Good morning. It's November 12th. It is a windy seasonably cold fall day here in New York City, and this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

President elect Donald Trump. President elect Donald Trump, continued in filling out his incoming administration this morning, picking South Dakota governor Kristi Noem to be the secretary of Homeland Security. Noem is best known nationwide for her unsuccessful attempt to convince Trump to pick her as vice president, an effort that failed amid and apparently because of a news cycle about the revelation that in her memoir, Noem had proudly told the story of shooting a puppy to death in a gravel pit, in a fit of rage over her own failure to properly train the puppy as a hunting dog. To its credit, CNN brings this up in its story about the news that this oafish sadist is who Trump wants running his crackdown on immigrants. 

In another appointment that came yesterday evening, too late for the deadlines of the New York Times print edition, the belligerent Florida Senator Marco Rubio will be secretary of state, re-demolishing the already demolished yet somehow persistent fantasy among right-wing and left-wing idiots alike, that Trump's contempt for the treaties and alliances of the liberal world order makes him a force for world peace. 

Speaking of Trump's role on the world stage, in an appointment that did make the print edition on page A14, Representative Elise Stefanik, who ditched her identity as a moderate to become the most fanatically cynical defender of Donald Trump during impeachment, and then the spearhead of the pro-war McCarthyite movement against college presidents, is supposed to become the ambassador to the United Nations. The extremism reporter Nick Martin of The Informant notes in a post on the suddenly burgeoning Blue Sky platform, that Stefanik has managed to complete the arc from promoting the anti-Semitic great replacement theory conspiracy, to winning congratulations from the Anti-Defamation League. Not that the Anti-Defamation League cares if someone's an anti-Semite, as long as they also hate Arabs and are willing to bully people on behalf of the Israeli government.

The parade of horribles continues, with failed New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, a passionate anti-environmentalist taking over the Environmental Protection Agency, and down at the bottom of the page, in a brief and indifferently copyedited item, there is the news that Stephen Miller, the face of vicious white nationalism in the first Trump administration, is, the Times' writes, “taking over policy planning for the transition and is expected to be named deputy chief of staff in the incoming administration.” That's packaged with the news that Mr. Miller is expected to work closely, the Times writes, “with Thomas D. Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whom the president-elect named on Sunday as his czar to the police and to control the border.” 

“Czar to the police” and “to control the border” is pretty muddy as a piece of writing, but the spirit comes through. The story does not say that Homan was the family separation guy last time around, though he was. Nor does it say he was a contributor to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, the blueprint for a new Trump administration that Trump disavowed on the campaign trail and is now apparently following as expected. And although the piece talks about Miller's plans to restrict immigration, including, the Times writes, “rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the United States and detaining them in camps before they're expelled from the country,” it does not supply the number or numbers that Trump campaigned on as he promised to do this to 15 or 20 or more million people. The story does say that the deputy chiefs of staff are expected to be announced as soon as Monday, meaning yesterday, because nobody bothered to update the reporting from the web version or even clean up the tenses before putting it in the paper. In further quality control issues, the story contains the sentence, “Mr. Trump's announcement on Sunday was the latest clue into who will and won't be his cabinet members and closest advisors,” which happened to be what I typed to try to pull up the web version of the story to confirm that when it said Monday, it didn't mean Monday next week, only to find it instead in a separate story about Homan's appointment alone, under the byline of Mike Ives. Whereas the newspaper version of the story is credited to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan with no supplemental reporting credit. Sloppy stuff on a story about exactly who's going to be putting the boot to millions of people very soon, but the front page of the paper is busy with “many Democrats sat out election at cost to Harris. Turnout slid from 20, drop off affected key cities and cut across demographics.” As the opinion machine churns on with explanations of how and why Trump seized a mandate and voters repudiated Kamala Harris. This story notes that Trump's victory “may not represent the resounding endorsement of his agenda that the final electoral college vote suggests.” Instead, he kept his voters and Democrats stayed home. Next to that, “plodding California count delays House results. Control of chamber hangs in balance as votes are verified.” California's reliance on mail-in ballots and its leisurely pace of hand-processing them mean that the Times writes “as of Monday, 10 of the 18 House races that have yet to be called this year are in California, including in Orange County and the Central Valley. Five are among the most hotly contested in the nation and could determine whether Democrats or Republicans gain control of the chamber.” Another reason not to tell the story of the election until the story of the election has been told. 

Next to that on page one, “Eonomic fear haunts Europe since the US vote. Seems reasonable. 

And then, in the left hand column, another bizarre round of Times coverage continues. The headline is detailing how Israeli visitors were attacked. The subhead is “A mirror of the Mideast in Amsterdam strife.” It truly is a mirror of the Mideast in that directly under the headline about an attack on Israelis, the story begins, “Dateline Amsterdam. Early Thursday morning, taxi drivers gathered en masse outside Amsterdam's Holland Casino. Hours before. Israeli soccer fans had stolen and burned a Palestinian flag while others attacked a cab and the drivers the police said were heeding an online call to mobilize.” After the jump again, under a headline “details emerge of how fans from Israel were attacked,” the Times writes “,in Amsterdam many civic leaders agree on basic facts. They largely concur that some Israeli fans stoked anger in the city's Muslim population by chanting incendiary and racist slogans including declaring that there were ‘no children in Gaza anymore,’ and by defiling the Palestinian flag and vandalizing the cab. They also agreed that Israeli fans were assaulted on multiple occasions in different locations, often in hit-and-run attacks on bikes and on foot, and that some attackers appear to have singled out their victims for being Jewish. This was not,” the Times continues, “the eruption of violence that Europe often sees around big soccer matches, with groups of supporters from rival clubs clashing in the streets, the authorities said. The city's top prosecutors said on Friday that officials were investigating whether the attackers were linked in a formal way and whether there was an organized connection between the various acts of violence.” All that sounds pretty much exactly in line with European soccer violence. A bunch of vicious jagoffs from one country go to another country, get abusive and violent in public, and are rewarded with retaliation from the violent local jagoffs. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening.

The indignity morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Max Scocca-Ho. Our podcasting is sustained by the contributions of you and the listener through subscriptions to Indignity and the use of the tip button. So please do keep those coming and barring the unexpected or in the case of yesterday's podcast, a regularly scheduled federal holiday that we plum forgot to think about, we will talk again tomorrow.