A nice summer evening. Sitting outside, looking up at the sky and watching
the clouds go by. We are under a typical summer time storm watch, and there are
small storms just to the north. Of course I was already informed of this via my
Weather Bug, an advertiser supported
application, that I have installed on my computer.
Then suddenly I remember an article I read in April, a month before the birth
of my blog. The article, published by the
Palm Beach Post brought me out of the clouds and into the reality once again
that our government does not care about the citizens, but rather the corporate
contributors that support their costly campaigns.
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa, introduced
Senate Bill 786 on April 14 of this year. This bill would limit the data
that the National Weather Service, a government agency, would make available to
the public. The bill is the result of a fueling debate between the
NWS and the private sector over
publishing forecast data.
The NWS recently introduced a new free service on their
website that provides the public, free of charge, forecast information for their
particular zone. This has upset the corporate weather services such as
Accuweather, who fears this free
service could cost them.
Now to straighten this point out, the information provided
on the NWS website is not something as typical as you would see on your evening
news. It is not provide real time current conditions, and it is supplied in an
XML format, which means the laymen would not be able to read it without use of a
special feed reader application.
Now Senate bill 786 says that the NWS should do away with
this information and focus only on predicting hurricanes and major storms. I am
no meteorologist, but I think in order to predict storms, you have to also
predict the nice days. There is not some special formula or computer program
that just pops-up and says a storm is coming, or maybe they are employing the
services of Ms. Cleo. No what the NWS is doing is providing data to the public
that they must collect regardless of the weather. This is not costing the NWS
any extra, or taking away from their job of predicting storms. They are just
making data available to the public, data the public has paid for through tax
dollars.
But this doesn’t sit well with companies like Accuweather.
They feel that this could hurt their business and cause a sudden drop in
profits. So they have called in that political favor to one of their puppets on
Capitol Hill and got this bill rolling. Again our government is not worried
about the declining economy, or other social agendas. They are now at a point in
history that their personal agendas and that of their deep pocketed corporate
pimps takes center stage. This is a true example of propaganda in action.
If we are now in the practice of writing bills that forbid
the Government from providing information to the public that can be purchased
through private corporations, then what will be next. Perhaps the bill should be
amended to include the IRS can not make instructions for tax returns public.
After all H & R Block is in the business of making money by preparing peoples
taxes, and these publicly available instructions could cost them a client or
two.
Please help me and show these corporate pimps to Congress
that we will not tolerate them trying to eliminate government services. If you
wish for weather information, go to an alternate site. I myself will not use
Accuweather at all because of their pushing for this bill and thereby
interfering with me accessing public information that I have already paid for!