Texas Babe Strikes Again

This must be ladies' day. I don't care who puts this stuff out as long as it gets out, but Molly Ivins is my favorite. She's definitely got a burr under her saddle.

Fixer'll like this one. Molly drives a Ford pickup. A good part of this is a follow-up to one of Fixer's posts.

This column is not about the presidential debate. It's about Other Stuff. Particularly eye-catching are the updates on the price of gasoline, your overtime pay, why the company most likely to hold the mortgage on your house could go broke, why you're getting peanuts from new tax cuts just passed by Congress and how the government is kicking hundreds of thousands of kids off health insurance while promising not to. Cheer all around.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has just put out a new study showing that the five biggest oil companies (ExxonMobil, Total, Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco) reported a $5.5 billion, or 16 percent, increase in profits during the first half of 2004 compared with the same period last year, which was no slouch either. Both ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco posted record second quarter profits in 2004.

When the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and moi are in perfect accord, it either means the End Times are near or we're both right for once. Accounting irregularities at Fannie Mae, the nation's largest backer of home mortgages, may force a "restatement of earnings," a lovely phrase meaning, "Oops, we cheated and got caught."

Once again, I left out the good parts to tempt you to go read the article.

Molly Ivins is widely read (and lusted after in some quarters) but she's not exactly mainstream media. Why aren't the mass media cuttin' through the shit like she does? Could it have anything to do with the phrase "Corporate America"?