculiarities of the personalities involved, but even that would be progress. At our present cultural moment, it is hard to think of a more edifying prospect than a campaign that will feature a running debate between churchgoing Democrats and vaguely impious Republicans.
Gary Rosen is the managing editor of Commentary.

Retinal Implant Restores Limited Sight to Blind

From Forbes

FRIDAY, Feb. 16 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. researchers say a new high-tech implant is restoring at least some sight to people blinded by eye disease.
The device -- known as the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System -- is an updated and more powerful version of an electronic retinal implant that has been the subject of ongoing clinical trials since 2002.
Speaking in San Francisco on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the device's developers announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had recently granted approval for a new clinical trial of the technology.
The prototype artificial retina used an array of 16 electrodes surgically inserted into a diseased eye to function as light-sensitive surrogates for damaged retinal photoreceptor cells.
Implants of this original configuration were able to give six blind patients the limited ability to distinguish light, perceive motion, and identify general shapes and objects.
The second generation retinal prosthesis will be fitted with 60 electrodes -- an increase that the researchers say will offer the blind the opportunity to acquire higher-resolution sight.
"Our work to date with our retinal prosthesis has exceeded all expectations we had, and we are very excited and look forward to the results from our 60-channel implant," said lead researcher Dr. Mark Humayun, a professor of ophthalmology with the Doheny Eye Institute in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, San Francisco.
He said that clinical trials of the newest generation of retinal prosthesis will begin later this year.
The technology is being targeted at both young and elderly patients blinded by either retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration. Approximately 25 million people, six million in the United States alone, have lost most or all of their vision to such diseases, a figure Humayun said researchers expect will double by 2020.
The term "retinitis pigmentosa" (RP) refers to a number of hereditary eye diseases characterized by the slow deterioration of retinal receptor cells, known as rods and cones. Such cells are key in capturing and translating light into an electrical pulse, which the brain then interprets as an image.
Usually striking early in life, the condition most commonly results in the uncorrectable loss of peripheral vision and color perception.
By contrast, macular degeneration (MD) involves damage to the center of the retina and the loss of central vision, rendering the patient unable to focus clearly on objects straight ahead. Over time, reading, driving, and face recognition are all severely impaired by this incurable disease, which has no known cause and is most common among the elderly. By some estimates, more than 10 million Americans are currently afflicted with the illness.
Both the original and current versions of the retinal implants, each manufactured by study co-sponsor Second Sight Medical Products, are designed to communicate with an external camera and computer.
The implant patient is outfitted with a pair of glasses rigged with a video camera. The camera records incoming visuals and transmits the sights by wire to a customized computer for processing. The data is, in turn, sent wirelessly directly to the implant, whose electrodes decode the message into an electrical impulse that can be directed to the brain for visual interpretation.
The second-generation study will focus on patients over the age of 50 who once had healthy vision before contracting either RP or MD.
The researchers expressed enthusiasm about the new device's prospects, noting that this suped-up version will bring also faster implant and recovery times, because it is just one-quarter the size of the original model.
However, Dr. John Loewenstein, an associate chief of ophthalmology with the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston, cautioned that even these cutting-edge technologies cannot promise anything like complete eyesight.
"This is by no means a slam-dunk, in the sense that it will provide true vision in the way we usually think about it," said Loewenstein, who is also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and involved in similar work.
"I don't want to denigrate the work, and this is a beginning," he said. "But the retina's electrical transmission process is very sophisticated, and we simply don't yet understand the language well enough to simulate it."
Loewenstein added that he has seen no evidence to suggest that electrode technology is yet poised to replicate the retina's complexity.
"When we put those electrodes in and stimulate the retina, people can see spots of light," he explained. "But we have not yet succeeded in translating those spots of light into true images. The analogy is to a scoreboard with individual light bulbs lined up to make up a '1' or a '2' or an 'A' or a 'B'. A person with normal vision can interpret all the bulbs as a whole to construe a letter or number. And we have all hoped, naively, that we could mimic this ability with a prosthesis. But, so far, it just hasn't worked out that way."
Jim Weiland, a member of Humayun's research team and an associate professor of ophthalmology, agreed there are many obstacles on the path toward full sight restoration. But he remains optimistic.
"Yes, it's true that how we stimulate the retina to convey useful information is still an open question," Weiland acknowledged. "So, this device is not something that's going to replace the natural vision that you and I have. But I do expect that there will be some benefit that a completely blind person may derive from this device, in terms of providing some ability to make out imagery and navigate about."
"Of course, this benefit has to be proven in a trial," added Weiland. "We think we're on the right road. But we still have a lot of work to do."

They wrote off resilient Rudy a little too soon
Andrew Sullivan
It tells you something about the state of the American right that Rudy Giuliani is having a very hard time deciding whether to run for the Republican nomination in 2008. He either has the highest ratings of the plausible candidates among Republican voters, or near the highest.
