They are trying to remove your weather access

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 23:21:51 GMT, George Patterson
wrote in jSVae.910$oD6.243@trndny07::

Andrew Gideon wrote:

Unless the publicity points out that he's trying to *decrease* public safety
for the benefit of certain very specific commercial interests. If it can
then be shown that they've contributed to his campaign...

Oh, it can be shown. One web site that I hit the other night when looking for
the text of the bill contains a list of each contribution Accuweather made to
him. Mostly small amounts, but they total over $3,000.



Here's a quote:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/rjwhite/
"It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers,
subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar
products and services for free," Santorum said.




Here's a little more information on the topic:


-------------------------------------------------------------------
AVflash Volume 11, Number 17a -- April 25, 2005

-------------------------------------------------------------------

FREE WX UNDER THREAT...
The National Weather Service (NWS) would be restricted from
offering any products to the public that are or could be provide
by the commercial weather industry, under legislation introduced
in the U.S. Senate recently by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). The
"National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005" would "modernize
the description of the National Weather Service's roles within the
national weather enterprise," Santorum said, and essentially it
would yank the popular NWS Web site off the Internet. The bill
already has attracted opposition among those who value NWS
products.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archive...ll.html#189634

...AS PROVIDERS SEEK PAYMENT FOR SERVICE
The effort seems to be driven by the NWS's recently revamped Web
site, which makes weather data more easily available. AccuWeather,
a private weather provider based in Pennsylvania, has been
critical of the NWS and supportive of the bill to change it.
AccuWeather spokesman Barry Myers told the Post the bill would
improve public safety by making the weather service devote its
efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than
duplicating products already available from the private sector.
But NWS spokesman Ed Johnson said it doesn't work that way.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archive...ll.html#189635


This article seems to give Barry Myers a soapbox:


http://www.wired.com/news/technology...w=wn_tophead_1
The commercial weather providers make more than $1 billion in
revenue each year from sales to media, transportation companies,
farmers and financial traders, according to Barry Myers,
AccuWeather's executive vice president.


Here is an account of attorney Barry Myers' political contributions:

http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_...rs&first=Barry

Here is an account of AccuWeather's President Joel Myers' political
contributions:

http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/ind_detail/MYERS|JOEL+N+DR|STATE+COLLEGE|PA|16801|ACCU+WEATHE R/


Another story on the subject:

http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/b...eather_421.htm
BAD WEATHER?
Senator aiming to nix federal weather forecasts enjoyed
AccuWeather money
Some worry that bill is bad idea in wake of hurricanes

By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor

A conservative Republican senator who proposed that federal
meteorologists be forbidden from competing with companies such as
AccuWeather and the Weather Channel, has received nearly $4,000
from AccuWeather's founder and executive vice president since
2000, RAW STORY has discovered.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) introduced the bill last week. The
senator's supporters (among them the founder and executive vice
president of AccuWeather) note the bill provides an exemption that
would allow organizations the National Hurricane Center from
alerting the public to hazards.

"The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core
mission should be, which is protecting other people's lives and
property," said Barry Myers, the Executive Vice President of
AccuWeather told the Palm Beach Post Thursday. "It spends hundreds
of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of
'warm and sunny.'"

Myers gave $1,000 to Santorum in the last election cycle. Santorum
was the only senator Myers financially supported.

AccuWeather's 15,000 clients include Post, which utilizes the
firm's hurricane forecast maps on PalmBeachPost.com. The Post
failed to include mention of Myers contributions.

Myers' brother, Joel, founder, CEO and president of AccuWeather,
has also given generously to Santorum over the years—more than
$2,000 in the last election cycle alone.

A spokesman for Florida's Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson was taken
aback by Santorum's bill, questioning the intelligence of a bill
that the senator believes might be dangerous in the wake of
several hurricanes.

"The weather service proved so instrumental and popular and
helpful in the wake of the hurricanes," Nelson spokesman Dan
McLaughlin told the Post. "How can you make an argument that we
should pull it off the Net now? What are you going to do, charge
hurricane victims to go online, or give them a pop-up ad?"

