Take, for example, Pennsylvania. Democrats there are already hard at work to tie Mitt Romney to Gov. Tom Corbett, whose antiabortion statements and austere budgets have proved unpopular in the state.

“He is becoming a more polarizing figure,” says Muhlenberg College political science professor Christopher Borick, who calls the gender gap a “treasure trove” for Democrats. “If I’m putting an ad out in Pennsylvania and I want to show Republicans to be opposed to women’s issues, I run sound bites from Tom Corbett next to those of Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh, and anybody else I can find.”

The Democratic National Committee did so in April in an advertisement released after Corbett endorsed presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, replaying the governor’s Internet sensation of a statement that women forced to watch a pre-abortion ultrasound “just have to close your eyes.” The ad called both “too extreme for women.”

The same is the case in Ohio and Wisconsin, where Republican governors have waged aggressive campaigns against public-workers unions. Romney hasn’t taken any chances with the potentially toxic ally in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Despite Walker’s endorsement, Romney did not appear with the governor during his primary fight against Rick Santorum.

“Walker is a vulnerable Republican,” Nation reporter John Nichols told “Democracy Now.” “And so, especially in the case of Mitt Romney, being photographed a lot with Scott Walker, only to have Scott Walker turn around and be defeated a month or so later, is not necessarily a positive, either.”

The diminished regard for these swing-state governors is a reflection of the shift in conservative politics from Washington to the statehouses. Unlike their obstructionist counterparts in D.C., conservative governors and statehouses have leveraged total control over government to attack organized labor, gut aid to the poor and disabled, slash spending on schools and universities, push through antiabortion restrictions, chip away at environmental protections and weaken gun control laws. Just as Democrats have transfigured the Republican social agenda into a politically serviceable “war on women,” the conservative attack on unions, public education and the safety net could likewise become a liability in an election season defined by a debate over economic fairness and inequality.

“As the general election campaign commences more fully I think you’re going to find voters really paying attention to what’s gone on within their state and how that affects their willingness to vote for one party or another,” says Paul Beck, a political scientist at Ohio State University. “The Democrats are going to push very hard that the Republicans are simply too extreme and that Romney is more conservative than the public, and try to connect him to what’s going on within the various states.”

Corbett is a case in point. The low-profile governor gained widespread attention in January when he announced new restrictions on the food stamps that feed 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia: people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets (homes and first cars excluded) would be barred from receiving aid, and those over 60 would have a $3,250 cap. The conflict got widespread attention because it echoes a national debate: U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, proposed slashing $127 billion from the federal food stamp program, while Newt Gingrich’s invocation of the “food stamp president” proved an effective line to the Republican base. But in Pennsylvania, the outcry from hunger advocates and Democrats was swift — and eager.

“This is one of the most mean-spirited, asinine proposals to come out of Harrisburg in decades,” said Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter. “I literally cannot understand what problem they are trying to solve.”

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack even jumped into the fray, noting food stamps are largely federally funded and that Corbett’s move would cost the state money. Corbett beat a hasty retreat, and the asset limits were raised to $5,500, and $9,000 for the disabled and elderly.

But the governor’s conservative agenda has taken a toll on his popularity: A March poll from Quinnipiac University found that just 41 percent of respondents approved of Corbett’s performance  (down from 47 percent approval in December), with 41 percent disapproving. And while 48 percent of voters oppose mandatory ultrasounds (42 percent support them), this year’s austere budget, and a proposed budget for next year heavy on cuts to higher education and welfare programs, have prompted even greater opposition: 49 percent oppose his handling of a budget that cuts services to the poor and disabled (36 percent support them); and a full 65 percent oppose his proposed cuts to public universities.

Progressive activists, however, concede Corbett’s political savvy: He avoided the national notoriety attached to counterparts like Walker during his first year in office, placating powerful public-employee unions by signing a four-year contract in 2011 and backing down from his initial call for a cut in wages.