His image will for ever be fused with the heroism of the response to 9/11. His legacy is the ravishing revival of New York City in the 1990s. Nobody doubts his effectiveness as a manager, or the charisma he brings to the political arena. No other Republican has his star power. And yet he has been inching only tentatively towards a real decision, and still hasn’t pulled the lever.
There are various plausible explanations for Giuliani’s equivocation. Some argue that the New York tabloids are sitting on a pile of sleaze to be hurled in his general direction once he hits the truly big time. It’s plausible. You don’t get to turn New York City around without knowing and persuading many unsavoury urban characters. It would not be a shock to discover that some of that rubbed off.
He’s also making a small fortune in the consultancy business and the speaking circuit — money he’d forfeit in a presidential run and clients who might not like the public scrutiny involved. Besides, he’s already a hero. Why ruin it with a campaign that would only expose all his faults, errors and flaws?
All of these factors might be at play in Giuliani’s mind. But the lukewarm response to him from the party’s base cannot be a plus. Here’s a quote of last week from a key leader of the religious right, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council: “He’s the frontrunner but it’s kind of like here in DC, you drive over the Potomac [river] at night and it looks beautiful but if you get down near it you certainly wouldn’t want to take anything out of it and eat it. It’s polluted; it’s got problems.”
A more elevated expression of the base’s discomfort came from Terry Jeffrey last week. Jeffrey is an editor at Ronald Reagan’s favourite journal, Human Events and wrote a column for National Review, the leading conservative magazine, that politely described Giuliani as anathema to conservatism.
You might well rub your eyes. Giuliani is for low taxes, law and order (often at the expense of civil liberties) and strong defence. As a prosecutor, he went after white-collar crooks like Michael Milken and Marc Rich as well as mafia hoods. He has a sterling antiterrorist record. In 1995 he famously ejected the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from a concert at the Lincoln Center in New York because Arafat had not been formally invited. “Maybe we should wake people up to the way this terrorist is being romanticised,” Giuliani explained.
You’d think this record would count as “conservative”. You’d think this colourful, capable, intelligent man would be the Republican party’s dream candidate. He was Time magazine’s person of the year in 2001. He has been called “America’s mayor”.
After a presidency criticised for incompetence, Giuliani is a details-oriented, results-driven manager. Seconds after his inauguration, Americans would feel safer.
But read Terry Jeffrey’s ideological indictment: “Giuliani’s positions on abortion and marriage disqualify him as a conservative because they annihilate the link between the natural law and man-made laws. Indeed, they use man-made law to promote and protect acts that violate the natural law.”
Giuliani’s heretical positions on abortion and marriage are as follows: he believes that abortion should be legal and that gay couples should be able to enter civil unions (but not civil marriage). The evangelical base of the Republicans believes that any civil recognition of gay couples is an attack on the family and that any defence of the right to a legal abortion is anathema.
For good measure, Giuliani is also fine with embryonic stem-cell research and mellow on immigration. So he would be to the right of David Cameron (he’d shoot a hoodie before he hugged one), but he is far too far to the left for the vocal elements of the Republican base.
Then there’s the personal life. Giuliani has been married three times. He divorced his second wife while having an affair with a staffer whom he then married. It got ugly for a while. Worse: during his estrangement from his second wife, he lived in the house of a gay couple who were friends. He has also dressed in drag on several occasions. You can YouTube a clip of him in full drag being courted by Donald Trump in a department store. New Yorkers loved it. But it doesn’t go down too well in South Carolina.
Or does it? The polling is extremely clear: Giuliani, for all his heretical tendencies, is still ahead of every other Republican candidate. Moreover, a recent Gallup poll found only 23% of Republican voters deeming him “unacceptable” compared with 41% saying the same for John McCain. The salient question to ask is: if Giuliani is so abhorrent to conservatives, why is he polling so well?
We don’t know the answer to that yet. It’s hard to gauge a campaign’s viability before it has begun. My view is that the managers and spokesmen of the base may be misreading the real mood of the evangelical rank and file. They’re more pragmatic than their leaders. If Hillary Clinton is the alternative, many Republicans will overlook Giuliani’s social moderation.
Moreover, there is a growing sense even among hardline conservatives that they may have overreached badly these past few years. Their stridency on abortion, gays, stem-cell research and end-of-life issues has begun to lose them many voters in the suburbs, the Midwest and the Mountain West. They are worried that the thumping loss in the midterm elections of 2006 was not a blip but the turning of a tide against them.
If they believe that, maybe Giuliani is the perfect antidote. Maybe he could rid the Republicans of their metastasising image as a Southern, intolerant and corrupt machine, and rebuild a more national and inclusive Republican party.
Or maybe, of course, his candidacy could be the final coup de grâce for a coalition already sinking under its own divisions. We don’t know yet — and neither does Rudy. So we wait for him, as he waits for others, and as the 2008 campaign waits for no one.

Small Agraculture Takes Root in South Dade

tfigueras@MiamiHerald.com
It's as inevitable as sitting through Hamlet's soliloquy: At some point in the school year, the students in Dan Holmes' English class will endure what has become known at Braddock High as the ``bamboo talk.''
