Lordy

There are things that the government, the one we have that is of for an by the people, SHOULD do. the National Weather Service is one of those things. It generates some of the best weather data there is, the data that private companies use to repackage and sell to radio and TV broadcaster, as well as internet prognosticators.

Rick Santorum (R-PA) introduced a bill to the Senate to limit the amount of info that the NWS can disseminate so that a handful of private companies can charge for the information. Nothing the GOP does is to help you. they help only the very, very rich. if you don't believe me, you're not paying attention. look at the facts, and the actual dollars, and you'll see.

This NWS gambit is built to make already-very-rich people richer, through new government/private shoehorn activities like packaging info generated on the public dime while withholding it from the very public that paid for the shit. Same thing with a buttload of stuff...we pay for research, private concerns get it. we pay for infrastructure, we don't get to use it. Every damn thing in this country belongs to it's citizens. Sadly, nowadays, more than half of everything...everything...every bit of wealth in ths nation, more than half belongs to the top 15% of the wealth scale. more than half! lord, i could go on about tax shelters and living trust gambits all day, and how the mega-wealthy get even more and more, and pass all of the burden of maintaining the nation they extract such fortune from squarely onto your shoulders (unless you are worth more than 89 billion dollars), but i won't.

just this once, write your senator. write your congresscritter. email em! say "dude! Satorum is trying to privatize NWS information! If you vote for that, i will never, ever vote for you or your party again". fucking jerks. they're trying to make it into a giant nation of that have-alls and the have-nones. the middle class are useful idiots. they're being lured along with promises, but they live on credit. they'll be in the muck with the rest of us. i'm dead serious, if you make less than around 3 million a year and have a net worth of less than 80 million, you don't even count as anything other than a potential profit center to the lawmakers in our country, GOP or Democrat. The GOP is the most heinous, but the Dems, with a couple of exceptions, are equally scummy (Daschle, Biden, et al).

It's disgusting. and it's not made to help anyone but the super-super-rich. look it up, i dare you.