Good morning. It's November 26th. It is a rainy morning in New York City. The afternoon is supposed to be sunny with things getting windy in between. All of that action being packed in before the 4:30 sunset. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

On the slightly wrinkled front page of the New York Times, pulled off the stoop just as the rain began landing on it, because the Times remains ideologically opposed to using its blue plastic bags, even when the Paper Zone forecast box calls for waterproofing. Anyway, right there in the middle of the page, the headline is “Netanyahu Signals Openness to Hezbollah Truce.” If you go to the website, the more up-to-date headline is “Israel Pummels Lebanon as Ministers Prepare to Discuss Truce with Hezbollah.” Subhead, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to present a deal mediated by US and French diplomats to end the fighting. The Israeli military kept up the pressure with heavy strikes in and around Beirut.” 

“Kept up the pressure” is a strange analytic frame to use, given that Netanyahu is presenting the ceasefire proposal to his own security cabinet, none of whom live in Beirut. So what pressure exactly is being applied to this proceeding, through blowing up Lebanese people in their neighborhoods? 

Back in the print edition, the lead news spot gets a two-column headline. “U.S. moves to drop pursuit of Trump in criminal cases. Special counsel cites policy in tossing election and documents charges.” We covered that one in the email Indignity newsletter when it broke yesterday. The Times did some nice, precise, and careful news writing here, writing that special counsel Jack Smith was “bowing to a Justice Department policy that says it is unconstitutional to pursue prosecutions against sitting presidents.” And then later the story says, “in both of the court's admissions, Mr. Smith made clear that his moves to end the charges were a necessity imposed on him by legal norms rather than a decision made on the merits of the cases or because of problems with the evidence. The Justice Department's policy against prosecuting sitting presidents”, the Times writes, is the Times reports Smith wrote to the judge, “categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government's proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the government stands fully behind.” Quite rightly, the Times does not say that the Constitution prohibits the prosecution of a criminal president, only that a Justice Department policy says that it would be unconstitutional, and that this is a legal norm. Even the idea that it's a legal norm is a bit of a stretch, since there is no comparable situation in the record of an indicted person being elected president to serve as a normative example for the justice department's behavior. Nevertheless, that's what the feds say and that's what the feds are doing.

Across the page under a picture of a scorched building in port-au-prince “Pullouts by U.N. dismay Haitians: Feeling forsaken after gang violence surge. A United Nations helicopter,” the Times writes, “has been buzzing nonstop for days over Haiti, as the U.N. starts to draw down its personnel in Port-au-Prince, evacuating 14 people at a time in chopper rides. Many embassies and international aid organizations — including Doctors Without Borders, which runs some of the few functioning hospitals in Port-au-Prince — are suspending operations in Haiti, where gangs have stormed into more parts of the capital, sowing panic among humanitarian groups. Port-au-Prince’s international
airport,” the Times reports, “remains closed to commercial traffic after gangs shot at US airliners this month.” Russia and China are blocking a peacekeeping operation. The peacekeeping operation after the 2010 earthquake killed 10,000 people and sickened 800,000 by causing a cholera outbreak. Intervention and non-intervention both look like terrible options, so presumably, if history is any guide, international community will eventually stumble onto some even worse third response. 

Two headlines are sitting right on top of the fold. One column is, “A new worry for migrants in New York,” in which backhandedly, in the context of talking about the threat of mass deportations under an incoming Trump administration, The Times acknowledges that aspects of the migrant crisis that it devoted so many full pages to earlier in the year have in fact already been brought under control. 

Next to that, the story is “Fiscal populism to be in hands of billionaires. Donald Trump's picks of Wall Street veterans to run the Treasury and Commerce departments,” the Times writes, “show the prominence of billionaire investors in setting an agenda that is supposed to fuel a blue collar boom, but that skeptics think will mostly benefit the rich.” 

On page A13, there's more news about our incoming plutocracy. “Mideast wealth funds rescued Trump's pick as envoy to the region,” is the headline. “Stephen Witkoff, the billionaire New York real estate executive whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has named as his special envoy to the Middle East,” the Times writes, “was in a jam. The year was 2018,” the Times writes, “and Mr. Witkoff's co-investor in a Manhattan hotel project had been indicted by the Justice Department on fraud charges. A plan to convert the hotel into luxury condominiums was also on hold. But there was a two-part rescue of sorts, from the kind of real estate angels that New York property investors have increasingly turned to. First, Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund expanded its stake in the troubled hotel Park Lane, which sits at the southern edge of Central Park. Then, in an even more crucial move, the Qatar Investment Authority last year dispatched $623 million as a leveraged buyout of Mr. Witkoff and his partners.” The story goes on to note that Jared Kushner acted as a Middle East envoy for the first Trump administration and not long after Mr. Kushner left the White House, he secured three billion dollars in commitments, mostly from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, to set up his own new private equity fund that Mr. Kushner calls Affinity Partners. Affinity Partners. Partners who have an affinity for one another. The story does not squeeze in the fact that Kushner got his investment from the Saudi Arabian sovereign fund at the direct orders of Mohammed bin Salman, overriding the people who actually operate the fund, who could see no practical reason investments wise that Jared Kushner should be entrusted with their money, because they failed to understand the value of affinity. The story does mention that Stephen Mnuchin, Trump's first term Treasury secretary, got his own Saudi backed 2.5 billion dollar fund to tied him through the Biden years as well.

Down the bottom of the page Adam Liptak has a little column about the Supreme Court dedicated to the proposition that the late Antonin Scalia would have, in principle, strenuously opposed Donald Trump's suggestion of using recess appointments to push through cabinet picks. Ten years ago, Liptak writes, “Justice Scalia anticipated the current dispute in a blistering 15-minute statement delivered from the bench after a five-justice majority ruled that many recess appointments made during congressional sessions were proper. Later on,” Liptak writes, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Justice Scalia's opinion. All remain on the court and there have been no indications that they have changed their minds.” He continues, “The views of the other three conservative justices on today’s court are unknown, but they have all expressed deep admiration for Justice Scalia’s jurisprudence. One of them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, served as his law clerk. Of the five justices in the majority in the 2014 decision, on the other hand, only two are still on the court: Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. That math,” Liptak writes, “suggests that Mr. Trump's plan would meet a chilly reception at the Supreme Court, assuming that the identity of the president involved did not figure in the justices' thinking.” 

And down at the bottom of page one, there's a referral box to a Science Times story with a cute little picture of a hummingbird, an aeronautical ideal. It says, “The flying abilities of hummingbirds have drawn the attention of robot designers, especially those studying the use of drones in warfare.” Oh, to look at a hummingbird sparkling as it flits from blossom to blossom, drinking nectar and think about how you might modify it to kill people. 

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 Mack Scocca-Ho. You are valued listeners. Keep us going with your tip and subscription dollars. So please support us if you can. Tomorrow morning is for packing up and getting on the road, so the long podcasting holiday weekend begins after today. Enjoy your own festivities, however you practice them. We give thanks again for you, our audience. And if nothing unforeseen happens, we will talk again on Monday in December. How about that?