Our Congress At Work

S. 786 has been introduced and sponsored by Sen. R. Santorum. While the wording of this bill leaves much to be desired if you puzzle with it a while you will see that it is trying to limit the ability of the National Weather Service ( seriously cool sight if your a weather nut ) to post its weather information online for general access by the public in order that it not compete with private enterprises such as Accuweather and The Weather Channel. It seems concerned about repetitious work by a government agency that the private sector is willing and able to provide.

I suppose on the surface of it this may seem reasonable enough but if you dig a bit deeper you find something interesting. Quite a bit of the information provided by Accuweather and The Weather Channel consist largely of repackaged National Weather Service information. This information is paid for out of the federal budget... IE your tax dollars. So everyone that pays federal taxes has partially footed the bill for this information. Private businesses of course want to make money for providing their services.

So just to spell it out.

Accuweather (primary instigator) has basically been crusading to get this legislation in action for a while now. They have managed to sway one of the Senators in their home state to sponsor and introduce S.786 to stop the National Weather Service from providing public access to the tax payer funded information that they repackage in their service. So in other words they want people to have to pay them (and other weather services) for access to the information collected and paid for already with their tax dollars.

This is wrong on so many levels it isn't even funny. That a company is trying to protect a business model that does not provide added value over what is already provided by a needed federally funded process is bad enough. That a Senator has bought off on it and is actively sponsoring a bill to make it law just isn't right. The whole thing puts me in mind of the RIAA and its whining that digital file trading is killing its means of making money. Well tough shit says I. There is no right to a specific business model. Horse Carriage makers had all the same arguments when the Model T came along and that Car thing actually took off.

Write your congress critters, or drop 'em an E-mail and say that this simply isn't acceptable. If they only people they hear from are the businesses like Accuweather then they might just be blinded enough by the BS to actually let a turd piece of legislation like this slip through.... By all rights it shouldn't even have gotten this far. But that is our Congress at work for ya. It is right depressing at time.