“I think that Governor Corbett is amazingly unknown in the state of Pennsylvania for someone who has pretty successfully started to dismantle the public education system,” says Gabe Morgan, president of Pennsylvania SEIU State Council. “I don’t really see him as being able to move votes in either direction. He’s been pretty lucky to be unnoticed.”

Yet Jennifer Stefano, Pennsylvania state director of the Koch brothers-funded conservative group Americans for Prosperity, contends that Corbett’s low profile is hurting his popularity.

“If he just allows the ‘we’re cutting higher ed’ to stand, he will continue to lose in the court of public opinion. This governor is failing to get out among the people, and it’s causing not only resentment towards him, but also allowing the other side to win the P.R. battle. The governor should talk about the excessive salaries, benefits and ‘jobs for life’ state university professors receive.”

Stefano also faults Corbett for moving to implement the insurance exchanges required under the embattled health care reform act and, like other conservatives, is frustrated that he has not addressed “union abuse issues.”

It’s Corbett’s ultrasound comment, however, that could prove a media-friendly albatross in an election defined to an unexpected degree by women’s health issues. A recent poll showed Obama’s lead over Romney in Pennsylvania opening up to eight points, even as it diminished in other important swing states. The reason for Obama’s surge is new support among women voters. And women, according to polls, oppose Corbett’s proposed cuts to higher education by an even greater margin than they oppose the transvaginal ultrasound. When it comes to Republican-led austerity, it seems that Pennsylvania women will have their eyes wide open this November.

Police said the children’s father had left the two-story home on a working farm in dairy country not far from the state capital, to begin his rounds hauling milk around 10 p.m. Tuesday. Two children, ages 2 and 3, were watching television at the time.

The father picked up milk and then parked the truck about a mile from home before nodding off, state police Trooper Tom Pinkerton said.

Soon after, the 3-year-old smelled smoke in the home and ran to the barn to alert her mother, who apparently tried to get into the house. The woman then ran to the homes of two neighbors before getting someone to call 911, then ran with the child to the father’s truck and banged on its windows, screaming that their home was on fire, he said.

By the time the father returned to the home it was fully engulfed by flames, Pinkerton said. Firefighters had arrived and were battling the blaze at the charred home.

The Perry County coroner ruled the children died of smoke inhalation, Pinkerton said. Officials said they were six girls, ranging in age from 7 months to 11 years old and a 7-year-old boy.

A neighbor, Deana Doran, said her dog’s barking woke her up around 11 p.m. and she thought she heard someone calling, “Hello! Hello!”

She told The Associated Press she saw the first-floor rear of the home burning and dialed 911. Once she got outside she saw the flames spreading to the rest of the home.

Doran said her 10-year-old son was friends with the 11-year-old girl who lived at the home.

“He plays with her every day,” Doran said, visibly distraught. “I don’t know how I’m going to handle this with him.”

Friends and family were outside the gutted home on Wednesday morning to help milk cows and do other chores. Sauder, the children’s grandfather told the AP the parents were awake and talking to people, just trying to find ways to cope with the tragedy. The father, he said, was out talking to friends and workers on the farm.

“He seems he might be just as good as to keep a little busy,” said Sauder, who at times struggled to express his emotions. “It’s really hard, I’m sure.”

The house is one of a cluster of homes near an intersection in Loysville, a rural stretch of farm land about 25 miles west of Harrisburg.

Police said the family wasn’t Mennonite, although many Amish and Mennonite families live in the area.

Authorities temporarily closed part of a highway near the farm because of the fire.

The cause of the explosion was unclear.

The fires consumed an entire row of homes, Scheirer said. The blaze was put out early Thursday, delayed by the difficulty of digging through packed layers of snow and ice to a ruptured underground gas line that was feeding the flames, he said.

He predicted eight houses would be lost and another 16 damaged.

In all, 500 to 600 people were evacuated, including elderly residents of a high rise. Residents were allowed to return home early Thursday. They had been taken to a Jewish community center and an agricultural hall at the city’s fairgrounds while emergency crews worked overnight.

The blast was so powerful that it sent a flat-screen computer monitor sailing into the back of Antonio Arroyo, whose house was on the opposite end of the row from the house that exploded.