Part tongue-in-cheek punishment intended to lull rowdy students with a botanical lecture, it's also one of the few moments when Holmes' twin passions intersect -- his workaday life teaching literature to seniors and his after-school job growing and, he hopes, selling bamboo.
''It's really two parts of my brain,'' said Holmes, who says bamboo is easier to tend to than other people's children. He has turned his backyard puttering into a modestly profitable enterprise.
''Enough to keep me from having to teach summer school,'' Holmes said.
Tucked amid South Miami-Dade's multimillion-dollar tree farms, landscaping nurseries and large tropical-fruit operations are a hodgepodge of small growers like Holmes.
Relative late bloomers, they have taken to farm life to augment their paychecks, keep themselves busy after retirement or to simply escape the pressures of a 9-to-5 job.
''There's a lot of small growers who started out as something else,'' said Redland activist Pat Wade, a former researcher and professor at the University of Miami's School of Medicine who now runs a small backyard nursery. ``Firefighters, police officers, teachers. Just about everyone has had a previous life.''
Wade's son started the nursery, which specializes in indoor landscaping plants for bank lobbies and the like, after graduating from South Dade High's well-regarded farming program.
Wade, 65, sold off her beloved horses, Ginger and Kentucky, to make room for the 12,000-plant nursery on her 1-acre property.
A GROWING TREND
Smaller farms are a growing trend in Miami-Dade -- where larger farms have been sold and carved up into five-acre homesteads, according to the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
While Miami-Dade has the highest number of farms in the southern agricultural region of Florida -- the 10 counties south of Lake Okeechobee -- the size of a typical farm in Miami-Dade has decreased by 40 acres since 1977.
Roughly 94 percent of Miami-Dade's farms have less than half the average Florida farm's 200 acres, according to a UF study based on the 2002 Agricultural Census, the most recent numbers available.
Turning small acreage into money-making ventures can be tricky and labor-intensive.
''You get a Pink Hibiscus mealybug or a hurricane, and you're dead in the water,'' Wade said. ``There are so many risks. There's disease, pests, the weather.''
A bacterial infection nearly wiped out her entire stock a few years ago. In a good year, her profits reach $20,000.
''That year, the nursery cost us money,'' Wade said.
Though not far from the Wades' nursery, Costa Farms is a sharp contrast.
Costa, one of the county's largest operations, holds more than 5 million plants in busier months, such as the ramp-up to the spring planting season. Its 145-acre Redland headquarters makes more than $200 million in annual sales, said Armand Tesserot, the company's financial analysis manager.
''We are definitely the little guys,'' said Wade, whose workforce usually consists of her husband, John, 64.
The couple puts in about 10 hours a week in a slow period -- more if sales are in full swing or if they're rebounding from a busy hurricane season.
Holmes, relies on his wife, Martha, a fellow English teacher, and 15-year-old daughter Katherine, to pitch in with weeding and staffing the stands at weekend plant fairs.
`SUMMER JOB'
Despite his prominence in botanical circles -- Holmes frequently lectures at the nearby Fruit and Spice Park -- he has resisted expanding.
His website, www.holmesbamboo.com, gently informs potential clients that the business is his and Martha's ''summer job.'' He doesn't take orders online either.
''I need this to decompress. Teachers get burned out,'' Holmes, 59, said. ``And those pots get pretty heavy.'''
For some, a sideline in agriculture doesn't stay that way.
Steve Garrison gave up his job as chief of police of Virginia Gardens nearly 20 years ago in favor of tree farming.
''I realized if I wanted to build something for my kids and grandkids, I had to build up the nursery,'' said Garrison, whose Almond Tree Farms in Homestead grosses roughly $2 million a year. Almost all of it goes back into the business, he said.
Garrison began with a part-interest in his brother-in-law's backyard bougainvillea nursery -- but later bought him out, when Garrison was still a Homestead police officer.
He worked part time on his nursery when he was named chief of the small municipality of Virginia Gardens in 1985 -- something that caused friction with the town mayor, who objected to his work schedule. He was suspended and ultimately dismissed, though he says he decided to leave.
Garrison said he misses law enforcement and still keeps his police certification current ``because you never know.''
But his plan to build up a business for his family has paid off: At 54, he plans to retire in a few years, perhaps write a book of historical fiction and turn the business over to his three sons.
''That's not bad for something I started as a goof,'' he said.

Anna Nicole Smith Dies in Florida at 39
By SUZETTE LABOYThe Associated PressThursday, February 8, 2007; 6:27 PM
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. -- Anna Nicole Smith, the pneumatic blonde whose life played out as an extraordinary tabloid tale _ Playboy centerfold, jeans model, bride of an octogenarian oil tycoon, reality-show subject, tragic mother _ died Thursday after collapsing at a hotel. She was 39.
She was stricken while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and was rushed to a hospital. Edwina Johnson, chief investigator for the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office, said the cause of death was under investigation and an autopsy would be done on Friday.
Just five months ago, Smith's 20-year-old son, Daniel, died suddenly in the Bahamas in what was believed to be drug-related.
