2004

No Whining

ArchPundit November 1, 2004 1 Comment

This guy defines what democracy is about. Wow.

TAHOKA, Texas – In the 10 days after Welch Flippin decided to stop dialysis and began succumbing to kidney failure, the 85-year-old Texas farmer and World War II veteran had something on his mind. Something, he told his son, he just had to do. He wanted to vote.

So when early voting started last week, his son went down the road to the Lynn County clerk’s office in Tahoka, a one-stoplight town of nearly 2,000 people 30 miles south of Lubbock, and asked if he could take a ballot home to his ailing father.

The clerk offered instead to make a house call.

“In a small town, we’re able to do that,” County Clerk Susan Tipton said Thursday. “But I’ve never had one that was under hospice care, so it was harder emotionally.”

The next morning, she went to the house and saw Welch Flippin, a man she had known for years from his work with veterans. When he smiled and greeted her by name, she knew he was alert enough to vote. She told him he could sign with an X. But he signed his name clearly.

When she left the room to give him and his son privacy, Perry Flippin held the ballot and started asking his father, a staunch Democrat, for whom he wanted to vote.

“You like Kerry and Edwards?” Perry Flippin, retired editor of the San Angelo Standard-Times, recalled in a column in the newspaper.

“Naw,” he replied wearily.

“Bush and Cheney?”

“Naw.”

The elder Flippin answered, “Yeah” when asked whether he liked 13-term Democratic Rep. Charlie Stenholm. His son marked an X for Stenholm.

He dozed off after that and did not talk to his son or wife again. The next day, Oct. 20, he passed away. His last conscious act was casting his vote.

Under state law, the vote will count.

“I think he knew exactly what he was doing, and I was privileged to cast that last ballot,” his son said Thursday. “I’m surprised that he would be thinking about that on his death bed, but he thought his vote was important.”

The Officer Backs Bush

ArchPundit October 31, 2004 2 Comments

Why does Bush want Carl Officer’s support? And why would the Leader treat this as a good thing.

Pat Gauen recounted the more colorful moments of Carl’s career in the PD in 2003:

My personal favorite was the day he gathered the press to announce that he was filing a federal suit to stop Gov. James Thompson from using the National Guard to seize the city. When I broke the news to Thompson’s press secretary, I thought the poor man would laugh himself into a stroke. No troops ever showed up.

Or maybe the best was the time Carl began a speech by greeting me from the podium, by name, but then complained the next day to my editor that the resulting story was unfair because he wouldn’t have spoken so candidly had he known a reporter was present.

No, I think it was the opening of an obstetrical unit to help deal with the community’s soaring population of unwed mothers. Carl, a bachelor, publicly announced that he was personally going to start work on populating the place that very night.

Oops, I almost forgot the major MetroLink ceremony where Carl wiped the smile off every face by vowing to block the project because he wasn’t consulted. (Civic leaders unanimously insisted that Carl was invited to every meeting but never once showed up.)

You’ve surely heard about how Zaire un-invited Carl to help fine-tune its government after he announced that he would take his own blood supply, so if he got sick he wouldn’t depend on its “monkey blood.”

Perhaps the best was when he got stopped by police doing 108 mph in a Jaguar borrowed from a convicted drug dealer. Carl bitterly denied the cop’s version, insisting he really had been doing 140.

Is there no end to it?

I haven’t gotten to the bodyguard with the Uzi. Or the $2,200 Carl claimed for trips never taken. Or the consulting contract the city council approved for $545,000 but Carl signed for $1.3 million. Or Carl’s hearty endorsement of a $450 million riverfront development plan long after everyone else, including a federal grand jury, figured out that it was just a big scam.

The uzis I believe, were present when he went to Big Al’s in Peoria–a gentleman’s club–and his ‘bodyguards’ had to explain why they were carrying uzis.

That’s some family values plan there.
From the Leader:

In breaking with his party on the Presidential race, Officer, an ordained minister, cited serious differences he has with the Democratic leadership on issues like gay marriage and abortion.

So uzis in strip clubs, okay. Populating the city obstetrics unit as a bachelor okay. But a woman having a right to choose and gay marriage bad. It’s all so clear.

If your party is so fricken’ desperate for any black person to back you all, you might try changing the approach.