Mother Nature makes fun of Republicans. Has anybody noticed?

The Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center has created a Severance Tax Ticker which calculates the amount of revenue the state has lost so far because it has failed to adopt a severance tax on the extraction of fossil fuels in the Marcellus Shale. As of this writing, the cost is over $55.2 million.

The usual Republican (and general industry-apologist) excuse -- to the effect that high taxation will discourage investment and therefore hamper job growth -- is never believable to begin with, since corporate taxes cut into profits but are not a deterrent to a company that wants to pursue new markets or investment opportunities. In this case, though, the excuse is downright ludicrous, since the natural gas is there, and there is not even a conceivable way that an energy company would move to a different location in response to high taxes.

That didn't stop Dominic Pileggi, the Republican leader in the Senate, from trying out this line of argument, just as nationally the Republicans appear to have tapped into an underground reservoir of stupidity that -- unlike fossil fuels -- is a renewable resource. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska really did have the breathtakingly moronic audacity to say that because BP has more or less destroyed the Gulf of Mexico with its offshore drilling in search of profits, our response should be to reward the same profit-hungry oil companies with drilling opportunities on land, preferably in imperiled wildlife reserves. Likewise, the Post-Gazette reported this last Thursday of Pileggi on the Marcellus Shale:

"'We want the full benefit of that industry in Pennsylvania,' and don't want to discourage drillers and the jobs they will create by adopting too high a tax, he said."

As if in direct answer to Pileggi, Mother Nature the very next day demonstrated the "full benefit of that industry":

"A blowout at a natural-gas well in a remote area shot explosive gas and polluted water as high as 75 feet into the air before crews were able to tame it more than half a day later. ... The well was brought under control just after noon Friday, about 16 hours after it started spewing gas and brine, said Elizabeth Ivers, a spokeswoman for driller EOG Resources Inc. ... Houston-based EOG, formerly part of Enron Corp. [I am not making this up -- FD], was drilling into the Marcellus Shale reserve, a hotly pursued gas formation primarily under Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York and Ohio that some geologists believe could become the nation's most productive natural gas field."

(Incidentally, why do the local newspapers -- presumably the Leader-Vindicator of New Bethlehem or the Courier-Express of DuBois in this case -- have to rely on the AP wire to report a story this big in their backyard? Doesn't this say something about the gutting of newsrooms across the country? Should I even bother with this anymore?)

This should at least be an incident to remember if there is not a state budget in a few months, and you hear someone blaming "both sides" for the impasse. Seriously folks, let's get real.