By Beau Elliot
So I see that the Fake-News-in-Chief wants to kill the weatherman -woman.
Or maybe that’s kill the weather. So hard to tell with the Trumpster these days (or any other days, for that matter). But at least he’s put the adage “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it” on notice. (Charles Dudley Warner said that, although it’s often attributed to Mark Twain.)
The Trumpster would like, according to the Washington Post, to cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by 17 percent (the National Weather Service is part of that agency). The rub is the budget would cut National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service funding for its satellite program by $513 million, 22 percent of its budget, the Post says.
Unfortunately, NWS uses that satellite program to predict the weather, especially severe storms. For most of us, such information merely means knowing what to wear. (Most undergrads, apparently, seem to be excluded from such knowledge.)
For many farmers, however, those data are crucial for such practices as when to plant, when to lay down fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides, and when to teach dairy cows the intricacies of Daylight Saving Time. (Dairy cows are notoriously indifferent about intricacies, even though they possess 17 stomachs or something. Perhaps they have 1 IQ point for each stomach.)
As the Post reports, “Data from weather satellites are indispensable for models used to predict the weather. NOAA has conducted experiments that show that forecasts for costly and deadly storms would be far less accurate without such information.”
It’s curious; rural America voted for the Trumpster, and yet, in his first six or seven weeks in office, he has slapped that constituency somewhere near the face. His travel ban and other anti-immigrant policies would hurt many farmers a great deal; they need that labor. His trade policies could hurt farmers, particularly in Iowa, because they depend on exporting grain.
His move against the Obama-era regulation WOTUS had farmers cheering, but WOTUS, and the Clean Water Act of 1972, to which it is an addendum, specifically exempt agriculture.
And now the war on weather. Oh, well. Farmers and AgriBiz got their “big victory” with the push against WOTUS, hollow though it is.
The rest of us? Well, we can live (if not cohabit) with the words of the American philosopher Bob Dylan (and a Nobel Prize winner), who once wrote, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Though it’s easy to suspect that such anti-climate-change zealots as the Trumpster and the (Steve) Bannon wanted to shoot down the satellite because it’s one of the devices tracking climate change, and any mention of climate change in this White House is verboten. And weather is too often conflated with climate, so weather is verboten, too. It probably won’t be too long, in the Trumpster’s and the Bannon’s America, that uttering the words “climate” and “weather” will be verboten. Ignorance is bliss, goes another adage.
Meanwhile, on the discrimination front, it turns out that Republicans of the tea party/evangelical ilk are profoundly disturbed by it. Discrimination against Christians.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute (via Five-Thirty-Eight), 57 percent of Republicans brush off the notion that gays and lesbians face discrimination in the U.S.
And oddly (or not), the institute reports that most right-wingers think that Christians — more than 70 percent of the U.S. population — face more bigotry than blacks, immigrants, Muslims, gays, and lesbians do.
Makes me wish we could go back to the days of “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”