I thought that Senator Santorum’s attempt to forbid the National Weather Service to give the public information that the public owns and has paid for would quietly fade away for lack of support. For those who were asleep last Spring, the bill introduced in the Senate by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa (Did I really have to tell you he was a Republican?) would keep the public from getting nearly any information from the Weather Service except under special and vaguely defined circumstances. If you want to know where the storm is going you would have to go through a private company and you would have to pay for it.
Those of us who live in areas where the weather can be dangerous and deadly as well as those who go out in boats or up in airplanes were outraged at Santorum’s blatant payback to Accuweather for their generous campaign contributions and some saw it as outright theft from the public as well as a disregard for public safety. Did I mention that Santorum is a Republican?
After the Katrina blamefest, the prospect of important information being further delayed in distribution was enough, so I thought, to make the idea go away, but when I read in Raw Story yesterday that, according to a leaked Sept. 29 email memo sent out to all NOAA staff, including employees of the National Weather Service (NWS) -- both of which are under the Department of Commerce -- employees must collect information from reporters and forward it to the Department of Commerce for approval before talking to them. The policy requires that local weather offices forward media requests to the NWS press office, who in turn would forward the request on to the Commerce Department’s public relations office. The Department would then decide whether comment should be granted.
Did I mention that the Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez is a Republican and according to the DOC website, a core member of President Bush’s economic team?
It’s hard to believe that there is any other reason to isolate the Weather service or NOAA from the public other than to give another handout of public property to corporations who back the Republican Party.
3 comments:
What's worse is that taxpayers already paid for the weather data and would have to pay again.
Another solution is move to a quiet non-weather threatened city.
It so "supervillain" to try and control the weather.
Easier to control the weather than to control the gang of thieves who stole our country.
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