Friday, February 17, 2006
Don't Tex With Messes
Maybe Whittington should be buried in New Orleans.
You can't follow the Lone Star State without knowing your Politex
(There are quotations within quotations that I haven't bothered to re-format; emphases added. Read the story)
In 1999 then-Gov. Bush got him to chair the Funeral Service Commission, a regulatory State agency. At the time, Bush was embroiled in a whistle-blower lawsuit that contended that Bush and Robert Waltrip, the owner of SCI, the largest funeral corporation in Texas, were in cahoots. Waltrip, a Houston-based CEO, had previously donated (at least) $45,000 to the Bush campaigns for governor and $100,000 to Daddy Bush for his Presidential Library. Here's how Romero describes it:"The Texas funeral industry was then riddled by claims of irregularities, some surrounding Service Corporation International, of Houston, a large chain of funeral homes headed by an ardent supporter of the Bush family. Under Whittington, the commission reluctantly settled a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by a former state regulator who maintained that she had been fired for investigating the company....
The Austin Chronicle's Robert Bryce calls it a "whistleblower lawsuit" which "alleges that Bush and other politicos worked to thwart an investigation by the Texas Funeral Service Commission (TFSC) into improperly licensed embalmers working out of SCI funeral homes in Dallas." Bush managed to stay out of court until Whittington worked out an undisclosed out of court settlement that cost the State of Texas $155,000 and Waltrip's SCI $55,000, as reported in the Dallas Morning News...We know where all the Bush Funeralgate players are today, right? Waltrip? Of course:"The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Kenyon International to set up a mobile morgue for handling bodies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. "
Appalachia cousins aren't this incestuous.
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