Former Governor Ed Rendell got into some hot water last week with an op-ed in the New York Daily News touting the economic benefits of hydrofracking. ProPublica quickly outed the Governor for his ties to the drilling industry, and Rendell owned up to the fact that he is a consultant to Element Partners, which has investments in the gas industry. The Daily News has added a note to its web site disclosing the financial arrangement.

A new chapter has been added to the shale gas industry’s eco-terrorism, counterinsurgency and psychological operations saga.

In March, NBC News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff revealed that many prominent U.S. public officials are on the payroll of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), a group labeled by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. These U.S. officials are lobbying hard to remove the MEK from the list.

Like the SustiNet Board in Connecticut, the Commonwealth Advisory Committee suggests against forcing this population to use the new exchanges for basically the same reason–the private insurance exchanges will likely result in worse coverage at a greater cost to both the customers and the government.

There are probably worse ideas for White House Chief of Staff, but I gagged on my homemade soup when outgoing Pennsylvania Governor Fast Eddie Rendell suggested that Barack Obama choose Colin Powell as his Chief of Staff.

For Democratic leaders, threatening unenthusiastic voters with vague pictures of doom and gloom, when much of what the voters see right now is already pretty gloomy, is not going to “wake up” very many of the rank and file. Promising little else in terms of benefits if Democrats stay in power—little beyond “there’s more to do”—does not provide enough positive motivation to engender enthusiasm.

The whole idea behind collecting this information and sharing it with private sector entities like oil drilling lobbyists arose as part of efforts to protect our critical infrastructure from terrorist attack after 9/11.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Homeland Security has employed an entity called the Institute for Terrorism Research and Response to monitor the web traffic of anti-drilling activists in that state. The effort was purportedly started to fulfill national requirements to protect critical infrastructure.