Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is a nasty piece of work. Both sides of the political fence say this so there might actually be a germ of truth here.
Here is an article dealing with Sen. Santorum's closeness with Wal-Mart.
Here is a site proposing: "Dump Rick Santorum" (lots of links)
And here is $antorum Watch (lots more links)
Here is Santorum's own take on the bill in question:
Santorum Proposes to Modernize National Weather Service to Better Serve PublicSeeks to Modernize? Sounds like a giant step backward to me unless... just unless... you happened to be one of the big commercial weather sites like AccuWeather. Sure you can get free weather information from AccuWeather but you have to endure lots of advertisements and pop-ups. You can get a much better set of information from the wonderful NOAA website with zero advertising or pop-ups. How do they do this? You have already paid for this data with your tax dollars. They are already funded, by you. Senator Santorum wants to take this away so that commercial weather companies can make more money. Some news stories on this can be found here and here You might want to write your local Senator and have them put a stop to this odious bit of corporate pandering. It is a bit funny because I went to Sen. Santorum's website, found the email Sen. Santorum link, filled in my disagreement with his legislation, hit the send button and this was presented for my next screen:
U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, today introduced the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005 to clarify the duties and responsibilities of the National Weather Service (NWS) within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
"With the support of my colleagues, we can pass this legislation to modernize the description of the National Weather Service�s roles within the national weather enterprise, so that it reflects today�s reality in which the National Weather Service and the commercial weather industry both play important parts in providing weather products and services to the nation," said Senator Santorum.
Fourteen years ago the NWS took the extra step of carefully delineating the respective roles of the NWS and the commercial weather industry, in addition to pledging its intention not to provide products or services that were or could be provided by the commercial weather industry.
However, the parent agency of the NWS, NOAA, repealed the 1991 non-competition and non-duplication policy in December 2004. Its new policy only promises to "give due consideration" to the abilities of private sector entities. The new policy has enabled NWS and NOAA to expand into areas that are already well served by the commercial weather industry.
"This decision by NOAA to repeal the non-competition and non-duplication policy detracts from NWS�s core missions of maintaining a modern and effective meteorological infrastructure, collecting comprehensive observational data, and issuing warnings and forecasts of severe weather that imperil life and property," said Senator Santorum.
Senator Santorum�s bill restores the NWS non-competition policy. However, the legislation leaves NWS with complete and unfettered freedom to carry out its critical role of preparing and issuing severe weather warnings and forecasts designed for the protection of life and property of the general public.
dead.letter indeed... The bill in question is called: "National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005"Thank you for expressing your views.
2005... User unknown Act... User unknown Duties... User unknown Services... User unknown Weather... User unknown of... User unknown /home/webservd/dead.letter... Saved message in /home/webservd/dead.letter
The National Weather Service(NWS) plays a huge role in the protection and preservation of life and property.
The National Weather Serivce Duties Act of 2005 is a vaguely written at best! The NWS must still be allowed to put out the data that needs to be put out in order to protect life and property.
Deo, what good is a radar image on a website if you can't easily see where your city or state is? Do you want just a radar picture with no roadways, no state lines, no county lines and no other way to find where you are on the map? Part of putting the information out to the public is putting it in a format that is easily read by EVERYONE.
As far as Senator Santorum goes. He has been receving large monetary donations from Accuweather, Inc founder and President Dr. Joel Myers. Santorum has also been receiving money from The Weather Channel and Dr. Myers' brother.
My wife works for the NWS and even she doesn't get a free weather station! This is unfair!
One thing the other websites can't offer that the NWS website can, by the way, is data without the time lag that "vendors" create as they "add value" to the data they receive free like the rest of us from NWS.
The agency isn't competing with those other outfits, they're supplying them. Our tax dollars are subsidizing the "vendors."
This actually doesn't bother me so much, though, as long as the same NWS data is still available for free to the rest of us. Once that stops happening, though, it becomes corporate welfare.
And conservative that I am, I don't like welfare of any stripe.
The NWS's original charter was to collect data and warn people. Now they're spending my tax dollars making flash based radar? No thanks. The next thing you know they'll be handing out free weather stations to everyone. But that will be okay, right - because we paid for it with tax dollars.