I’m trying to keep a running tally of the direct funds to states from the foreclosure fraud settlement that will get diverted to General Funds to fill budget holes. When we last left this story, Maine had decided to send $5.7 million to the general fund, joining Missouri’s $40 million and Wisconsin’s $26 million. So [...]

War has broken out between West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania over who can give away more tax dollars to Shell Oil.

Today is Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) awareness day!

“Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.” This sunny tagline from the early days of atomic energy has more recently become a quickest way to sum up how dark and dismal its prospects are today–as in, nuclear power has proven itself to be unclean, unsafe, and prohibitively expensive. “Clean, safe and too cheap to meter” now sounds less like boastful marketing, and more like a schoolyard taunt.

The numbers of ways nuclear power plants have betrayed their Madison Avenue mantra has pretty much been the backbeat of this column for nearly ten months now, and 2012 keeps up the cadence.

Dimock, PA, home to dozens of fracking wells and featured in the movie Gasland, experienced massive contamination with their water supply. Cabot Oil & Gas, the main fracking company, provided free water to the residents, under an order from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. But with a new governor, PA DEP let Cabot stop the water shipments. At first, the federal EPA said it would provide water, but then the EPA canceled the delivery. What now?

Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. ended delivery of bulk and bottled water to 11 families in Dimock on Wednesday. Cabot asserts Dimock’s water is safe to drink and won permission from state environmental regulators last month to stop paying for water for the residents.

A judge on Wednesday declined to issue an emergency order compelling Cabot to continue the deliveries. The judge, who sits on the state’s Environmental Hearing Board, set a Dec. 7 deadline for arguments on a second, related petition filed by lawyers for the families.

Jack Markowitz, a retired editor, has a column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review this morning where he argues that high unemployment among today’s youth is the result of poor personal habits and values. Markowitz bases this argument on a story he tells about two young men — one employed with a failed marriage and living with his parents rent free, and the other an unemployed ex-convict. Markowitz is, in effect, arguing that the rise in unemployment is the result of a wholesale outbreak of vice among the young which happened to coincide with the beginning of the recession.

Tim Puko at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review uncovered a $56 million mistake in the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue’s reporting of personal income tax (PIT) collections attributed to Marcellus Shale drilling for last year.

Back in May, the Department estimated that taxable Marcellus Shale royalties generated $102.7 million in PIT collections in 2010. Now the Department says that figure is a tad lower — $46.2 million, a decrease of $56.5 million or over 55% from what was reported six months ago. To quote Britney Spears, “Oops!”

Institutions faced with allegations of criminal misconduct like the rape of children have a choice. The president of Penn State, following the model used by the bishops of the Roman Catholic church, backed his athletic director and VP for finance unconditionally when they were indicted. But the Board of Trustees took a different path, demanding openness to wherever the investigations by prosecutors takes them. That kind of institutional loyalty will, in the long run, help Penn State come to grips with what has happened in their midst — much more so than attempts to cover up, make excuses, and otherwise keep silent.

I’ve been a campus pastor, and my heart goes out to the campus pastors at Penn State. But one of them has a much tougher assignment than the others: Father Matthew Laffey. The Roman Catholic church in Philadelphia is facing a remarkably similar criminal indictment of Monsignor William Lynn, the former assistant to the former Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua. Lynn faces trial next March on charges that he protected priests he knew to be pedophiles, with the knowledge and support of his boss, the Cardinal. It doesn’t help matters for Father Matthew that Penn State’s Catholic campus ministry is in the middle of constructing the Suzanne Pohland Paterno Catholic Student Faith Center. (That’s Mrs. JoPa.)

Good luck with all that, Father Matthew.

In a general election matchup President Obama and Mitt Romney are running neck and neck in three of the largest swing states according to a new Quinnipiac poll. The poll found that Obama had a small lead in Ohio and Pennsylvania, while Romney leads in Florida