Good morning. It is December 2nd. It's a cold morning in New York City under bright blue skies, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

President Joe Biden issued a full pardon to his son, Hunter Biden, yesterday, sparing him any chance of going to prison for his federal convictions on falsifying gun purchase paperwork and evading taxes, crimes that he almost certainly would never have been prosecuted for if his father had not run for president. Terrible takes are proliferating wildly out there about the news. The very dumbest being that this is somehow going to give Donald Trump permission to abuse the pardon power. 

Relatedly, over the weekend, Donald Trump named Charles Kushner ambassador to France. Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner and the father-in-law of Ivanka Trump, was already pardoned by Trump in his first time as president for the federal convictions he got when he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law so that he could secretly record it and send the video to his sister to try to prevent her from testifying against him about his embezzlement of funds from the family business, which he then spent on contributions to the successful New Jersey gubernatorial campaign of Jim McGreevey, whose own incredibly lurid and absurd scandals fell outside the scope of Kushner's own federal prosecution. But now Joe Biden has given Donald Trump permission to do the things that Donald Trump had already done and was going to continue to do regardless. 

And speaking of the incoming presidential cesspool, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has a new story about Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth building on the existing news that Hegseth was accused of getting aggressively drunk at a hotel bar, and then raping a woman who tried to rein in his behavior by reporting that Hegseth was aggressively drunk everywhere and all the time while running a sexually hostile workplace and demolishing the organizational finances he was in charge of by spending the money on parties. Citing a whistleblower report from his time as president of Concerned Veterans for America, the story says that at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time and other members of his management team, sexually pursued the organization's female staffers whom they divided into two groups, the party girls and the not party girls. And also that he ignored accusations of attempted sexual assault by another employee at that strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, the story continues, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early morning hours of May 29th, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting, “kill all Muslims, kill all Muslims.” 

The front of this morning's New York Times is one Trump appointment news cycle behind that. With the confusing headline, “some allies back Trump's pick of FBI chief bent on revenge.” If the point of news is to express what's new and unexpected, then the framing premise of that headline is that Trump's pick of Cash Patel, a completely amoral and unqualified loyalist who explicitly sold himself as Trump's agent of retribution against journalists and political rivals, the FBI director, ought to be untenable. FBI directors, the Times writes are, confirmed by the Senate, and Mr. Patel is likely to face tough questions at his confirmation hearings about whether the agency would remain free from political interference. 

And with that, it's time to just move over to the next column on the front page. “Senate faces decisive test of its power. Trump aims to blunt its constitutional job.” That's a news analysis column. “President-elect Donald J. Trump's determination to crash over traditional governmental guardrails will present a fundamental test of whether the Republican controlled Senate can maintain its constitutional role as an independent institution and a check on presidential power.” Mm-hmm. “With Mr. Trump putting forward a raft of contentious prospective nominees,” the Times continues, “and threatening to challenge congressional authority in other ways, Republicans, who will hold the majority come January, could find themselves in the precarious position of having to choose between standing up for their institution or bowing to a president dismissive of government norms.” Government norms like... not sending a mob to the Capitol to try to steal an election? Because it seems like it's been almost four years since the Senate Republicans laid down that particular marker as to where they fall on the question of institutional responsibility versus partisan compliance. The Senate's genuine constitutional role is as a center of anti-democratic power, which in our current political arrangement means bolstering the Republican Party. It's true that as the institutionalist side desperately points out in the article, as if they're clapping for Tinkerbell not to die, that the accused sex predator Matt Gaetz withdrew from his nomination as attorney general rather than force the issue in the Senate. But that also meant that the senators did not have to defy Donald Trump in a public vote. They are what they do and what they do is obey their president. 

The lead news column on page one. is reporting from Syria, where the stalemate in the country's civil war abruptly unstalemated itself. “Fight intensifies as Syria's rebels seize more land, Aleppo airport taken, forces loyal to al-Assad seeking to push back sudden uprising.” For now, the Assad government seems to be on the run. 

On page A8 is the news from Georgia that the people are out in the streets. The lead of the story plays it right down the middle. “Protesters clashed with the police in the Republic of Georgia's capital late into the night on Sunday during the fourth consecutive day of demonstrations over the recently elected government's suspension of its bid to join the European Union.”

“Protesters clashed with the police” is the safe news writing formulation as the people who write news understand it Even though the reporting in the story sounds much more like the police took care of the primary clashing activity. “Police officers used water cannons and water from fire hydrants to disperse protesters, the Times writes, who shot off firecrackers and other fireworks in response, according to videos shared from the scene. The Interior Ministry,” the Times writes, “said that several police officers and 42 of its employees had been hurt since the protests began. The Associated Press,” the story continues, “reported that its journalists had seen police officers chasing and beating protesters. It was not immediately clear how many protesters had been injured.”

On page A11, there's an update from Paris. France's prime minister is in a precarious position. The position is that the treacherous game Emmanuel Macron and his centrists played to publicly ally with the left to block Marine Le Pen's far right in the election and then privately ally with Le Pen to block the left from having any leading role in the government, left the ostensibly ruling faction with no real power base and despised by everyone.

Down at the bottom of the front page is a little feature story “when form follows function a mail truck looks like a duck” as the Times catches up with the Postal Service's next-generation delivery vehicle whose appearance the Times writes “has not been universally applauded It has a giant windshield and a low slung hood designed to allow drivers of almost any height to see the road. One car enthusiast on YouTube called it ugly by design. Ezra Dyer a columnist for Car and Driver described the truck as a visual abomination. The number two thing here, of course, is that Car and Driver can get stuffed. The fact that a low hood and a big windshield look weird to somebody who writes about the car market reflects how psychotic American vehicle design has gotten, where even sedans have battering ram fronts and pickup trucks genuinely just can't see the road. But the number one thing is form always followed function with mail trucks. It's a mail truck. Before the old box truck, there were Jeeps. Before there were Jeeps, there were older box trucks. Before that, there were horse wagons. One design agenda realized across evolving technological platforms. What does the new truck look like? A year from now, it's going to look like a normal mail truck. 

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. Our work is funded through the subscription and tip dollars of you the listeners. So please click the button if you can. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again tomorrow.