Category: default || By jt3y

The National Weather Service has been providing free weather information to sailors, pilots, long-distance truckers and pretty much everyone else for its entire 135-year existence, and once the Internet came along, it naturally started delivering the information online.

(Actually, that's not entirely true. Even before the Web, you could get weather information from NWS via your computer. You used to have to dial into the NWS computer with your modem, and it would spit back a bunch of numbers and codes at you that you could translate into the current weather and sky conditions. But only geeks knew about that, which is why I can remember it.)

Of course, the reality is that the National Weather Service isn't really "free." Your tax money is paying for it. Realistically speaking, though, the NWS would have to collect the information anyway for all of the government agencies that use it, and the amount of money it takes to run the NWS is miniscule compared to, say, the amount of postage Congress uses in a week. So, for all intents and purposes, let's say it's free.

Since it's a government service, the information is available to everyone equally --- if you're an airline dispatcher, you have access to the same data as a Cub Scout pack planning a camping trip, a PennDOT salt truck supervisor preparing for a storm, or Joe and Jane Homeowner getting ready for the weekend. If you're a smart cookie like the people up at AccuWeather, you can even take that data, reinterpret it, dress it up with snazzy graphics and resell it to TV and radio stations for a tidy profit.

Then again, if you're AccuWeather, that's not good enough. You've given a couple of thousand dollars to Rick Santorum's re-election campaign. Why should all these Cub Scouts, truck drivers and homeowners be getting the data for free, when you're trying to charge them for it?

So you put the arm on one of your U.S. senators --- say, Rick Santorum, who you've given a couple of thousand bucks. And he says, "Hey! I'll write some legislation that will forbid the NWS from providing the public with the weather information that the public has paid for."

But not in those exact words --- I'm paraphrasing. What the Senator actually says is that he wants to "modernize the description of the National Weather Service's roles" so that it can focus on its "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."

Now, it would stand to reason that the National Weather Service can't collect all of that "comprehensive" data and issue those "warnings and forecasts" without doing all of the day-to-day forecasting that Santorum wants to block from being released to the public. The National Weather Service is supposed to collect all of this data and ... do what with it, exactly? Keep it to itself?

Let's cut to the chase, then. In effect, Rick Santorum wants to enact a tax on weather forecasting to help fund his re-election.

No? Well, what do you call it when suddenly you have to pay for something that the government used to do as a public service? A "tax." So wouldn't it be correct to say that Rick Santorum wants to raise my taxes to subsidize a private business and help his own political campaign?

Just checking.

Ol' Froth and 2 Political Junkies have been all over this, and I'm coming late to the party. (Tube City hard-hat tips all around.)

Suffice it to say this may be one of the most hare-brained proposals ever floated by the junior senator (R-Va.) and the fact that he's giving it serious consideration is a strong indication of just how out of touch he's become. Frankly, I liked it better when he was just shining flashlights into everyone's bedrooms.

...

On second thought, it may be too simplistic merely to conclude that Santorum wants to ensure that AccuWeather and a handful of other weather repackagers to have a monopoly on weather forecasting (concealing that, like the emperor, they really have no clothes).

No, perhaps this is just part of the Bush administration's ongoing effort to withdraw information from the public record. I'm sure that Santorum is just trying to protect us. If only he had sold this as a homeland security initiative!

Or, maybe this is being offered in the spirit of Social Security "reform." Santorum should be calling these "personal weather accounts": "The National Weather Service trust fund is going bankrupt! It's not going to be there to predict severe weather in 2048 unless we do something now!"

...

In other news: One of my all-time favorite writers, Peter Leo of the Post-Gazette, appears to be back in the game (sort of) with a new feature called "The Morning File." It's --- dare we say it? --- a sort-of "blog."

Several writers from the Tribune-Review have been blogging for months now, so this is not exactly any new ground that the P-G is breaking. Still, it's nice to see Peter Leo back on a regular basis. I stole everything I know from him.