AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Witty best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, a Texas liberal who died after a long battle with breast cancer, left legions of admirers, even among the politicians she regularly skewered.

President Bush, referred to as “Shrub” in Ivins’ writings, said in a statement issued after her death Wednesday evening that Ivins was a Texas original who was loved by her readers and many friends.

“I respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase. She fought her illness with that same passion. Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed,” Bush said.

Ivins died in her home in hospice care. She was 62. Ivins revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time.

Her livelihood was poking fun at Texas politicians, whether they were in the White House or her home base of Austin.

“Molly Ivins’ clever and colorful perspectives on people and politics gained her national acclaim and admiration that crossed party lines,” said a statement from Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry, playfully dubbed “Governor Goodhair” by Ivins.

Colleagues at the liberal Austin-based biweekly The Texas Observer remembered her as a mentor and hero, a patriot and a friend.

“With Molly’s death we have lost someone we hold dear. What she has left behind we will hold dearer still,” the Observer said in a statement. The Observer’s Web site Wednesday night featured photos and tributes to Ivins, once a co-editor of the publication.

Readers from around the world e-mailed remembrances of Ivins, telling how she had touched their lives. Some fans dropped off flowers at the Observer’s office in downtown Austin.

More than 400 newspapers subscribed to her nationally syndicated column. Ivins’ illness did not seem to hinder her populist-toned humor or her ability to deliver biting one-liners.

“I’m sorry to say [cancer] can kill you but it doesn’t make you a better person,” she said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in September 2006, the same month cancer claimed her friend former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.

In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq.

“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war,” Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. “We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!’”

Ivins’ best-selling books included those she co-authored with Lou Dubose about Bush. One was titled Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and another was BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush’s America.

Dubose, who has been working on a third book with Ivins, said even last week in the hospital, Ivins wanted to talk about the book.

“She was married to her profession, she lived for the story,” he said.

Ivins’ jolting satire was directed at people in positions of power. She maintained that aiming it at the powerless would be cruel.

Ivins was an equal-opportunity critic, taking jabs at and making fun of politicians of both major parties if she felt they deserved it.

“Molly Ivins’ work made us all laugh – liberal, conservative and in-between,” said Democratic state Sen. Rodney Ellis of Houston. “She had an incredible gift to cut to the chase and make us not take ourselves too seriously. She was one of a kind.”

In an Austin speech last year, former President Bill Clinton described Ivins as someone who was “good when she praised me and who was painfully good when she criticized me.”

Former Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a longtime Republican who turned independent for her unsuccessful run for governor last year, recalled the time Ivins called her “tougher than a two-bit steak.”

“Well, I tell you, she was one of the toughest Texans I’ve had the privilege of knowing,” Strayhorn said. “She fought for independent newspapers, she fought for independent thought, the forgotten, the vulnerable. She was one of the toughest, wittiest and most dedicated women. … She was a Texas ambassador of wit and intellect across these United States.”

Ivins loved to write about politics and called the Texas Legislature, which she referred to as “The Lege,” the best free entertainment in Austin.

“Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?” she wrote in a 2002 column about a California political race.

She referred to conservative Panhandle Rep. Warren Chisum, a favorite target, as “the Bible-thumping dwarf from Pampa.”

Chisum said that if Ivins didn’t agree with him, he was doing the right thing.

Ivins opposed a constitutional change banning same-sex marriage. “Gay marriage, now there’s a crisis,” Ivins said. “Well, OK, so there isn’t much gay marriage going on here in Texas. None, in fact. First, we made it illegal. Then, we made it unconstitutional. But President Bush is all concerned about it, so I guess we have to alter the U.S. Constitution.”

“She was magical in her writing,” said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ivins in 1992. “She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn’t hurt so bad.”

Born Mary Tyler Ivins in California, she grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

She is survived by her brother, Andy Ivins, of London, Texas; her sister, Sara Maley of Albuquerque, N.M.; two nephews and two nieces.