In a release Apr. 14, Santorum said the bill was sorely needed.

“With the support of my colleagues, we can pass this legislation
to modernize the description of the National Weather Service’s
roles within the national weather enterprise, so that it reflects
today’s reality in which the National Weather Service and the
commercial weather industry both play important parts in providing
weather products and services to the nation,” Santorum said.



AccuWeather's President compares himself to Edison, Ford, Disney,
Turner, Trump, and Gates:


http://wwwa.accuweather.com/company....bout#president
President
Dr. Joel N. Myers
Founder, CEO and President of AccuWeather, Inc.
Dr. Joel N. Myers is the man who transformed weather into an
industry.

As a graduate student of meteorology at Penn State University in
1962, Myers accepted his first consulting assignment to provide
weather forecasting information to a Pennsylvania utility company.
Thus began the fulfillment of a dream he had held since he was 11
years old, to help industry and consumers by providing weather
forecasts and information of value, with his own weather company.

Since that time, Dr. Myers has gone on to build the world’s
best-known commercial weather service. Today, AccuWeather and
AccuWeather.com are the most respected names in weather
forecasting, a brand recognized by nearly every American. The
company, which employs 400 professionals including 100 operational
meteorologists (probably the most in one location, anywhere in the
world), provides customized weather forecasting services to 15,000
clients worldwide, including international media, more than 180 of
the Fortune 500, government agencies and private subscribers.


A lifetime student and instructor of meteorology, Dr. Myers’
accomplishments include:
Reworking the arcane science of meteorology in order to educate
mass audiences to the forces of weather and how they impact
everyday life.
Advancing the very science of weather forecasting to provide media
outlets and businesses worldwide with the most exact and timely
weather forecasts available for them to use as a competitive
advantage in their marketplace.
Establishing weather information as a key content component in
both traditional broadcasting and on the Internet. Prior to
AccuWeather, weather was reported as an afterthought. Today,
weather is often the news--due in part to Dr. Myers’ vision and
forethought.
Training an estimated 17% of all practicing meteorologists in the
United States as of his retirement from teaching at Penn State.
Pioneering ready-for-air color weather graphics for television
stations and print-ready weather pages for newspapers. Today, more
than 1000 individual television and radio stations and newspapers,
plus leading news organizations like CNN, CNBC and MSNBC use
AccuWeather as their weather source.
Dr. Myers continues to innovate. The patent-pending Real Feel
Temperature™, developed by Dr. Myers and other AccuWeather
experts, as the only true indicator of how temperatures feel, is
replacing the less accurate wind chill factor and heat index as
the predominate means of how consumers understand the effect of
temperatures.

Over the past five years, Dr. Myers has established AccuWeather as
the premier supplier of online weather information.
AccuWeather.com receives about 4.5 million unique visitors,
accessing 60 million pages each month. When these viewers are
combined with the more than 1,200 other Internet sites that
provide AccuWeather content, an estimated 70 million unique users
view more than 700 million AccuWeather pages each month.

Dr. Myers has authored more than 75 articles and papers on a wide
range of technical and business subjects and has given hundreds of
speeches and presentations. He has appeared On the ABC Nightly
News, To Tell the Truth, Larry King Live and has been quoted in
Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, National Geographic,
The Economist, USA Today, Reader’s Digest, Forbes, Internet World
and in more than 500 magazines and newspapers. As a weather
broadcaster for 18 years, he has been seen on major media
nationwide and is generally considered the nation’s most respected
source on the business of meteorology and how it affects industry
and consumers. He was dubbed "the most accurate man in weather" by
the New York Times.

Dr. Myers was recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine’s Encyclopedia
of Entrepreneurs as one of the 520 greatest entrepreneurs in
American history, along with historical figures such as Thomas
Alva Edison, Henry Ford and Walt Disney and contemporaries Bill
Gates, Ted Turner and Donald Trump. He is one of only 40 thus
honored born after the start of World War II. Dr. Myers is also a
member of the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcaster’s Hall of
Fame.

