Don’t get me wrong, I’ll vote for Josh Shapiro in the end, I guess. Stacey Garrity (Did I spell that right) is the worst Gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania that I’ve seen from either party in my lifetime. She holds lunatic views, if you even give her credit for coherent views, can’t really articulate them, and lacks any sort of political identity for any of us to even pretend we’re attacking. You can sort of just rule her out through the ear test- listen to her give a speech or two, and you just know this person isn’t capable of running a civilized place, let alone a state the size of Pennsylvania. This is the closest thing to a default election we’ve had. Scott Wagner and Dougie Mastriano were at least easily classified as angry conservatives.

Let’s be honest though, I wish I wasn’t forced to vote for Governor Josh “GPT” Shapiro. As I said last week:

As for Josh Shapiro? Whatever. What has he done? Shorty worked hard on building data centers and passing school vouchers, while SEPTA funding, property tax reform, and adult recreational weed legalization went nowhere. What’s the point of high approval if all you want to do is take it with you to South Carolina in January? To be fair, he made the smart decision to Xerox the Wolf budgets and maybe add the inflation rate to the numbers. I guess he also fixed twenty yards of road in Philly too one time. Get shit done, right? Still, the guy is basically competent and kept the state from going off course in his first term. Stacy Garrity is incompetent and has bad ideas. Nobody needs her as Governor.

I mean, it’s a step down from Tom Wolf, who was honestly a step down from Ed Rendell, but hey, it’s like complaining about spam when the alternative is starvation. You’ll take it, you guess. Of course, Josh would have a problem with a credible alternative though. As data center politics energize rural Pennsylvania, and even the suburbs, Shapiro is pretending now that he’s standing in the way of irresponsible development. He’s running ads saying his opponent is awful on data center development and putting out executive orders in the 11th hour of his term to set rules on the structures. I mean, it’s a super complicated issue and I appreciate his wanting to get it right now, but wow the revisionist history. Just Google Josh Shapiro record on data centers. I mean, the guy secured $20 billion from Amazon Web Centers to build data centers all over Pennsylvania when he thought it was popular. Oh, and there was this:

Other groups are more skeptical of Shapiro’s proposal. The Better Path Coalition, a grassroots consortium of environmental groups, pointed to the administration’s behind-the-scenes communications with Amazon, which is developing multiple data centers in the commonwealth, as a cause for concern.

A group of Montour County residents who organized against data center development obtained a trove of emails from the administration through a Right-to-Know request, which showed that a top staffer sent an Amazon lobbyist a “feedback draft of the principles” that the administration planned to lay out in GRID before the standards were public.

The records, which were previously reported by Heatmap, also included an email that state Secretary of Community and Economic Development Rick Siger sent to Amazon. He told the company the GRID standards are “intended to be voluntary,” and said Shapiro is “not proposing to ban or even discourage data centers or other large loads that don’t agree to implement them from siting here.”

That, the Better Path Coalition wrote in a recent statement, shows Shapiro’s GRID standards are “strictly performative.”

Now, he’s doing this:

• The executive order asks developers to sign an agreement that they will follow the governor’s GRID standards, which include clean energy and job creation requirements. In exchange for signing, they get permit review and approval on a rolling basis.
• It requires that developers show proof of local approvals before they can receive any state permits or authorizations.
• It puts conditions on Pennsylvania’s data center sales tax exemption — if developers don’t follow the GRID standards, the state Department of Revenue won’t acknowledge applications for the tax credit.
• It bans agencies under the governor’s control from signing NDAs in connection with data center projects. (The order doesn’t prevent local government officials from signing such agreements.)
• It kicks data centers out of Fast Track, a Shapiro administration initiative to speed up permitting of major projects. (Previously, Shapiro had said he was giving this extra permitting attention to data center projects that followed his GRID standards.)

So basically, all the easy permitting he promised, and the tax breaks he promised, now he’ll make you pay off the locals first (I wonder how he raised so much, don’t you?), then you can have them. Look, I get it, I do think the eventual answer on data centers and AI from Democrats has to be yes, but Governor GPT started out with the red carpet out for them, and now he wants to pretend he’s making it hard for them. The answer should be “pay for the infrastructure and utility costs, actually help the towns you invade in ways they need, and then meet our state standards,” and this is closer to that, so good. It still feels hypocritical as hell though. The truth is that Shapiro saw something that made potential 2028 donors and major unions who support him both feel happy, and he tried to be the champion for that, until he realized that public sentiment was way behind on it. So now we get the Shapiro shuffle.

Of course, Josh Shapiro is also asking us to vote for his hand picked Congressional candidate, Bob “Crooksy” Brooks in the Lehigh Valley, a man who can’t string together thinking nearly as advanced as Shapiro on data centers. Crooksy is a stone cold moron who stiffed his ex-mother-in-law out of money, and well, he’s probably confused on this issue. On one hand, Crooksy knows a couple of unions made him a serious candidate for Congress, and he’s probably just waiting to be told what he thinks on this issue, which will probably be to build them. On the other hand, Uncle Josh is moving his position in response to activists like the ones in Carbon County, in South Whitehall, and in Lower Mount Bethel who are opposing data centers, and Crooksy doesn’t know how to make those folks happy without just saying what they want.

Knowing Crooksy, we know his answer- both. A friend of mine said back in the Spring that they attended a Crooksy talk to local Muslim leaders where he said Israel “had committed a genocide in Gaza,” but they were less than convinced that he really understood his answer. I was too, based on the since removed video of him at Lehigh Valley for All completely avoiding the question and pulling his shirt over his face. Look, these are tough questions. If you can keep your answers private, you can get away with giving a different answer to everyone who cares about them. If you’re kind of dumb, why not try that on data centers too? I get it, do what you can get away with, bro.