Sen. Santorum wants the government to sell you what you've already paid for

seriously... if this wasn't so ridiculous it would be outrageous. Good luck getting this bill passed. Josh Marshall today

This page right here is the one I go to to check the weather. It's put out by the National Weather Service. It's a lot like some commercial ones, only it has more information, costs nothing and contains no ads. But as the Carpetbagger Report notes here, Sen. Santorum (R) of Pennsylvania has introduced a bill that would ban the federal government's meteorologists from making this information available for free since that creates a problem for outfits like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather, which want to sell it.

Plenty of federal legislation these days boils down to this sort of rip-off of the public. But seldom is the equation so clear.

You paid for the data. Your tax dollars fund a massive apparatus of meteorological data collection for reasons ranging from agriculture to disaster safety to keeping airplanes in the air -- everything under the sun. You pay for it and this is just the feds making it available to you on a website.

Brad Delong thinks Santorum should resign, right now.