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NOAA Is Struggling As Hurricane Season Nears

The Felon's regime with the aid of Elon Musk's unthinking "chainsaw" attacks on federal agencies have wreaked havoc on the safety of everyday Americans as medical research funding has been slashed, clean air and clean water regulations are erased, food safety inspections  have been curtailed in some instances, and important information is purged from federal websites.  In addition, NOAA has been savaged by cuts to funding and the departure of hundreds of employees - just as we approach the 2025 hurricane season.  Living on the Atlantic coast - and previously on the Gulf of Mexico coast - and having lived through a number of hurricanes, I am only too aware of the need for timely and accurate forecasts, things many fear will not be provided by a savaged NOAA and hurricane center.  Indeed, the ax taken to NOAA could literally cost lives, not that the Felon or Musk care, and could well threaten inland regions as Hurricane Helene underscored last year.  Ironically, the red states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas could pay the highest prices resulting from a diminished NOAA and less accurate forecasts and lack of coordination with local forecasters. A piece at Politico looks at NOAA's weakened situation.  Here are excerpts:

Vacancies at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are raising fears among current and former agency officials and Democrats that cuts to the federal workforce have left the country with too few experts to help prepare for weather disasters ahead of the looming Atlantic hurricane season.

POLITICO first reported on Wednesday that NOAA posted 155 job openings at the National Weather Service, the public safety agency whose regional offices make up the nation’s first line of defense for imminent storms and disasters. . . . . NOAA managers are pleading with employees in emails to pursue reassignments to fill those jobs, which in many cases would amount to demotions.

“There appears to be a panic level on the part of the department to try and undo the damage they’ve done to the weather service.”

The vacancies are mostly for meteorologists who embed in local offices scattered throughout the country and coordinate with local officials like mayors and emergency managers to provide timely information for storm preparation, helping reduce loss of life and property.

NWS is also backfilling crucial roles like hydrologists and information technology specialists who help fine tune radar systems, said Tom DiLiberto, a former NOAA official who spoke at the Wednesday event. Those functions are essential for events like the hurricane season that officially begins June 1, DiLiberto said.

“We’re not prepared. We’re heading into hurricane season as unprepared as anytime as I can imagine,” he said.

Five former NWS chiefs said in an open letter earlier this month that the Trump administration’s cuts could lead to “a needless loss of life.” They said offices are so thinly staffed that some roles will have to be filled on a part-time basis. The former NWS directors said 250 employees were fired or took buyouts in February, and another 300 have since departed.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has also endured layoffs and curtailed or cut disaster response programs.

“This is not fear mongering. These are challenges by design, by the actions of the Trump administration,” Rep. Gabe Amo (D-R.I.) said. “We know that there’s a likelihood of a very intense [hurricane] season. So why would we put ourselves in a position to not be the most prepared possible?”

DiLiberto said Trump’s actions will also further obscure climate-driven dangers. NOAA recently shuttered its database of disasters that cause at least $1 billion of damage, taking a key public resource offline. DiLiberto said datasets tracking polar sea ice in the Arctic and greenhouse gases at NOAA are also under threat.

“The Trump administration takes an axe to NOAA, whose mission is to protect the American people and their livelihoods,” he said. “NOAA is in trouble.”

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ICE Tactics Are Fueling a Trump Immigration Backlash

During the Felon's first regime, outside of his most fervent white supremacist supporters, the images of migrant children torn from their parents and put in cages caused widespread revulsion among Americans and undermined support for his anti-immigrant agenda.  Now, during the early days of his second regime with the assistance of Stephen Miller, the Josef Goebbels figure in the regime, and ICE Barbie, the Felon's tactics and images of masked ICE agents seizing outwardly law-abiding migrants and immigrants who are deprived of any meaningful due process are again causing a backlash among all but the white supremacists and most foul supporters in the MAGA base.  Indeed, the images are reminiscent of Nazis seizing Jews and others targeted by Nazi regime which similarly made those captured disappear - often to death camps - with zero due process. Many are saying the Felon is overreaching and ignoring the reality that such tactics are beyond whatever alleged mandate - there was none since the Felon received the votes of only a little more than 1/3 of all eligible voters - he claims to possess.  Worse yet, the Felon's regime is losing in the courts even as ongoing images of masked ICE agents continue to cause backlash.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the situation:

The long-running television show Cops became a propaganda boon to American law enforcement soon after its debut in 1989. The morality of the show is not complicated: The heroes are guys in uniforms braving danger to restore order. They face off against shirtless, drunken louts yelling in the street or barreling down the highway at 100 miles per hour.

