Drill, baby, drill

Face it, if you want to send your child to college you will have to start a business, preferably a natural gas drilling business. And then you will have to donate a tidy to Tom Corbett's political campaign, preferably a nice round sum like $305,000. And then you will be able to pocket all the loot you make from plundering and pillaging the earth, money you can spend on firearms or prostitutes or even your youngsters' higher education.

That's the deal going on right now in Pennsylvania, as documented by Philly.com:

To middle-class state employees, to upwardly mobile college students at Pennsylvania-funded universities, to the working poor who've looked to Harrisburg for affordable health insurance, Corbett sent out more sacrifice signals yesterday than a third-base coach on a built-for-speed baseball team. He even urged that teachers take a one-year pay freeze - an issue not under his direct control....

But there's another group that's tapping into big-time wealth - a buried treasure right here in Pennsylvania - that isn't facing the kinds of tough decisions that cause a pay-frozen schoolteacher's family to cut back on groceries or cancel a weekend down the shore.

That would be the economically booming, mostly out-of-state natural-gas companies and their multimillionaire CEOs, who continue to rapidly expand their aggressive form of drilling known as hydrofracking, or simply "fracking," across large swaths of upstate Pennsylvania. The companies take in hundreds of millions of dollars without paying any dedicated Pennsylvania tax - even as such levies are imposed in the other 14 of the top 15 gas-producing states.

In a remarkable coincidence, 2010 gubernatorial candidate Corbett received a whopping $835,720 from oil-and-natural gas interests, including his largest single contributor - Marcellus Shale driller Terry Pegula and his wife, Kim, who gave $305,000 to his campaign at the same time Pegula was selling his exploration firm to Royal Dutch Shell and pocketing $3 billion.

Indeed, Corbett's career in elective politics was launched in 2004 when an Oklahoma gas driller - Aubrey McClendon, of Chesapeake Energy - funneled most of the dollars for an eye-popping $480,000 donation that went to Corbett's attorney-general campaign from an obscure GOP fund.

Fracking A!