It was just a week ago Thursday that we commented more-or-less favorably on Gov. Rick Perry’s audacity in coming up with a plan to sell the state lottery to private interests. We weren’t sure about the merits of the plan, but the clear implication was that we’d try to keep an open mind.

Well, it’s been 10 days, and our mind is closing fast. None of our original reservations has been allayed, and a couple of new ones have popped up.

The governor proposes that the state sell its lottery to private interests and use the money to fund endowments for education, cancer research and providing health insurance to low-income Texans. He predicts we could get about $14 billion for the operation.

Our primary reservation was that, even using the governor’s rosy estimates, the proposed endowment for public education would provide an estimated $200 million less per year than lottery proceeds do now. Some consulting firms hoping to broker the deal have said Perry’s $14 billion estimate might be low, but only if buyers were allowed to expand the scope of the lottery to include such things as video slot or poker machines.

That heightens our second reservation, that a private operator might be less scrupulous than the state in marketing the games to low-income Texans.

And now we are detecting the familiar aroma of cronyism and greed. One of the companies sniffing around to broker the proposed lottery sale is UBS, a financial service, and former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, an old political and personal pal of Perry’s, is a vice president of that company. Adding to the unpleasant effluvia is the fact that UBS has hired Perry’s son, who recently graduated from Vanderbilt University with an economics degree.

It’s all a coincidence, says Perry’s office, and it may be, but if so, it is yet another in a string of coincidences that is beginning to strain our suspension of disbelief.

The sad truth is, there are simply too many of these coincidences where Perry and his public policies are concerned. It hasn’t been a fortnight since Perry has had to make essentially the same “coincidence” argument about reports that his former chief of staff is a lobbyist for Merck, a drug manufacturer that stands to make hundreds of millions if the governor’s order to inoculate all 11- and 12-year-old girls in Texas against HPV is carried out.

We happen to think this is a basically good idea, but it’s hard to get around the aroma of goosegrease that wafts around it and taints whatever merits it may possess.