Seminole Police Chief Charlie Tiger said a private nurse called 911 after finding Smith unresponsive in her sixth-floor room at the hotel, which is on an Indian reservation. He said Smith's bodyguard administered CPR, but she was declared dead at a hospital.
Through the '90s and into the new century, Smith was famous for being famous, a pop-culture punchline because of her up-and-down weight, her Marilyn Monroe looks, her exaggerated curves, her little-girl voice, her ditzy-blonde persona, and her over-the-top revealing outfits.
Recently, she lost a reported 69 pounds and became a spokeswoman for TrimSpa, a weight-loss supplement. On her reality show and other recent TV appearances, her speech was often slurred and she seemed out of it. Some critics said she seemed drugged-out.
"Undoubtedly it will be found at the end of the day that drugs featured in her death as they did in the death of poor Daniel," said a former attorney for Smith in the Bahamas, Michael Scott.
Another former Smith attorney, Lenard Leeds, told the celebrity gossip Web site TMZ that Smith "always had problems with her weight going up and down, and there's no question she used alcohol." Leeds said it was no secret that "she had a very troubled life" and had "so many, many problems."
"She wanted to be like Marilyn her whole life and ironically died in a similar manner," Leeds said. Monroe died of a drug overdose at age 36 in 1962.
Smith attorney Ron Rale told The Associated Press that he had talked to her on Tuesday or Wednesday, and she had flu symptoms and a fever and was still grieving over her son.
"Poor Anna Nicole," he said. "She's been the underdog. She's been besieged ... and she's been trying her best and nobody should have to endure what she's endured."
The Texas-born Smith was a topless dancer at strip club before she entered her photos in a search contest and made the cover of Playboy magazine in 1992. She became Playboy's playmate of the year in 1993. She was also signed to a contract with Guess jeans, appearing in TV commercials, billboards and magazine ads.
In 1994, she married 89-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, owner of Great Northern Oil Co. In 1992, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $550 million.
In a 2005 interview with ABC, Smith recalled meeting Marshall at what she called a "gentleman's club' in Houston. "He had no will to live and I went over to see him," she said. "He got a little twinkle in his eyes, and he asked me to dance for him. And I did."
Marshall died in 1995 at age 90, setting off a feud with Smith's former stepson, E. Pierce Marshall, over his estate. A federal court in California awarded Smith $474 million. That was later overturned. But in May, the U.S. Supreme Court revived her case, ruling that she deserved another day in court.
The stepson died June 20 at age 67. But the family said the court fight would continue.
Smith starred in her own reality TV series, "The Anna Nicole Show," in 2002-04. Cameras followed her around as she sparred with her lawyer, hung out with her personal assistant and interior decorator, and cooed at her poodle, Sugar Pie. She also appeared in movies, performing a bit part in "The Hudsucker Proxy" in 1994.
After news came of Smith's death, G. Eric Brunstad Jr., the lawyer who represented Marshall, said in a statement: "We're very shocked by the news and extend the deepest condolences to her family."
In a statement, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said: "I am very saddened to learn about Anna Nicole's passing. She was a dear friend who meant a great deal to the Playboy family and to me personally."
Smith's son died Sept. 10 in his mother's hospital room in the Bahamas, just days after she gave birth to a daughter.
An American medical examiner hired by the family, Cyril Wecht, said he died accidentally of a combination of methadone and two antidepressants. Last month, a Bahamas magistrate scheduled a formal inquiry into the death for March 27.
Meanwhile, the paternity of Smith's now 5-month-old daughter remained a matter of dispute. The birth certificate lists Dannielynn's father as attorney Howard K. Stern, Smith's most recent companion. Smith's ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead was waging a legal challenge, saying he was the father.
Debra Opri, the attorney who filed his paternity suit, said Birkhead "is devastated. He is inconsolable, and we are taking steps now to protect the DNA testing of the child. The child is our No. 1 priority."
Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan on Nov. 28, 1967, in Houston, one of six children. Her parents split up when she was a toddler, and she was raised by her mother, a deputy sheriff.
She dropped out after 11th grade after she was expelled for fighting, and worked as a waitress and then a cook at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken restaurant in Mexia.
She married 16-year-old fry cook Bill Smith in 1985, giving birth to Daniel before divorcing two years later.

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The New Crusaders
The radical traditionalist Catholics, who reject the teachings of the modern papacy, may form America's largest group of anti-Semites.
by Heidi Beirich

"Fucking Jews!"
So began Mel Gibson's now infamous anti-Semitic rant to Los Angeles sheriff's deputies who pulled him over on suspicion of drunken driving last July. "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," the world-famous movie actor continued, before asking his arresting officer: "Are you a Jew?"
After his tirade made international news, Gibson promptly disappeared into an addiction clinic. He left behind a statement, released through a spokesman, begging the Jewish community for forgiveness and suggesting that booze was to blame. He was, he wrote, "in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display." But their origin is easy enough to pinpoint -- the extremist Catholic beliefs Gibson learned at the knees of his anti-Semitic father.
