THE MARCELLUS SHALE OIL BOOM

WASH POST:

"It's a gold rush, really. It's a boom," said Steve Rupert, an executive with Range Resources, which is drilling aggressively in the rolling farmland southwest of Pittsburgh.

... The state of Pennsylvania is on pace to issue more than 7,000 permits for oil and gas drilling this year, more than twice as many as five years ago. Coal mining is expanding, driven by rising coal exports. With the Marcellus looking so promising, Pennsylvania farmers are suddenly flush with cash from leasing mineral rights.

"It's a land-rush type of deal," said Gary Lash, a geologist at the State University of New York at Fredonia who studies the Marcellus. "Some people are becoming millionaires overnight."

... The Marcellus Shale underlies much of Pennsylvania and parts of New York, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky -- an area that already has a lot of infrastructure for distributing natural gas. Geologists say the shale might contain more than 50 trillion cubic tons of gas, about twice what the United States uses in a typical year.

• IF THE DEMOCRATS WOULD JUST THE EFF OUT OF THE WAY, WE COULD BE MAKING THOUSANDS OF MORE MILLIONAIRES RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, AND BE A LITTLE MORE ENERGY INDEPENDENT AT THE SAME TIME.

• IT WOULD BE A WIN-WIN.

• THERE'S ONLY ONE THING IN THE WAY: THE DEMOCRAT PARTY.

• WHY SHOULD RUSSIA AND BRAZIL AND THE GULF STATES BE THE ONLY ONES TO EXTRACT OIL AND GET RICH!?

• THERE'S ONLY ONE THING IN THE WAY: THE DEMOCRAT PARTY.

VOTE ACCORDINGLY.