Shellshocked

I think a lot of voters in Pennsylvania, both Democrats and Republicans, are shellshocked by the Republican assault on public education. They can't quite believe it's happening, but they know they don't like it, as was made clear by a new Franklin & Marshall poll that showed about two-thirds of state residents oppose Gov. Corbett's slash-and-burn attack on public schools and public universities. Sixty-two percent of people surveyed support levying an extraction tax on natural gas taken from the rich Marcellus Shale deposits below the state.

Corbett said today that he will not approve a gas extraction tax because shale gas will become "a cornerstone of the state economy." This is wrong on many levels. For one thing, no extraction tax means that all the profits from the industry will flow to Texas, doing no good for the people of Pennsylvania. This resource is the heritage of all the people of Pennsylvania and it should benefit all of them, not just a wealthy elite who can afford to make big campaign contributions to Corbett and other Republicans.

For another, gas drilling will create relative few jobs, and most of those jobs will go to people brought in by the gas drillers from out of state. Local municipalities will be left with the cost of repairing roads damaged by gas industry trucks, and the people of Gasland will be left with the environmental damage. We've seen this movie twice before, first when coal mining ravaged Pennsylvania for a hundred years, leaving catastrophes like the Centralia mine fire, and second when wind farms despoiled mountaintops and killed migratory birds while providing almost no local jobs or tax revenue and precious little electricity.

Speaking of Gasland, the Corbett Administration--hey, there's a price to be paid for getting a boatload of gas industry money for the campaign--has moved against the father of Gasland documentary director Josh Fox, a day after Fox posted an open letter on his website calling for Corbett to fire a DCNR official who called him a Nazi propagandist. I won't say who targeting the families of political critics reminds me of. No one who keeps up with the CasablancaPA blog should be surprised by any of this.

Yes, Republican voters (and some Democratis), you may have thought you were getting Tom Ridge II when you elected Corbett, but the Republican Party has changed, changed, changed.