Gibson's dad, Hutton Gibson, is an important player in the shadowy world of radical traditionalist Catholicism, also known as "integrism" or Catholic separatism. This religious subculture's teachings have little in common with the modern Roman Catholic Church and its universalistic theology. Hutton Gibson, for one, is a well-known Holocaust denier who believes the Second Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s, which made the church vastly more tolerant of other faiths, were the result of "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews." He is particularly incensed by the council's historic declaration, "Nostra Aetate," which condemned "all hatreds, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews." In Gibson's world, the Second Vatican Council's liberalizing reforms are rejected and anti-Semitic teachings and conspiracy theories are heartily embraced.
Like father, like son.
Mel Gibson has his own traditionalist house of worship near Los Angeles -- a church, funded entirely by him, that is not recognized by the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese. It is unclear what is said in the hallowed halls of the Holy Family Chapel, since, unlike virtually all other Catholic churches, it is closed to the public. What is known is that Gibson is reported to have blamed Jews for forcing him to cut a scene, in which Jews and their descendants are held responsible for the murder of Christ, from his 2004 film, "The Passion of the Christ." Sounding a bit like he did that July night in Malibu, Gibson told The New Yorker: "If I included that in there, they'd be coming after me at my house. They'd come to kill me."
Few Americans defended Mel Gibson's drunken rant about the evils of the Jews. But radical traditionalist Catholics did. A three-year investigation of this subculture by the Intelligence Report has found that these Catholic extremists, including the Gibsons, may well represent the largest population of anti-Semites in the United States. Organized into a network of more than a dozen organizations, scores of websites and several extremist churches and monasteries, radical traditionalists in the U.S. are preaching anti-Semitism to as many as 100,000 followers. A few, such as the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's family, Christopher Ferrara, are even movers and shakers in important right-wing Republican circles.
Jew-Bashing at the Holiday Inn
The Philadelphia airport Holiday Inn is an odd place to celebrate a Catholic mass, especially in a city filled with lovely churches and an extraordinary, century-old Romanesque cathedral. But the inn is where the radical traditionalist Catholic outfit, (CFN), held its annual conference in 2003, dressing up one end of a drab conference room with an altar, incense, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, and transforming it into a church.
The rest of the hall looked rather different. Vendors set up folding tables along almost every inch of the remaining walls, piling them high with books, videotapes and Catholic accessories. The stacks were notable for the prominence of anti-Semitic and extremist materials, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Hutton Gibson's Is the Pope Catholic? to CFN head John Vennari's popular anti-Semitic conspiracy tract, The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita. Priests in Roman collars staffed many tables; brown-cloaked monks manned others.
CFN conferences hearken back to the era before the Roman Catholic Church enacted the liberalizing Vatican II reforms, which removed from the weekly Mass prayers for the conversion of the Jews and also ended the centuries-old practice of celebrating the Mass in Latin, the Vatican's official language. At the Holiday Inn in 2003, Sunday's religious activities started with a now rarely celebrated hour-long recitation of the rosary. After that, apostate priests conducted a rendition of the Latin Mass, a format dating to the Middle Ages, before an audience remarkable for the veils that covered every woman's hair and the time it spent on its knees.
Vatican II did not ban these time-honored celebrations, and many Catholics who call themselves "traditionalists" continue to worship in this manner in churches that remain an official part of the Holy See (these churches are awarded an "indult" that allows them to continue celebrating the Latin Mass). The vast majority of those who practice Catholicism in this older form are unrelated to the radical traditionalist Catholics who gathered in Philadelphia. Indeed, the groups that gave presentations at the CFN conference preach a theology specifically rejected by the Vatican, and many have been declared schismatic, or officially separated from the church.
The participants at the CFN conference spent most of their time bashing Jews and, in particular, dwelling on the perils of much-feared "Judeo-Masonic" plot. As preached from the pulpit that day, the alleged conspiracy involves ancient, shadowy fraternities such as the Masons and the Illuminati, who are seen as puppets in a Jewish master plan aimed at destroying the Catholic Church. The theory is laid out in great detail in Venarri's Alta Vendita, which has been compared to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous tract also alleging a global plot by the Jews.
But the "Judeo-Masonic" plot wasn't the only fearful conspiracy that was described that day. There was also the "Marxist-Jewish" scheme that is ruining our schools, the "Jewish-homosexual" alliance that is destroying the priesthood, and, naturally, the 9/11 conspiracy, which has to do with the fact that the 2001 terrorist attacks were actually "predicted by the Blessed Virgin Mary 84 years ago."
The Passion of the Anti-Semites
The Philadelphia Jew-bashing was not a one-off. Several such conferences are held quietly around the country each year, and they attract thousands upon thousands of people. The Intelligence Report also attended a radical traditionalist conference held in 2005, a year and a half after CFN's. Put on by the St. Joseph Forum (SJF) of South Bend, Ind., the conference was held at a Quality Inn up the road from Notre Dame, the esteemed Catholic university seen by conference attendees as fatally corrupted by multiculturalism and religious tolerance.
