Protect Your Weather Service
Santorum wants to ban the National Weather Service from giving you, the taxpayers who fund the Weather Service, their products. He proposes to allow them to give their products only to the companies who sell their products so that you, who paid for them, will then be forced to pay these private companies, who happen to be based in his home state for this information. The editorial below lays out the facts. But it UNDER reports the amount of money Santorum has accepted in various forms from the companies he proposes to enrich at YOUR expense.
PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES AND TELL THEM THAT YOUR NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MUST SURVIVE. STOP THIS CYNICAL CORRUPTION BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.
June 4, 2005
Overcast in Pennsylvania
Far from just talking about the weather, Senator Rick Santorum is doing something dank and cloudy about it: he is proposing to squelch the National Weather Service's growing role in the information age.
The Weather Service provides a priceless flow of nonstop measurements and readings that commercial forecasting companies package and sell to the public. Lately, the Weather Service itself has been trying to make all its information more accessible to anyone who wants it. But Mr. Santorum, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, has introduced legislation that would basically require the service to give much of its data only to those private weather forecasting companies. A dozen of those businesses happen to be located in Mr. Santorum's home state, Pennsylvania.
"It's not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products for free," the senator said, somehow overlooking that taxpayers finance this round-the-clock national resource in the first place.
Senator Santorum, who is running for re-election, is vowing to protect hundreds of Pennsylvania weather company jobs. But timing is everything in both politics and weather, and his case was not helped by the fact that two days before the bill was introduced, his campaign accepted a $2,000 donation from one of the weather companies lobbying for protection. This was dismissed by the senator's supporters as a small-beer coincidence in a $25 million race. But as they say on the weather segment, it's a lingering disturbance on the Doppler.
- NY Times
PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES AND TELL THEM THAT YOUR NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MUST SURVIVE. STOP THIS CYNICAL CORRUPTION BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.
June 4, 2005
Overcast in Pennsylvania
Far from just talking about the weather, Senator Rick Santorum is doing something dank and cloudy about it: he is proposing to squelch the National Weather Service's growing role in the information age.
The Weather Service provides a priceless flow of nonstop measurements and readings that commercial forecasting companies package and sell to the public. Lately, the Weather Service itself has been trying to make all its information more accessible to anyone who wants it. But Mr. Santorum, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, has introduced legislation that would basically require the service to give much of its data only to those private weather forecasting companies. A dozen of those businesses happen to be located in Mr. Santorum's home state, Pennsylvania.
"It's not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products for free," the senator said, somehow overlooking that taxpayers finance this round-the-clock national resource in the first place.
Senator Santorum, who is running for re-election, is vowing to protect hundreds of Pennsylvania weather company jobs. But timing is everything in both politics and weather, and his case was not helped by the fact that two days before the bill was introduced, his campaign accepted a $2,000 donation from one of the weather companies lobbying for protection. This was dismissed by the senator's supporters as a small-beer coincidence in a $25 million race. But as they say on the weather segment, it's a lingering disturbance on the Doppler.
- NY Times
posted by Defective Unit | 8:08 AM
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