Dr. Myers was called upon several times by the U.S. Congress to
testify as an expert on weather forecasts and information and on
the respective roles of the government and private sector weather
services. He was also an invited speaker by the U.S. National
Weather Service to present his view of the future of weather in
their Visions of Future Weather Service seminar series, and by the
American Meteorological Society in their 2001 Summer Colloquium.

Dr. Myers continues his lifelong interest in education as a
trustee of The Pennsylvania State University, a post which he has
held for the past 21, having been elected by alumni for eight
3-year terms. He is also a member of Pennsylvania Governor
Schweiker’s Team Pennsylvania. He works from AccuWeather’s Global
Headquarters in State College, PA.


History
Over the last 39 years, AccuWeather has grown from one man's dream
to become the world's largest commercial weather service. Today,
AccuWeather serves more than 15,000 clients worldwide with weather
forecasts, data, color graphics, consulting services, computer
hardware and software. AccuWeather serves clients in the media,
government, industry and education. More than 180 million
Americans recognize the AccuWeather name as the leader in weather
forecasts and information.

On November 15, 1962 Joel N. Myers, then a Penn State graduate
student, began forecasting the weather for a gas utility company
in Pennsylvania. Joel not only had a firm grasp of weather
patterns, but he also had insight into the impact of the weather
on businesses and people.

As Joel worked on his M.S. and then Ph.D. in Meteorology from The
Pennsylvania State University, AccuWeather's client base grew to
include other businesses and government agencies. In 1971,
AccuWeather began services to radio and television stations. Five
of the first seven broadcast stations served by AccuWeather in the
early '70s are still clients today. AccuWeather now serves
hundreds of television and radio stations all across the United
States plus stations from Canada to Chile, from Africa to
Australia, and from Moscow to Manilla.

During the early days of AccuWeather, Dr. Myers not only forecast
and ran the new company, but remained an active member of the Penn
State faculty. At the time of his retirement from teaching at Penn
State, it was estimated that Dr. Myers had taught basic
forecasting skills to 17% of all of the country's practicing
meteorologists. During Dr. Myers' teaching at Penn State and work
at AccuWeather he conducted numerous studies to help develop
forecasting techniques which increase forecast accuracy. The
AccuWeather approach to forecasting has helped make AccuWeather
the most accurate and most recognized name among commercial
weather forecasting services.

Joel and AccuWeather share a commitment to excellence in
education. Joel has served as a member of the Penn State Board of
Trustees since 1981, and each year AccuWeather awards several
scholarships to Penn State meteorology students and State College
High School seniors. In addition, AccuWeather is a sponsor of the
National Collegiate Weather Forecasting Contest.

AccuWeather's pioneering developments have extended well beyond
the creation and dissemination of weather forecasts. AccuWeather
has also led the way in utilizing and developing new technologies.
In 1979, AccuWeather began to develop a state-of-the-art
meteorological database. AccuWeather also developed an educational
program, On-Line with AccuWeather, utilizing teachers' guides,
educational modules and student worksheets, which has been
recognized with four awards as one of the top educational
products. In 1983, AccuWeather began to make color weather
graphics available, and these are now utilized by MSNBC, CNBC, CNN
and more than 200 individual television stations. AccuWeather has
also supplied graphics computer systems to more than 100
television stations. As technology advanced, AccuWeather was in
the forefront and in 1994 AccuWeather began providing free
Internet weather at AccuWeather.com, which has become one of the
Web's leading weather sites. AccuWeather is the world leader in
Internet weather, providing weather data, forecasts, and graphics
to over 6000 sites including five of the six top TV news sites,
and three of the four top cable news sites.

AccuWeather pioneered advances in newspaper weather, providing
newspapers with complete, camera-ready, black and white or color
custom weather pages. With our latest technology, transmitting
complete weather pages directly to a newspaper's pre-press system,
AccuWeather today provides weather pages to more than 750
newspapers in the United States and around the world and, in
addition, prepares all of the weather maps for The Associated
Press.

Other AccuWeather innovations include an automated, state-of-
the-art fax service called AccuWeather Fax (tm) , and a warning
service, FirstWarn (tm) , that automatically generates a crawl
over a television station's broadcast signal to notify the public
the instant an official warning is issued.

