Monsieur Le Governor Perry, the spittin', swearin',
Other reports have already deconstructed part of Mssr. Le Governor's argument, by showing that employment in Texas remained high after 2007 due to employment in the government, not the private, sector.
In other words, Monsieur Le Governor Perry is a liar.
However, thinking Dogs know that employment is only one yardstick of the quality of life in a nation-state like Texas. Dogs also know enough to get in out of the sun before your brain boils. Mssr. Le Governor apparently doesn't know as much as any Dog.
Invictus, one of the few allowed to post articles at Barry Ritzholt's site, The Big Picture, did what good analysts do -- he looked at the data.
So, putting employment aside, I thought I’d examine some other metrics by which states are measured. Using the excellent database at the Council of State Governments (which I’ve written about previously), I took a look at a dozen “quality of life” metrics to see how Texas ranks relative to its peers.The image opening this post shows where the country of Texas is relative to
In each case, I ranked the 50 states in a manner where “1″ is the best score achievable and “50″ the worst (e.g., the highest high school graduation rate would garner a “1,” the lowest incidence of STD’s would also garner a “1.” In other words, if you’re a governor — a state’s CEO, as it were — you always want to be #1 and, conversely, nowhere near #50.).
I have difficulty recalling what, aside from Oil, Texas has given to the world. Murder of a President? "Lil' Boots" Bush? Big hats, no cattle? The most executions of convicted prisoners? Of whom even some were guilty? (Mssr. Le Governor would know about executing the innocent, personally.)
To be fair, Mssr. Le Governor did inherit a state already pushed towards insolvency and badly mismanaged by "Lil' Boots", and many of the Quality Of Life indicators listed above were already low when he took office.
However, he's had years to address the issues, and apparently hasn't done a goddamned thing. Texas under the Le Governor looks more like a badly-run agricultural amusement park than a part of the United States:
- Seventh from the bottom in people over 65 living in poverty?
- At the very bottom, No. 50, in persons over 25 graduating high school?
- Almost at the very bottom, No. 49, in people not having enough food?
- Nearly at the top in violent crime and homicide?
Is this a place you and your family, children, the elderly, should live?
As my friend El Rog The Magnificent likes to point out, for a number of years now, Texas is regularly thrown out on the meteorological grill to bake up pretty good -- the place averages nearly one hundred days a year with temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or more. And Le Governor insists that Global Warming and Climate Change is just a con job promoted by some 'o them librul-type eggyhead scientists.
The entire Southwest region is suffering under a drought of biblical proportions (pun intended). Mssr. Le Governor hosted a Prayvaganza to call upon god to change the weather and bring rain to Texas. It wasn't well attended, and plainly didn't work.
One can only hope that Monsieur Le Governor Perry will continue to show all 'Murrka just what he's done for Texas, what he's made of, and what is in his tiny little black heart.