The SJF conference, attended by more than 250 people, was awash with extremists. A favorite of the crowd was Father Stephen Somerville, who Mel Gibson employed as his spiritual adviser during the filming of "The Passion of the Christ." Somerville was suspended in 2004 by the Vatican for schismatic behavior and is a popular speaker at radical traditionalist Catholic conferences. At the forum, he raged at "a corrupt subculture or network of homosexuals" ruining the priesthood.
But the most extreme comments of the weekend came from Brother Anthony Mary of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a monastery and order based in Richmond, N.H. (The Slaves were founded in the 1950s by Boston-based priest Leonard Feeney, an anti-Semite ultimately excommunicated by the Vatican.) Mary's presentation was entitled, "The Fruits of Zionism."
"The perpetual enemy of Christ is the Jewish nation," Brother Mary roared, explaining that the aim of the Jews is to "destroy all Christian nations." Mary blamed Jews for both world wars -- an opinion also mouthed by the drunken Mel Gibson -- and a coming world government. Professing from the pulpit a "great hatred" of Jews, Brother Mary declared that "Jews are the synagogue of Satan" -- a phrase that is also part of the official ideology of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations.
"We must always and everywhere," he added, "oppose Jewish schemes."
An Unsavory Tradition
Since the colonial period, American society has been marred by sometimes savage anti-Catholic prejudice, an antipathy that mushroomed as waves of Irish, Italian and German Catholics arrived here in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Anti-Catholic hatred fueled the 1850s rise of the Know Nothings, the largest third party in U.S. history, and it also drove the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when nearly 4 million Americans became members.
Yet some of America's greatest peddlers of hate have themselves been extremist Catholics. The best known of these was Father Charles Coughlin, the Michigan "radio priest" who at his height in the late 1930s was spewing pro-Nazi propaganda to 3.5 million listeners on his CBS radio broadcasts. Repeating common anti-Semitic canards, Coughlin blamed the Great Depression on an "international conspiracy of Jewish bankers"; Jews also got the blame for communism. Two weeks after the German national pogrom known as Kristallnacht, Coughlin blamed the Jews for their own persecution, making him a hero in the German press. Also in 1938, Coughlin published an article in his Social Justice weekly -- which at one point had 1 million subscribers -- attacking Jews, atheists and communists. Parts of the article were plagiarized directly from the English translation of a 1935 speech by Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Coughlin was finally forced off the air in October 1939, the month after Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland.
Two other priests, both now dead, serve as the primary inspiration for today's radical traditionalist Catholics. The first is Father Denis Fahey, an Irish priest who died in 1954 and was much admired by Coughlin -- just as he is also admired by today's neo-Nazis, some of whom have contributed a number of his quotes to "1,001 Quotes By and About Jews," a feature on the racist Stormfront website.
Fahey was a prolific author whose main topic was the inherent evil of the "Jewish Nation." Repeating classic anti-Semitic allegations, Fahey blamed nearly all iniquity on Jews. According to an article by Sandra Miesel in Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine, Fahey "enjoyed quoting papal policy statements against Jews, coyly refused to reject the long-debunked Protocols [of the Elders of Zion], praised the anti-Semitic activities of [automaker] Henry Ford, and denied the death toll from the Holocaust." Taking on the church's main bogeyman in the early 1900s, Fahey laid atheistic communism directly at the feet of the Jews: "The real forces behind Bolshevism are Jewish forces, and Bolshevism is really an instrument in the hands of the Jews for their establishment of their future Messianic kingdom."
While spouting the same kind of anti-Jewish propaganda as the Nazis, Fahey crafted an argument that he believed should exempt him from the label of anti-Semite. Fahey claimed he didn't hate the Jews per se, but merely opposed their "naturalistic aims." Since he also argued that Jews can't help but work to further those aims -- communism, the destruction of Christianity, and the like -- this was a distinction without a difference. (Today's radical traditionalist Catholics, including the Society of St. Pius X, a far-right powerhouse that has thousands of supporters, continue to claim they are not anti-Semitic, just against "Jewish naturalism.")
Along with Coughlin, Fahey is the main source for The Plot Against the Church, a 1967 book supposedly written by 12 clerics under the pen name "Maurice Pinay." Similar to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book blames Jews, also referred to as the "synagogue of Satan," for every evil that has befallen Catholics from Roman times to the present. Citing ancient papal writings, the book suggests that Jews be expelled or enslaved, segregated and forced to wear visible marks. It's little wonder that modern neo-Nazis praise Pinay's work. But so do large numbers of radical traditionalist Catholics, and the book is sold by Omni Christian Book Club, the favorite bookseller of today's radical traditionalists.
The Beat Goes On
The second great inspiration for contemporary radical traditionalists is Father Leonard Feeney, another fervent anti-Semite who was for years a leader of Boston's St. Benedict Center, a Jesuit institution. Feeney is best known in Catholic circles for his especially hard-line version of the "no salvation outside the church" doctrine.
