The Chron tut-tuts Rick Perry for giving a $40K/year job to a lobbyist's wife. Any more emotion on their part and I might actually be able to detect a pulse.
Elsewhere on the Patronage Patrol, here's a nice parting gift for Gregg Phillips.
Gregg Phillips and Larry Temple worked together in the mid-1990s in a massive and largely unsuccessful attempt to downsize Mississippi's human services agency. Then last year both landed prime Texas government jobs: Phillips as the No. 2 man at the Health and Human Services Commission overseeing the downsizing and privatization of state welfare programs; Temple as the executive director of the Texas Workforce Commission, the state's unemployment agency.Now there are questions about whether Temple steered a $670,270 state contract to a company that Phillips founded. That company still employs Phillips' wife and is run by a woman whom Temple describes as an old "family friend."
Temple and Phillips denied any wrongdoing involving the contract. Temple blamed a disgruntled agency employee for prompting an internal investigation, which he said cleared him of any improper activity.
"I had a secretary who, it came to my attention, had made some negative comments relative to me," Temple said.
What I find more outrageous is that we're hiring beauracrats from friggin Mississippi. You know, the state that ranks fiftieth in just about everything (with the exception of education, where Texas recently took a commanding lead). Are they just trying to make Texas suck?
Posted by: brooks on July 20, 2004 3:53 PM