Immigration enforcement in service of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has been the aesthetic opposite of a Cops episode. In social-media clips and grainy security-camera footage, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers appear in dark clothing, some wearing masks or neck gaiters that make them look like bandits. The people they target may be walking down the street, sitting in a car, or otherwise going about their lives. Few are engaged in obvious criminal behavior.

In one recent example that went viral, ICE officers in Maryland stopped a 51-year-old mother and smashed through her car window to arrest her while her teenage daughter sat in the passenger seat filming and crying. In another, security-camera footage of the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk—a student from Turkey whose visa was revoked over an op-ed—shows her crying out in fear as plainclothes officers swarmed her on the street and put her in a car. (She was released on Friday.) A Massachusetts neighborhood devolved into chaos last week when ICE officers arrested a distraught teen trying to stop them from hauling away her mother.

Many Americans have recoiled at these scenes, comparing officers’ tactics to those of authoritarian regimes. Yet the arrests in the videos do not show conduct outside the bounds of typical ICE protocol. This is what immigration enforcement looks like. It’s messy and emotional, and requires officers to arrest people for an offense that many Americans do not view as a crime.

Whenever public attention on immigration shifts from the border to U.S. streets, support for aggressive enforcement tends to erode. It happened during Trump’s first term. It’s happening even faster now.

Immigration was one of Trump’s best-polling issues when he took office in January, and his rating on the issue continues to rank higher than his overall job approval. But in the past two months, Trump’s immigration approval rating has seen a double-digit downturn.  . . . . 53 percent of respondents disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, compared with 46 percent who approved. Other polls taken around the 100-day mark of Trump’s presidency found similar results.

A president’s approval numbers on immigration can be misleading, because the measurement contains two distinct components. One element is about stopping illegal border crossings. , , , , But a quiet border does not provide a dramatic visual image.

The other part of a president’s immigration performance relates to people who are already here. Polls show far less enthusiasm for aggressive ICE enforcement that sweeps up immigrants without criminal records in U.S. communities. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only about one-third of Americans want to see the deportation of all immigrants living in the country illegally. . . . . support for deporting violent criminals is nearly universal, but backing drops to the single digits when it comes to people who are married to a U.S. citizen or who came to the U.S. as children.

Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies immigration, attributes some of the slump in Trump’s approval to . . . . Trump is “not doing what most people want,” he said. He’s doing much, much more. He’s overreaching.

“I think there’s this tendency to assume that if people are skeptical or dislike immigration, they would just be happy with anything, but there are limits,” Kustov told me. “People don’t like chaos at the border. But if you just randomly and mindlessly deport people without due process, it’s also actually pretty chaotic too.”

Soon after Trump designated Tom Homan to be the White House border czar, Homan began playing down expectations that ICE would round up immigrants en masse. ICE would focus on national-security threats and violent criminals, he said—“the worst of the worst.” It sounded like moderation.

That type of selective immigration enforcement does not make for much of a mass-deportation campaign, however. . . . aggressive immigration enforcement on U.S. streets, filtered through bystanders’ cellphone videos, is so politically perilous.

Trump and his top officials took a different path when they returned to power, opting instead for a shock-and-awe campaign that sent migrants to Guantánamo Bay on military jets and banished others to a nightmarish megaprison in El Salvador. ICE operations on U.S. streets, and rumors of them, have left immigrant neighborhoods across the country on edge. Immigration attorneys and advocacy groups are reenergized, winning in court and bringing media attention to the most sympathetic or outrageous cases.

ICE says three-quarters of the immigrants it arrested during Trump’s first 100 days had criminal records, but the agency did not provide a breakdown of their crimes. Traffic offenses, drug crimes, and immigration violations—such as reentering the United States after a deportation—are typically the leading categories.

Tom Warrick, a former DHS official who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said the current administration would be smart to spend heavily building up the immigration court system and providing more due process, not less. . . . . . Polling shows that a majority of Americans aren’t opposed to deportations per se, but believe that the government should follow the law and give detainees a fair hearing.

Warrick told me it won’t be easy for the Trump administration to simply ignore public opinion and forge ahead with three and a half more years of harsh tactics. If it does, that could feed the sanctuary-jurisdiction movement that Trump officials are trying to stamp out.

Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policies—and the political messaging behind them—has led the attack on due-process rights for ICE detainees. Last week he said the White House is considering wartime measures that would suspend people’s constitutional right to challenge their arrest and imprisonment. ICE is not required to publicly release the names of those it arrests. Stripped of habeas protections, the immigrants in the grainy videos being seized off the street could be quickly deported with no recourse to challenge their detention. But most wouldn’t show up in any video at all.

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