Good morning. It is December 4th. It is another sunny freezing morning in New York City. There's a wind advisory through the afternoon, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The CEO of the insurance division of United Health Group, Incorporated was gunned down in Midtown this morning outside the site of the company's scheduled investor meeting. Bloomberg, which was presumably there to cover of the investors meeting as a meeting in the healthcare sector reports that Brian Thompson, age 50, was shot in the chest before 7 a.m. in what a source Bloomberg describes as a person familiar with the situation called an apparent targeted attack. Upon Thompson's arrival, the story says “the alleged attacker was waiting for him and shot the executive from about 20 feet away before fleeing on foot.” The suspect was described as a white man wearing a cream colored coat black and white sneakers, a gray backpack and the black face mask, according to NYPD. CNN is reporting that the shooter ran down an alley, somehow finding an alley in midtown, jumped on a bike and peddled away, possibly disappearing into Central Park. Seems like a pretty straightforward commentary on the role of health insurance executives in our society that nobody appears to be particularly frightened about what is after all a masked gunman at large in the city. 

Chad Chronister, the sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, and President-elect Donald Trump's announced choice to run the drug enforcement administration withdrew yesterday evening and announced he will remain in his current job as sheriff. New York Times reports that the drawback to his candidacy appears to have been the fact that he enforced COVID-19 regulations to the displeasure of Mr. Trump's most ardent right-wing supporters. The story goes on to say, “current and former DEA agents also started circulating a video of Sheriff Chronister's son, George Zachary Chronister, rapping about his involvement in a knife attack against another man during a brawl in 2017. The son was sentenced to 22 months in prison for the stabbing and later released a rap video describing it titled, Slash Yo Face.” Honestly, a little disappointing that he washed out so fast before the national public really got the chance to savor his record. The story continues, “a Pennsylvania native who once worked in construction and as a hotel bellhop, Sheriff Chronister married into a family with ties to Mr. Trump more than a decade ago. His father-in-law, Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., has donated to Mr. Trump's political campaigns and received a pardon from Mr. Trump in 2020. The pardon expunged Mr. DeBartolo's guilty plea in 1998, stemming from an extortion plot connected to a riverboat casino license that a company he invested in was seeking in Louisiana.” That's the same Eddie DeBartolo whose dad bought him the San Francisco 49ers, which he then handed off to his sister after his conviction. A reminder that before Donald Trump went into politics and became the leader of the lowercase-m mob, his real estate career was all wrapped up with the mob with a capital-M. Chronister is the second of Trump's picks to fall through, but probably not the last. As the Wall Street Journal led a pack of other newspapers in reporting that Trump is considering replacing Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality, war crimes apologist, Christian nationalist, and accused rapist, he nominated his secretary of defense, with Ron DeSantis. Rather than the rape, bigotry, and fascination with lawless violence, it looks like the potentially disqualifying liability for Hegseth is the reports of his out-of-control alcohol abuse. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column, only one column, belongs to South Korea's success at repelling yesterday's coup attempt by the president. The BBC is reporting that the National Assembly has introduced an impeachment measure against President Yoon Suk-Yeol and that the defense minister who enthusiastically embraced Yoon's short-lived declaration of martial law has offered his resignation. 

One column over from that and trapped on the other side of the unforgiving print deadline is a story previewing the arguments currently underway at the Supreme Court, about Tennessee's ban on medical care for transgender youth, in which, judging from the live posting on Bluesky, the right-wing justices who condemn any consideration of European law on the death penalty or guns or other issues are eerily citing European regulations, and the less fanatical right-wingers are embracing New York Times' concerns about the unprovenness of it all, and constructing clumsy rationalizations about why the court's previous holding, that anti-trans discrimination is sex discrimination, might not apply here. 

The next slot over is about how these Supreme Court justices deliberated among themselves to conclude that they would only have an ethics code if it were unenforceable. Neil Gorsuch, the Times reports, “was especially invested in the court's impunity in a debate carried out by passing paper documents and envelopes to each chamber,” presumably to avoid having any email leaks. the private exchanges, “Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court's critics as politically motivated and unappeasable.” As opposed to Alito and Thomas, who are politically motivated but extremely bribeable. Looking for someone to make the case that it's okay for Supreme Court justices to help themselves to lavish gifts and decide for themselves whether it's appropriate to judge cases involving their benefactors' interests, the Times came up with Sarah Isgur, who continues, with success, to launder her reputation as the champion of Donald Trump's kids-in-cages migrant family separation policy into a career as an acceptable mainstream political commentator. Here, the Times reported that she said, “the justices seemed to be trying to preserve some latitude amid the constraints imposed by security threats, protests, and heavy security. They are already so isolated,” she said. “I don't know that people fully appreciate what the life of a Supreme Court justice is.” If there's one thing you can count on Sarah Isgur for, it's empathy for those who are trapped and all alone. 

In the far left column at the top of the page, the Times has another version of the same story it ran yesterday about how things are just too politicized at the Justice Department, between Joe Biden's decision to pardon his son and Donald Trump's, and the Supreme Court-authorized impunity with which Donald Trump will be shutting down all the prosecutions of his own criminal behavior. “Over a few days, the American justice system was buffeted by raw exercises of power from the current Democratic president and the incoming Republican president,” the Times writes. 

Below that, milking the same teat for the next one over, there's “Father's Legacy is Complicated by Son's Pardon,” a news analysis of the grave historical importance of Biden's pardon decision that manages to cast its gaze back over what Joe Biden did in office without a single mention of the word Afghanistan. The jumps on those two stories arrive at a two page interior spread occupied entirely by coverage of the Hunter Biden pardon, except for the little corrections box down in the corner. 

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 podcasting work is sustained by the subscription and tip contributions of You The Listeners. So thank you for those, and please keep them coming. And depending on some still open-ended personal scheduling questions, we may or may not talk again tomorrow.