Feeney also is known for preaching against Jews on the Boston Common with his followers. Although he was finally excommunicated for disobedience in 1953, he rapidly founded his own order, Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and started a newsletter, The Point, that was suffused with anti-Semitism. Feeney's newsletter blamed Jews for controlling and biasing the press and for creating communism. One article lambasted Jews for their role in the "anti-hate" initiatives that it despised. Another, published in April 1958, was entitled "Newspapers and The New York Times: Other Jews and Minister Sulzberger" and summed up the Jewish "problem" like this: "Essential to the understanding of our chaotic times is the knowledge that the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-Christian bloc within Christian society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by every means at its disposal."
Feeney did reconcile with the church in 1974, four years before his death. But his anti-Semitic ideas remain popular in radical traditionalist Catholic circles and in the New Hampshire monastery his followers started, which still endorses his anti-Semitic ideology, to the point that a New Hampshire bishop lambasted the monastery's teachings in 2004 as "blatantly anti-Semitic" and "offensive."
The bishop isn't the only one who sees Feeney as anti-Semitic. One white supremacist has created an online archive of Feeney's writings (fatherfeeney.org) for the benefit of fellow Aryans. It is part of the so-called "World White Web."
A Dynamic Movement
Today's radical traditionalist Catholics -- the theological descendants of Feeney and Fahey -- are part of a thriving, energetic movement, even if it is one that is tiny when compared to the approximately 70 million Americans who are mainstream Catholics. The dozen or so organizations that make up this movement read each other's writings, buy each other's conference tapes, and co-publish major theological works. They put on conferences several times each year that are served by circuit-riding preachers like Brother Mary and Father Nicholas Gruner.
The movement is important for a number of reasons. It is growing, and spreading its anti-Semitic teachings, at a time when anti-Semitism and religious conflict generally are clearly resurgent around the world. Some of the most radical of the traditionalists are increasingly interacting with neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. For example, John Sharpe, head of the anti-Semitic Legion of St. Louis, attended the 2006 conference of American Renaissance, a racist publication that specializes in race and intelligence. That same year, Father Gruner, leader of the International Fatima Rosary Crusade, attended a conference of The Barnes Review, a Holocaust denial journal. Gruner celebrated a special Mass at the Washington, D.C., conference, which was also attended by an array of long-time neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other anti-Semites.
The radical traditionalists may also be gaining influence on the larger political scene. The best example of this is Christopher Ferrara, the lawyer who in 1990 started the American Catholic Lawyers Association to defend "Catholics in religious and civil liberties cases." Ferrara writes for anti-Semitic traditionalist journals like The Remnant. He recently said Pope Benedict XVI had "abased himself by entering a synagogue." He uses Robert Sungenis, a particularly venomous anti-Semite, to staff the "Apologetics Desk" at his legal organization. But he also was the lawyer for the family of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose feeding tube was removed in 2005 after a protracted court battle. In that role, Ferrara rubbed shoulders with key Republican and Christian Right leaders who convinced Congress to pass a law to protect Schiavo that was ultimately killed by the courts.
If radical traditionalists belong to a particular sect -- and many do not -- it is most typically the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a sprawling international group that publishes reams of anti-Semitic writings on its website and is based, in the United States, in Kansas City, Kan. In the late 1980s, Pope John Paul II excommunicated all SSPX priests and declared the sect formally in schism, but it has continued to grow. In America, 20,000 to 30,000 people are members.
Many of these radical traditionalists embrace "sedevacantism," a word derived from the Latin that refers to a period when "the see [or seat] is vacant." While the term is the official Roman Catholic word for the period between a pope's death and the election of his successor, many radicals are sedevacantists in the sense that they believe that there has not been a real pope for years (typically, since 1958). Some have adopted conspiracy theories about rigged papal elections and even the idea that the authentic pope is secretly being held in captivity.
The radicals' understanding of what has gone wrong with the world boils down to a few basic things. They believe that most of the theological developments within the church since Vatican II have been egregiously wrong, especially with regard to reconciling with Jews and the followers of other faiths. They despise the Vatican's ecumenical outreach efforts. And they lament the fall of the Latin Mass and argue that the new Mass, "Novus Ordo," does not guarantee salvation. Through it all, disdain and even outright hatred for Jews flows like a poisonous river.
A Joyless Faith
For the vast majority of Catholics, the existence of an anti-Semitic, sedevacantist subculture is highly distressing. The church has worked extraordinarily hard in recent decades to distance itself from anti-Semitic teachings and the idea of forcing its view of the world on unbelievers. And, by most accounts, it has been successful, with many Jewish and organizations from other faiths praising its efforts. Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, signaled his gratitude after the 2005 death of Pope John Paul II, who, he said, "revolutionized Catholic-Jewish relations" by denouncing anti-Semitism as a "sin against God and humanity." More recently, Pope Benedict XVI's repeated clarifications of statements he made about the Islamic faith in September reflected a commitment to interfaith dialogue.
