1. It’s Thursday, January 4, 2018.

2. Just a reminder: The National Weather Service doesn’t name winter storms. That’s a marketing ploy by The Weather Channel. It’s bogus.

These are serious enough events that they shouldn’t need some sort of naming device that makes it somehow cute or relatable.

3. Speaking of NWS, the folks who work there are some of my heroes. I love how thoroughly they update people, good days and bad. Using science.

Their tools for showing the impact of weather conditions get better almost every time you look. All you have to do is follow them on social media – Facebook or Twitter.

Weather forecasters are routinely badmouthed – as if they create bad conditions to make people miserable.

Maybe I’m sympathetic because I spent a lifetime delivering bad news to people. But I think the NWS does an amazing job and I’m grateful for the people who’ve dedicated themselves to working in meteorology for the United States Government.

The snow – where I live, we’re now expected to get about seven inches – is a diversion from the winter of discontent that is the U.S. government.

4. My former brethren in the news media are focused on the snow and the hullabaloo over a book that tells people Trump is perceived as a barely functioning idiot by the people who got him to the White House.

Neither of those things is news to anyone with eyes and a brain.

Here is what we should be focused on this awful January day:

— Congress has to come up with a way to fund the government past Jan. 19.

The Republicans found the time and will to provide an idiotic tax plan that mostly benefits the wealthy.

Keeping government agencies running, providing health care for children and getting some help to people in Puerto Rico who have spent nearly a third of a year without power seem less important to these jackasses.

— There still appear to be grownups in charge of South Korea.

The government seized on a suggestion from Kim Jong-Un that North Korea, despite months of bombast and missile launches, was willing to send a delegation to next month’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

They’ve also resumed communications via a hotline between the two still-warring nations.

Seoul seems determined to get things back to an uneasy calm – as opposed to the jitteriness spurred by the childish, hot-tempered exchanges between Trump and Kim.

— The Republicans want to derail the Mueller investigation.

Two House members wrote an op-ed for a tame organ calling for the firing of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.

Getting a blithering idiot out of office is, on the face of it, a good idea. But the real reason these clowns want Sessions out is that his successor wouldn’t be bound to continuing Mueller’s probe. Sessions is recused from influencing the probe; his successor wouldn’t be.

The truth needs to be found as to the extent of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The Republicans don’t want that – that’s how they got the gift of the presidency, the moron holding the job not withstanding.

5. On a day like this, I am reminded of the wise words of Lou Grant, former news director of WJM-TV in Minneapolis:

“I hate snow. I don’t like its color. I don’t like its shape. I don’t like its temperature. I don’t like how it feels. Or what it does. I don’t like it in snowballs. Or on hills. I don’t like anything about it. It’s a soft, wet, white, mushy, melting, freezing mess. I hate snow as much as I hate anything in the entire world.”

Winter is one-seventh over. I think about a nice 95-degree day in July and remember that it’s coming back. Eventually.