“I thought we were under attack,” he recalled from a shelter where some 250 people took refuge in the hours after the blast.

Arroyo and his wife, Jill, both 43, lost their home in the fire.

Antonio said he ran outside and saw that an entire house had been leveled, a fireball now raging in the spot where it once stood.

“What I saw, I couldn’t believe,” said Arroyo, a community volunteer.

He and his wife, a nurse, fled their home with only the clothes on their back. They planned to return at daylight to see what they could salvage. Jill Arroyo broke down sobbing when she recalled her son’s athletic memorabilia — likely lost in the blaze — including DVDs of his high school football games.

“The DVDs are gone. All his trophies are gone. All gone,” she sobbed as her husband comforted her.

Tricia Aleski, who lives a few blocks away, said the explosion jangled her nerves.

“I was reading a book in the living room and it felt like a giant kicked the house. It all shook. Everything shook,” she said. “I checked the stove and everything, (to) make sure everything’s off.”

Jason Soke was watching college basketball when he heard and felt the explosion. It rattled his windows. He went to the third floor and looked out and saw flames and smoke.

“Your senses kind of get stunned,” he said. “It puts you on edge.”

“Gasland” is a highly compelling grass-roots-level exposé of the explosion of natural gas drilling across the United States since 2005, when a little-noticed clause in Dick Cheney’s energy bill exempted the aggressive and invasive extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “hydrofracking,” from any federal regulation or oversight. Fracking, at least in its recent, higher-tech reinvention, involves the explosive injection of millions of gallons of water, laced with tons of toxic chemicals, in an effort to free natural gas trapped deep in the shale. It appears anecdotally connected to hundreds if not thousands of cases of groundwater contamination and a wide range of health problems.

Suddenly on the defensive after half a decade of doing pretty much as it pleased, the gas industry can feel the boom slipping away. New York state recently passed a temporary moratorium on hydrofracking, which is likely to launch a national examination of the practice. So gas advocates are fighting back hard against “Gasland” and the activist movement it represents. In a letter sent to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Feb. 1, the head of Energy in Depth, a murky P.R. and lobbying organization funded by a variety of oil and gas companies and industry associations, urged the academy to reconsider its nomination of “Gasland”:

… “GasLand” puts forth a thesis on natural gas development in the United States founded on a mistaken understanding of the process required to access these resources, and factually incorrect interpretation of the myriad rules and regulations in place designed to safeguard those operations wherever they take place. Along the way, the filmmaker alternates between misstating and outright ignoring basic and verifiable facts related to the impact of these activities on the health and welfare of humans, wildlife and the environment.

… Although we believe the film has value as an expression of stylized fiction, the many errors, inconsistencies and outright falsehoods catalogued in the appendix attached to this letter — and the many more we withheld for sake of brevity — cast serious doubt on “GasLand’s” worthiness for this most honored award, and directly violate both the letter and spirit of the published criteria that presumably must be met by “GasLand’s” competitors in this category.

This oddly formal missive, so full of sweeping charges yet so light on specifics, is signed by Lee O. Fuller, who is described as executive director of Energy in Depth, although his name appears nowhere on the group’s website (which includes almost no names and deeply buried contact info pointing at a couple of Washington P.R. flacks). This is presumably the same Lee O. Fuller who served as counsel to the GOP-controlled Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in the mid-’90s and is now listed as vice president of federal resources and political affairs at the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

Attached to Fuller’s letter is a lengthy addendum titled “Debunking ‘GasLand,’” which you can read on the EID site. It simultaneously accuses Fox of several potentially serious errors and misstatements and also tries, none too subtly, to paint him as a big-city freakazoid elitist, out of touch with the drill-baby-drill American heartland. On the one hand, EID says that Fox falsely claims that gas drilling is not subject to regulation, unfairly asserts that gas companies are hiding the brew of toxic chemicals used in fracking, and overlooks alternative explanations for the intriguing fact that numerous Colorado homeowners who live next door to gas wells can light their tap water on fire. Just as damningly, perhaps, EID describes Fox as “an avant-garde filmmaker and stage director whose previous work has been recognized by the ‘Fringe Festival’ of New York City.” (The scare quotes around the name of a long-standing theater festival, one of many such around the world, are especially nice.)

