{"id":4032,"date":"2005-04-22T10:40:21","date_gmt":"2005-04-22T14:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4032.html"},"modified":"2005-04-22T10:40:21","modified_gmt":"2005-04-22T14:40:21","slug":"santorum-wants-to-control-the-weather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/santorum-wants-to-control-the-weather\/","title":{"rendered":"Santorum wants to control the weather"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sen. Rick “Man on Dog<\/a>” Santorum has been stranger than usual lately. He exploited the Terri Schiavo controversy to fly to Florida for campaign fundraising<\/a>, he used a Wal-Mart jet<\/a> to do it, he threatened to shut down the Senate<\/a> unless he got his way on Schiavo legislation, he flip-flopped<\/a> on Amtrak funding, flip-flopped<\/a> again on the death penalty, and just this week decided he may want to push off the nuclear option<\/a> after fighting for it for two years. (Maybe his falling poll numbers<\/a> are affecting his judgment.)<\/p>\n

All of this nuttiness aside, Santorum’s decision to go after the National Weather Service<\/a> has to be right up there among his stranger decisions. (Thanks to AYM for the tip.)<\/p>\n

Do you want a seven-day weather forecast for your ZIP code? Or hour-by-hour predictions of the temperature, wind speed, humidity and chance of rain? Or weather data beamed to your cellphone?<\/p>\n

That information is available for free from the National Weather Service.<\/p>\n

But under a bill pending in the U.S. Senate, it might all disappear.<\/p>\n

The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me get this straight. A senator, who claims to love the free market, wants to limit competition between the National Weather Service and private weather forecasters. A free government service, available to everyone online<\/a>, would probably disappear, so a private service could flourish.<\/p>\n

I recognize Santorum’s drive to privatize everything he can get his hands on, but weather forecasts? You don’t suppose this has anything to do with the fact that AccuWeather is based out of Pennsylvania<\/a>, do you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sen. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum has been stranger than usual lately. He exploited the Terri Schiavo controversy to fly to Florida for campaign fundraising, he used a Wal-Mart jet to do it, he threatened to shut down the Senate unless he got his way on Schiavo legislation, he flip-flopped on Amtrak funding, flip-flopped again […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}