Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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We told you Rep. Wendy Ullman was only into doing political theater as a legislator but now she’s proven it by her comment to Tom Wolf.

Senator Lisa Baker and Rep. Jonathan Fritz have been long pursuing legislation that would treat any Delaware River Basin Commission fracking as a land condemnation deserving of compensation to landowners for the taking of their property. The legislation was getting legs early last year. The Delaware PovertyKeeper a/k/a Riverkeeper, together with its silent partner, the DRBC, went apoplectic and starting lobbying legislators to oppose equal justice and knock back the bill. Rep. Wendy Ullman joined them as an ally writing, an article in a Bucks County publication suggesting such basic fairness was somehow a threat to clean water. I wrote a point by point rebuttal effectively calling her piece “vacuous and deceptive” political theater and now she’s admitted it’s what she does (and Tom Wolf as well).

Yes, Rep. Wendy Ullman stepped in it the other day and by that I mean she opened her mouth and spoke truth before a microphone she didn’t realize was hot. Here’s how it went:

You won’t find much in the media about it, of course, because journalism today in far too many quarters amounts to ensuring the mistakes of favored politicians get buried deep beneath the mud and the actions of others are ground into it. A great friend and journalist of the original cigar-chomping curmudgeon model calls out the problem:

“The tragedy isn’t that she and Wolf think that way or even that she said it. The tragedy is that it’s not getting anything like the visibility it should be getting in the media and that so few elected officials – and Pennsylvanians in general – have the backbone to do something about it. I do, however, like the fact Wolf’s office claims that her comment was taken out of context. If I were the reporter who’d asked about it, I’d have said “okey-dokey, then give me the context.”

Nice thought but, of course, the real journalists generally don’t work for newspapers, radio or television anymore, although there are exceptions. They tend to free-lance, write books and do their own thing because they still have integrity. They don’t cooperated with political theater such as Rep. Wendy Ullmann and Tom Wolf did here and have done with the DRC fracking ban. Indeed, the only they’ve done with respect to gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin is political theater.  Rep. Wendy Ullman apparently wants the adulation of her gentry class Bucks County neighbors (although there are plenty of Bucks folks who agree with us) and I’m guessing Tom Wolf wants to be honored at some future Pennsylvania Society gala event in Manhattan. He certainly works hard at representing New Yorkers or he wouldn’t be choosing them over us, would he?