As Fox told me after returning home to New York from the Oscar nominees’ lunch in Los Angeles, “The gas industry has done a pretty good job of making it look like this is some kind of liberal, city-based concern. But that’s completely not true, and they’re underestimating this movement.”

On his own website, Fox has posted a lengthy, point-by-point rebuttal of EID’s charges, with links to an impressive array of supporting material. In general, he argues that the allegations against him amount to a bunch of weasel words, semantic distortions and legal dodges, often drawn from government regulators whose independence from the industry they are supposed to police is very much in doubt. “Everything in the film is backed up by data,” he says. “I stand behind every second of the movie 100 percent. It was all carefully vetted.”

Fox became interested in the hydrofracking issue in the first place because he was raised in Milanville, Pa., in a house he still owns that was built by his “hippie parents.” A small town in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania near the Delaware River, Milanville sits smack in the middle of the Marcellus Shale, an enormous natural gas deposit that extends from New York through Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. (My own interest stems from a similar cause; my family owns a house in Delaware County, N.Y., less than 50 miles from Milanville.) When a gas company offered him nearly $100,000 for drilling rights on his property, he began to explore the question further, which led him first to Dimock, an isolated town in west-central Pennsylvania that has been extensively contaminated by gas drilling, and then further afield to meet dozens of people affected by gas wells in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana.

During his travels, Fox came up against an uncomfortable demographic fact: Gas exploration has disproportionately affected lower-income rural communities, which tend to be overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Republican and distrustful of metropolitan liberals. The gas industry has evidently set out to exploit this fact. “The campaign against ‘Gasland’ plays to a serious cultural divide,” says Fox, “which is something I was actually trying to address in the film. I made the film initially to allow some of the people I interview in the film, like ranchers in Texas or cowboys in Wyoming, to speak directly to the people in the Catskills or in rural Pennsylvania — these red patches of the Northeast — who were like, ‘Drill baby drill!’”

I don’t imagine that the gas industry really believes it can convince the members of the academy — which has long viewed the documentary category as an opportunity to strike political positions — to withdraw Fox’s Oscar nomination. Even so, you have to wonder if the Energy in Depth strategists have considered that they may be helping “Gasland,” both in terms of the Oscar campaign and in terms of putting the movie, and the hydrofracking issue, on society’s radar screen.

“You could ask why they’re expending all this energy on attacking me, instead of making things better for people who’ve been affected by gas drilling,” Fox says. “I personally think it’s because they don’t think they can make it better. They think it’s collateral damage. We’re talking about thousands of contaminations affecting hundreds of families and endangering the water supply for millions of people. But there’s a long-standing culture within the oil and gas industry which is bullying, aggressive and willing to lie. They take everything that goes wrong and shove it under the rug. They buy people’s silence with nondisclosure agreements, and take away their First Amendment rights for money. You shouldn’t be able to do that in America.

“I think what’s happening now is that they can’t suppress the story and it’s driving them crazy. Look, out West in places like Texas and Wyoming and Colorado, oil and gas have been developed for a very long time, and still we see people who are outraged and fighting back about this particular form of insanity. In the East, things are changing very rapidly. I think there’s no chance that they will get to drill in New York and Pennsylvania. I think we’re going to win.”

“Gasland” is now available on DVD, or as a streaming rental from Amazon, Netflix and other vendors.

The defense began calling witnesses Friday afternoon after its motion for acquittal was denied, according to the Republican-Herald newspaper of Pottsville.

Two of the men were convicted of a federal hate crime for beating and kicking Ramirez. They were supposed to face sentencing on Monday, but a judge rescheduled it for Feb. 23. Each faces 25 years in prison if convicted of all charges, while Moyer faces an additional five years if convicted of lying to the FBI, according to the Republican-Herald.