Doing something about the weather...

Now they've made me mad. Sure, the bankruptcy bill is an abomination, and portraying the filibuster as an attack on people of faith is just absurd, and Tom Delay is a sleaze of the highest order, but this is too much. Rick Santorum, the junior Republican senator from Pennsylvania, wants to take away my free weather information!

The claim is that by prohibiting the National Weather Service from putting out information that competes with for-profit weather companies like AccuWeather, the NWS can focus its resources on saving life and property from hurricanes and other weather hazards. Of course, in order to predict hurricanes, the NWS would have to do exactly what it's already doing; predicting the weather all the time. The only difference would be, they wouldn't be allowed to make that daily information available to the public. You paid for it, but now Santorum wants you to pay for it again, by giving money to private companies. Incidentally, companies like AccuWeather base their forecasts in part on their own data and models, but also on the free data and models from the NWS.

Of course, there's really only one piece of information you need to know to understand why Santorum is doing this: AccuWeather is headquartered in State College, PA.

Best government money can buy!