Tom Corbett Fires A Cabinet Member Over Racially Charged Email

The head of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Richard Allen, has been under scrutiny lately for negotiating in secret to open up drilling on an 18,000 acre swath of Loyalstock State Forest. Just this week, a coalition of environmental groups demanded the terms of the proposal to be released, along with a set of public hearings that would typically accompany such a project.

But that’s not why he was a fired. (Or asked to resign, technically speaking.) According to the Inquirer, Allen was shown the door for sending a racially insensitive email to his wife, also a state employee, in which he made a play on words using the word “colored.” As the Inky notes, Allen is the sixth member of Corbett’s cabinet to resign in the past nine months. [Inquirer]