Rare for Rick to let his appointees languish... at least 96% of Rick's appointees replaced right away...

Elise Hu and Matt Stiles are trying to win their co Pulitzers for investigative journalism... they have a story written together for the Texas Tribune based on an open records request of appointees and which ones had lapsed or reappointed right away (link). Excerpt follows...

The appointees with expired terms represent just a fraction of the roughly 2,400 people serving now. The 103 people serving after their terms were up had overstayed their terms, on average, more than 100 days when the other commissioners were ousted. Several had overstayed their terms more than a year, the records show.

OJ attorney Barry Scheck who runs the Innocence Project is convinced that Willingham is his best shot at finding a wrongly executed man and therefore overturning the entire death penalty sees only the 4% as the issue...

"These numbers are disturbing because, contrary to what Gov. Perry said, it was not a regular practice to remove these commissioners so quickly and on the verge of a very important hearing," said Barry Scheck, co-director of The Innocence Project, a group that helps the falsely accused. "It's more evidence that Gov. Perry's actions were not to get to the scientific truth of the matter but were self serving and calculated for political advantage."

Hu and Stiles led with this quote instead of the raw numbers... in this new age of decentralized journalism they should really have provided what they found under the open records request... just post the raw documents so bloggers and other citizens can examine for themselves...

Most bloggers don't want to do or don't know how to do open records requests... or we have real day jobs that get in the way...

Apparently the number of expired appointees is actually lower than 4% too but Rick's peeps didn't have time to crunch the numbers themselves...

Chris Cutrone, a Perry spokesman, reviewed the list Monday afternoon and said some people with expired terms had been replaced or reappointed since September 30. The office did not have time to research each appointee's status, however.

It seems like a quick call over to the appointments division at the Capitol could have yielded some positive results for Rick on this issue... if 20 of the 103/2400 had been replaced you are looking at 97% vs. 3%. If 50 had been replaced you are looking at 98% vs. 2%.

I guess that is not a huge difference... 96% replaced on schedule vs. 4% pending appointment or confirmation is a pretty giant number and shows that Rick's reasoning for replacing the board members of the forensic commission when their terms were up was backed by the numbers.

I bet if you looked at vacancies for Obama right now it would be higher and will be higher even when he leaves office in 2013... from my experience there are a lot of worthless boards and agencies that frankly do not need anyone... some agencies only meet every other year or once a year... some are just wastes of government money and should be allowed to lapse and not be reauthorized during sunset reviews... this goes for the state level and the federal level both...

If 4% of positions being unfilled on a given day means aspiring co journalists have carte blanche to give capital punishment opponents Barry Scheck and Rodney Ellis a prominent platform to rant, I'd hate to see the kind of article that would have been written if the number had been a still low 8%.

That co Pulitzer remains elusive...