Over the past 39 years, AccuWeather has grown from the dream of
one person to one of the nation's best-known and most respected
companies. AccuWeather today employs over 400 people, including
100 meteorologists, the largest staff of operational forecasters
at one location anyplace in the world. It is conservatively
estimated that the AccuWeather forecasts have, over the years,
saved more than 100 lives and more than $30 million in property.

AccuWeather is proud of its continued growth over the past 39
years. Each year, AccuWeather has grown in number of employees and
clients served and total revenue.

AccuWeather is an assembly of the best meteorologists, computer,
graphics, technical and support personnel available. The
AccuWeather staff takes pride in the company's success, and in the
positive impact AccuWeather has had in people's lives.

Return to top

Headquarters
AccuWeather's operation is housed in its Global Headquarters, a
52,000 square foot facility built on 6.5 acres of land near State
College, PA.
AccuWeather spent several years designing its headquarters,
incorporating many features that enable us to serve our clients
even better than ever. Some of the highlights include redundant
computer facilities, on-site UPS and power generation, 23 radio
booths and a TV studio.

The dramatic operations room is larger than two basketball courts,
and with a 21-foot high ceiling, it enables AccuWeather
meteorologists, graphic artists, editors and operational support
staff to interact together as integrated teams.

The headquarters' state-of-the-art design and equipment enables
AccuWeather to provide the most reliable and accurate weather
information well into the new millennium.

AccuWeather Strategy
To create and grow a portfolio of profitable lines of weather and
selected other businesses using techniques proven throughout our
decades of success:

Recognize customer needs, and exceed their expectations.

Study our own product set and the marketplace and deliver
solutions that improve on the best.

Maintain flexibility in product features and pricing to provide
maximum value to customers.

Develop customer solutions and relationships that deliver
recurring revenue and profit.

Enhance AccuWeather's brand strengths.

Seek significant new opportunities in accessible markets.

Leverage alliances and acquisitions to gain new customers, markets
and technology.

Work with the Commercial Weather Industry and government to
achieve our mission.

Employ our proprietary intellectual property to maximum advantage.

Be innovative and diligent in maximizing our efficiency and
cost-effectiveness.

Follow established processes and strategies while working in an
orderly way to improve them.



Finally, telling it like it is:


http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?...themonth_Dec04
...
As for Punxsutawney Phil, the last thing Washington needs is
another rodent. He seemed to be happy burrowing holes in the
ground; but now he is burrowing holes in taxpayers’ wallets. On
the real Groundhog Day, instead of waking up and seeing his
shadow, he will see 10 more years of deficits. Unfortunately,
taxpayers will not be able to hibernate through the coming crisis
in entitlement spending, sure to be made worse by Congress’s
addiction to pork spending.

Democracy has reached a new low with the spectacle of rodents
defending congressional earmarks, but the participation of
AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers in this afternoon’s press conference
presents another oddity, and some hypocrisy. Myers claims that
the National Weather Service duplicates work done by the private
sector a position taxpayers would appreciate. But AccuWeather is
the nation’s largest private forecasting operation, part of a $1
billion industry. If Myers thinks the Punxsutawney Weather Center
is so great, he could cough up more of his own money for the
project, instead of reaching for tax dollars confiscated from
other peoples’ paychecks.

Despite Peterson’s, Myers’, and Phil’s best efforts to make the
Punxsutawney Weather Center out to be the Greatest Thing Ever, its
mission is no different than hundreds of museums throughout the
country that manage to succeed without federal funding.
Pork-barrel projects rarely, if ever, uplift economically
struggling communities. There are hundreds of poor communities
throughout the U.S. that should not be taxed to turn Punxsutawney,
Pennsylvania into the “Weather Capital of the World,” simply
because its congressman was able to curry favor with the right
committee. While December 7 will always be “a day that will live
in infamy,” this year it also represents the depths to which
members of Congress will sink to protect their pork. For
defending questionable priorities in a time of war, record
deficits, and debt; circumventing the budget process; and grabbing
$100,000 in federal funding for a pet project, CAGW names Rep.
John Peterson and Punxsutawney Phil the December Co-Porkers of the
Month.

Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation's largest
nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating
waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.

George Patterson wrote:

hit the other night when looking for
the text of the bill contains a list of each contribution Accuweather made
to him. Mostly small amounts, but they total over $3,000.

Have you still the URL?

- Andrew

Andrew Gideon wrote:

George Patterson wrote:

hit the other night when looking for
the text of the bill contains a list of each contribution Accuweather
made to him. Mostly small amounts, but they total over $3,000.

Have you still the URL?

Never mind...someone else posted some good ones.

- Andrew

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 16:29:14 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote in ::

Here's a quote:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/rjwhite/
"It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers,
subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar
products and services for free," Santorum said.


Here's the response to my e-mail inquiry I received from one of my
senators:

From:
Subject: Responding to your message
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 20:10:47 -0400
Message-ID:




May 17, 2005


Dear Mr. Dighera:

Thank you for contacting me regarding
S.786, the National Weather Service Duties Act of
2005. I appreciate the opportunity to respond to
your views, and I share your concerns about this
bill.


S.786 seeks to severely restrict the
functions of the National Weather Service (NWS),
which is run by the federal National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. The NWS currently
offers a wide range of free weather services for
all Americans, including invaluable information
for airplane pilots, farmers, and those seeking
details about severe weather in their areas.
This bill would prevent the NWS from offering
these free weather services to the public.
Instead, private weather companies, which rely
primarily on the same data used by the NWS, would
charge Americans for their services.


The NWS provides a reliable and effective
public service that is utilized by over six
million Americans each day. S.786 eliminates
this valuable service and unfairly penalizes
people by requiring them to pay for information
that should be available free of charge. This
bill is currently in the Senate Commerce
Committee, of which I am a member. Rest assured
that I am not in favor of this bill and that I
will work with my colleagues to prevent this bill
from reaching the full Senate floor.


Again, thank you for writing to me. Please
do not hesitate to contact me again about this or
any other issue of concern to you.




Sincerely,


Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

================================================
Please do not reply to this e-mail. This is not an active e-mail
address.

If you wish to comment further on this issue or an any other
issue and want to ensure an answer--please complete the form at
http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm

On Wed, 18 May 2005 00:55:13 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote in ::

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 16:29:14 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote in ::

Here's a quote:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/rjwhite/
"It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers,
subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar
products and services for free," Santorum said.


Here's the response to my e-mail inquiry I received from one of my
senators:

From:
Subject: Responding to your message
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 20:10:47 -0400
Message-ID:




May 17, 2005


Dear Mr. Dighera:

Thank you for contacting me regarding
S.786, the National Weather Service Duties Act of
2005. I appreciate the opportunity to respond to
your views, and I share your concerns about this
bill.


S.786 seeks to severely restrict the
functions of the National Weather Service (NWS),
which is run by the federal National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. The NWS currently
offers a wide range of free weather services for
all Americans, including invaluable information
for airplane pilots, farmers, and those seeking
details about severe weather in their areas.
This bill would prevent the NWS from offering
these free weather services to the public.
Instead, private weather companies, which rely
primarily on the same data used by the NWS, would
charge Americans for their services.


The NWS provides a reliable and effective
public service that is utilized by over six
million Americans each day. S.786 eliminates
this valuable service and unfairly penalizes
people by requiring them to pay for information
that should be available free of charge. This
bill is currently in the Senate Commerce
Committee, of which I am a member. Rest assured
that I am not in favor of this bill and that I
will work with my colleagues to prevent this bill
from reaching the full Senate floor.


Again, thank you for writing to me. Please
do not hesitate to contact me again about this or
any other issue of concern to you.




Sincerely,


Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

================================================
Please do not reply to this e-mail. This is not an active e-mail
address.

If you wish to comment further on this issue or an any other
issue and want to ensure an answer--please complete the form at
http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm

Today, I received a nice letter from my other senator thanking me for
contacting her to share my opposition to the National Weather Service
Duties Act.

She says the legislation has been referred to the Senate Committee on
Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and should it come to the
Senate floor, she will keep my comments in mind.