Yet the ranks of the radical traditionalists seem to be swelling. Michael Cuneo, a scholar of Catholicism, wrote in his 1997 book The Smoke of Satan that weekly attendance at American chapels of the Society of St. Pius X had been growing at about 10% annually since the late 1980s. Today, SSPX, which raises its own funds without help from Rome, employs 336 member priests in 27 different countries, teaches 226 seminarians in six international seminaries, runs 130 priories, and serves more than 600 Mass centers. The group also runs nine retreat houses, 14 major schools, and another 50 schools connected to priories or chapels.
Stephen Hand, a respected Catholic theologian and editor of the Web-based Traditional Catholic Reflections and Reports, wrote in 2000 of his worries about the growth of the movement. "Integrism," he said in his book Tradition, Traditionalists and Private Judgment in a reference to radical traditionalist Catholicism, "is a bitter affair, a joyless 'faith.' It thrives on polemics, on opposition and hatred."
There is little question that much of the world is seeing a resurgence of ethnic and religious hatreds and accompanying violence. As dangerous conflicts between Christianity and radical versions of Islam multiply around the globe, the last thing humanity needs is still one more form of religiously based extremism.

Intelligence Report
Winter 2007

Molly Ivins, Populist Texas Columnist, Dies at 62
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died today at her home in Austin. She was 62.
Her death, after a long fight with breast cancer, was confirmed by her personal assistant, Betsy Moon.
In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her ideological opponents with droll precision.
After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that America was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”
“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”
Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas Observer, the muckraking biweekly that would become her spiritual home for life.
Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was “reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its legislature was “reporter heaven.” When the legislature was set to convene, she warned her readers: “Every village is about to lose its idiot.”
Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She viewed President George H.W. Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.)
But she derided President George W. Bush, whom she first knew in high school. She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, she wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush” (2000) and “Bushwhacked” (2003).
In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush’s re-election, and as the war in Iraq continued, she called for his impeachment. In her last column, earlier this month, she urged readers to “raise hell” against the war.
Mary Tyler Ivins was born on Aug. 30, 1944 in California and grew up in the affluent Houston suburb of River Oaks. Her father, James, a conservative Republican, was general counsel and later president of Tenneco Corporation, an oil and gas company.
As a student at private school, Ms. Ivins was tall and big-boned and often felt out of place. “I spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds,” she said.
She developed her liberal views partly from reading The Texas Observer at a friend’s house. Those views led to fierce arguments with her father about civil rights and the Vietnam War.
“I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet,” she told The Texas Monthly.
After her father developed advanced cancer and shot himself to death in 1998, she wrote: “I believe that all the strength I have comes from learning how to stand up to him.”
Like her mother, Margot, and grandmother, Ms. Ivins went to Smith College in Massachusetts. Graduating in 1966, she also studied at the Institute of Political Science in Paris and earned her master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Her first newspaper jobs were at The Houston Chronicle and The Minneapolis Tribune, now The Star Tribune. In 1970, she jumped at the chance to move to Austin, where she became co-editor of The Observer.
Covering the statehouse, she found characters whose fatuousness helped focus her calling and define her persona, which her friends saw as populist and her detractors saw as manufactured cornpone. Even her friends marveled at how quickly she could drop her Texas voice for what they called her Smith voice. Sometimes she combined the two, as in: “The sine qua non, as we say in Amarillo.”
Ronnie Dugger, the former publisher of The Observer, said the political circus in Texas inspired her. “It was like somebody snapped the football to her and said, ‘All the rules are off, this is the football field named Texas, and it’s wide open,”’ he said.
In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.
While she drew important writing assignments, like covering the Son of Sam killings and Elvis Presley’s death, she sensed she did not fit in and complained that Times editors drained the life from her prose. “Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she later wrote. “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.”
After a stint in Albany, she was transferred to Denver to cover the Rocky Mountain states, where she continued to challenge her editors’ capacity for prankish writing.
Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her attempt to use it angered the executive editor, A.M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.
She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”
But the paper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.
After The Times Herald folded in 1991, she wrote for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, until 2001, when her column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Ms. Ivins, who never married, is survived by a brother, Andy, of London, Tex., and a sister, Sara Ivins Maley, of Albuquerque, N.M. One of her closest friends was Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, who died last year. The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds.
“Molly is a great raconteur, with a long memory,” Ms. Richards said, “and she’s the best person in the world to take on a camping trip because she’s full of good-ol-boy stories.”
Ms. Ivins worked at a breakneck pace, adding television appearances, book tours, lectures and fund-raising to a crammed writing schedule. She also wrote for Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly and The Nation.
An article about her in 1996 in The Star-Telegram suggested that her work overload may have caused an increase in factual errors in her columns. (She eventually hired a fact-checker.) And in 1995, the writer Florence King accused Ms. Ivins of lifting passages from Ms. King’ for an article that Ms. Ivins had written in Mother Jones in 1988. Ms. Ivins had credited Ms. King six times in the article but not in two lengthy sentences, and she apologized to Ms. King.
Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”
But she continued to write her columns and continued to write and raise money for The Observer.
Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”