Santorum's weather crusade

By: Bob King
Politico.com
January 5, 2012 06:53 PM EST

Will Rick Santorum’s lost crusade against the National Weather Service rain on his suddenly hot presidential campaign?

While a seemingly obscure issue next to abortion, gay marriage and tax cuts, weather forecasting inspired a defining controversy for the tail end of Santorum’s U.S. Senate career: his sponsorship of a 2005 bill aimed at hobbling the federal agency’s ability to compete with commercial forecasters like AccuWeather.

The bill went nowhere but brought Santorum a nationwide pasting from bloggers, weather enthusiasts, airline pilots and other critics. Some of them noted that executives from AccuWeather — a company based in State College, Pa., in Santorum's home state — had donated thousands of dollars to his campaigns over the years.

Doubling down later in the year, Santorum also accused the weather service's National Hurricane Center of flubbing its forecasts for Hurricane Katrina's initial landfall in Florida, despite the days of all-too-prescient warnings the agency had given that the storm would subsequently strike the Gulf Coast.

(More here.)