The rural town of Dimcock, Pennsylvania, in the US, rests in the rolling hills in Susquehanna County. It used to be picturesque, but today it boasts more blight than Appalachian charm.

In 2009, local claims of water contamination by Dimcock’s residents had reached almost hyperbolic proportions, with reports of wells spontaneously combusting, kitchen faucets spouting corrosive liquids, pets mysteriously shedding their hair, and morning showers resulting in skin lesions.

This is probably because the town, which is home to fewer than 2000 residents, sits on top of the Marcellus shale, a massive formation of sedentary rock that the US Department of Energy estimates contains some 262 trillion cubic feet of valuable and recoverable natural gas. “It probably transforms the US energy outlook for the next 100 years,” Tony Hayward, the former chief executive officer of the oil company BP, has remarked. The oil was extracted using hydraulic fracturing, also known as ‘fracking’.

This week – three years after the residents first lost access to their drinking water – the US Environmental Protection Agency has launched an investigation into the source of water contamination in the area.The inquiry is part of an ongoing study that the Agency is currently undertaking to assess the environmental health consequences of fracking. A preliminary report is expected at the end of the year, and a final assessment is slated for 2014.

The Dimcock study follows a ground-breaking report issued in December of last year, in which the EPA for the first time attributed water contamination to fracking.

 
       Mitt Romney has spent more than 20 years in private enterprise, making thousands of business decisions affecting hundreds of companies that led to more than 100,000 new jobs and billions of dollars for employees and investors. So you can see why the left despises him.

Among Romney's thousands of business decisions, the one I gather his opponents consider his absolute worst was the decision to close a paper plant in Marion, Ind. Which wasn't his decision at all.

It was labor trouble at the Marion plant of a Bain-acquired company, Ampad, that formed the basis of Teddy Kennedy's desperate 11th-hour attack on Romney in their 1994 Senate competition. Plant worker Randy Johnson was featured in Kennedy campaign commercials against Romney and disgruntled workers were lavished with Dickensian lachrymosity in The Boston Globe.

In the current presidential campaign, Democrats -- and some Republicans -- have returned to Ampad and the Marion plant as their case in chief against Romney.

The "King of Bain" movie that a pro-Newt Gingrich super-pac just bought with money donated by a gambling magnate (with money acquired honestly in the open market from people driven by their gambling addictions) cites only one company closed by Bain when Romney was even there.

Guess which one? That's right: Ampad.

The Democratic National Committee has retained Johnson to go on tour in order to more fulsomely describe the horrors perpetrated by Bain Capital on workers at that plant. As salt-of-the-earth Johnson explains, he lost his job at Ampad because Romney "didn't care about the worker."

It is beyond journalistic malpractice for media outlets showcasing the bitter and lying Johnson to neglect to mention that he was the union president who led the strike that forced Ampad to close the plant.

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney got into trouble for saying, "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me." To comprehend why the political class reacted as if Romney had just praised Hitler, you must understand that his critics live in a world in which no one can ever be fired -- a world known as "the government."

(And a tip for you Washington types: Just because a person became rich without working for government doesn't mean he is "Wall Street." A venture capital firm in Boston that tries to rescue businesses headed for bankruptcy, for example, is not "Wall Street.")

Romney's statement about being able to fire people was an arrow directed straight to the heart of Obamacare. (By the way, arrows to the heart are not covered by Obamacare.)

Talking about insurance providers, he said:

"I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don't like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."

Obamacare, you will recall, will be administered by the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. They will operate under the same self-paced, self-evaluated work rules that have made government offices the envy of efficiency specialists everywhere.

And no one will be able to fire them -- unless they're caught doing something truly vile and criminal, such as stealing from patients in nursing homes.

Oops, I take that back: Government employees who rob the elderly also can't be fired.

It's been a mixed week for Mitt Romney's campaign. On one hand, Romney won Iowa, but on the other, he was endorsed by John McCain.

Until the first actual votes were cast Tuesday night, it appeared as if some elements of the Republican Party were becoming the mirror image of a liberal mob.

The wild swings -- at least in the polls -- from one populist right-winger to another suggested that some Republicans were determined to change the meaning of "conservative" from "normal person who wants to protect what's best in mainstream America" to "perpetually indignant, restless carper against everything, obsessed with symbolic issues, determined to punish the country for its impurities."

Some Republicans, we were led to believe, would only be satisfied with angry denunciations of Obama as a Kenyan colonialist and demands for Barack Obama's birth certificate -- without ever spending five minutes of calm contemplation to see that he had already produced it.

And if there's anyplace for a zealot to shine, it's in a caucus state like Iowa.

But Romney won -- in a razor-close finish with another plausible candidate, Rick Santorum.

The reason the Iowa caucuses rarely produce the party's eventual nominee is not because Iowans are wacky white Christians, as some in the media have claimed, but because caucuses are ridiculous ways to choose a presidential candidate. It is a process that empowers the pushy and loud, much like a Manhattan co-op board meeting, but, unfortunately, not like anything envisioned by our founding fathers.

An unnamed source said the military deployment of US anti-missile ships and accompanying support personnel will occur in January and later this spring, Global Research reported.

Commander of the US Third Air Force based in Germany Lt.-Gen Frank Gorenc said it is not just an "exercise," but a "deployment," The Jerusalem Post said.

Washington and Tel Aviv have planned to hold what they call the largest-ever joint military exercise this spring.

The US commander visited Israel two weeks ago to confirm details for “the deployment of several thousand American soldiers to Israel.”

The US General also visited one of Israel's three Iron Dome anti-missile outposts. The Israeli Air Force has announced plans to deploy a fourth Iron Dome system in coming months.

While US troops will be stationed in Israel for an unspecified amount of time, Israeli military personnel will be added to United States European Command (EUCOM) in Germany.

This is while the US is reportedly bringing its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and ship-based Aegis ballistic missile systems to Israel.

The White House has resumed its anti-Iran war rhetoric after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report in November, in which Tehran was accused of conducting activities related to developing nuclear weapons. Iran strongly dismissed the allegations.