Waco - Ongoing dispute between Lake Shore Dr. GOP and Grass Roots Types Still Brewing With the King Street Patriots making waves in Houston's 18th Congressional District over poll watching, the ugly issue moved to Waco in inter-party and intra-party bickering just the day before elections.
Question: Who will watch the poll watchers watch the polls?
They seem to focus on the ghetto, not on the precincts located in silk stocking districts, you know.
U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Dist.18), has asked Attorney General Eric Holder for help with the Tea Party poll watchers, who insist on standing behind voters at the polling booths as they cast their ballots.
She and others nationwide, including riot stick-toting New Black Panther Party activists in Philadelphia, allege voter intimidation by zealous Tea Party and Republican activists.
But now even the staid and conservative political officials of Waco and McLennan County have joined the fray with County Democratic Chairman Karen Petree protesting comments by grass roots coordinator and State Republican Executive Committeewoman Janet Jackson of Clifton.
In a training class aimed at GOP poll watchers, she allegedly told those attending that election officials will be interested in knowing if they still reside at the address listed on their credentials.
“So if you moved, you don't want to tell them,” she reportedly told trainees, according to an audio tape acquired by The Waco “Tribune-Herald” Staff Writer Michael W. Shapiro.
In an interview with KXXV-TV Channel 25, Mrs. Jackson laughed at the notion that poll watchers could overstep their boundaries.
“Laughing about voter intimidation is offensive enough, said Ms. Petree, “but to actually instruct poll watchers – who are supposed to protect the sanctity of our elections – on how to commit potential voter fraud by lying about their home addresses is beyond the pale.”
Mrs. Jackson expressed gratitude in follow-up interviews that it was the full extent of the Democratic case for voter intimidation.
Ms. Petree called it “disinformation.”
But wait. There's more!
McLennan County Republican Chairman Joe B. Hinton, a retired executive vice president of Exxon-Mobil, said “I was absolutely appalled at the way she handled the whole thing from start to finish. I thought she was very unprofessional and flippant in her reaction to the questions being asked of her. I'm obviously not a supporter of the Democrats, but I think they were right in asking those questions.”
Mrs. Jackson told newsmen that when she tried to coordinate poll watcher training with Mr. Hinton, he hung the phone up in her face without even saying goodbye.
It's all part of an intra-party dispute that began when Mrs. Jackson went to the County Republican Party office on Lakeshore Dr. one day in the dim recesses of the distant past and a dispute erupted between herself and former Republican State Legislator and County Republican Party Chairman M.A. Taylor's wife. A dispute arose over disagreeable happenings regarding Mr. Holt Getterman, a candidate for office.
Someone allegedly called someone else a whore.
The Legendary always has trouble recalling the precise details of that part of the ongoing saga. It would require the stamina of a William Faulkner in his salad days as a Mississippi correspondent with the New Orleans “Times-Picayune” to chronicle the twists and turns of the ways of the people of Yoknapatawpha-at-the-Crossroads.
Politics. Yes. The people, yes.
Howsoever, at that point, according to Mrs. Taylor, a police officer who just happened to be in the building at the time responded to the shouting match and requested that Mrs. Jackson leave the premises.
The war was on.
And the floggings will continue until morale improves.
No doubt.
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