Shana Alexander, Requiescat in pace.

From UPI (via The Washington Times) come this news:

Shana Alexander, '70s TV star dies

Shana Alexander, who gained fame as the liberal voice on the "Point/Counterpoint" segment on CBS' "60 Minutes" in the 1970s, has died. She was 79.

She inspired one of my favorite SNL bits: "Jane, you ignorant slut."

Alexander, who broke ground earlier as the first woman staff writer and columnist at Life magazine, died of cancer Thursday in an assisted-living facility in Hermosa Beach, Calif., her sister, Laurel Bentley of Manhattan Beach, told the Los Angeles Times.

A 1945 graduate of Vassar College, she was a columnist for Newsweek magazine in 1975 when she was teamed with James J. Kilpatrick, the conservative Washington Star columnist, on "Point/Counterpoint" for the next four years.

She wrote The Pizza Connection, a book about some of my unsavory gangster cousins.

Born in New York City in 1925, Alexander was the daughter of Milton Ager, a successful pop composer whose songs included "Happy Days Are Here Again," "Hard-Hearted Hannah" and "Ain't She Sweet."

That's pretty cool.

She was twice married and twice divorced. Her 25-year-old daughter, Kathy Alexander, died in 1987.

On television she appeared to be a doctrinaire totalitarian of the middle. She now knows the truth.

May God have mercy on her soul.