Thursday night, CNN's Newsnight ran a piece about Rick Santorum's bill that would prevent the National Weather Service from providing "a product or service ... that is or could be provided by the private sector."
Basically, Rick wants your tax dollars to pay for the National Weather Service to collect data, then he wants you to have to pay private companies to see the data that the NWS collects. It's not mentioned by CNN, but two of the executives at one of those private companies are Santorum/Republican donors. Video:
So the agency was guided by essentially the same rules until they changed a year ago and yet the complaint is that the reversal is guided by graft? Given the small amount of donations in question from AccuWeather ($11k over 2 years isn't much) I think that argument falls flat.
Whether tax payers will be billed twice for the information is also a difficult point to make since the bill clearly states that the NWS will only provide services that private industry doesn't already offer. Even if the NWS can only offer those services to private industry and not directly to the public, so what? Do you really expect radio, tv, and websites to start charging for their weather information? When the old rules were in place, does anyone remember paying for their weather forecast?
Alarmist warnings about paying twice for your weather forecast or not knowing about a hurricane danger is nonsense.
Bet the Myers family will find Ricky a job after he gets beat next November...a lobbyist, perhaps?
If the commercial weather services want to launch their own satellites, put up their own weather monitoring stations, and fly their own hurricane reconnaissance, they can go right ahead. Until then, information that's been paid for by the public will be publicly available for free, as should all information gathered by the government that doesn't present a clear and present national security risk.
As the old song say, "Little things mean a lot."
Barry Pack
York
BoatUS.com, a site representing boaters of all stripes, posted this article recently:
SB 786 Proposes to Curtail Free Data
from National Weather Service - May 2005
"Free NOAA weather radio could go the way of the eight-track tape player if Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) has his way.
Legislation introduced by Santorum, S. 786, would restrict NOAA's broadcasting to emergency weather, like hurricanes and tornados and permit private companies like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel to get all of its daily weather information from NOAA for free. These companies would then turn around and sell the continuous weather updates to the public that NOAA used to provide free of charge."
Read rest of article...
http://www.boatus.com/gov/sb786.htm
This has not been lost on the sportsmen's press, either. Outdoors Magazine posted the above article from BoatUS.com in its "Current Outdoor News" section, just above a recommendation to apply for the Second Amendment Foundation's Mastercard. (Scroll down page.) These guys don't mess around.
No, the fallout over this poor decision of the senator is not going away, nor should it.
For more information on the Santorum record on sportsmen/conservation issues, visit:
http://www.santorumrecord.com