Good morning. It is January 3rd. It's another bright, appropriately cold morning in New York City. The baffling dislocation of the holiday week is coming to an end, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The 119th Congress will be seated today and speaker by default, Mike Johnson is going to try to get reelected with an even tinier margin and an even more deranged Republican conference than he had, on precariously assuming his position last time around. That occupies the left-hand column of this morning's New York Times. “Bid by Johnson to lead again faces defiance. Trump backs Speaker, but a rift persists.” Donald Trump did endorse him in an effort to keep his runaway personality cult attached to his own personhood.

But the Times writes, “The problem for Mr. Johnson is
that in order to win re-election, he will need nearly unanimous support from his fractious House Republican Conference. Given the party’s exceedingly slim margin of control — Republicans hold 219 seats and Democrats 215 — Mr. Johnson will be able to lose only a single G.O.P. vote if every lawmaker is present and voting and Democrats support one of their own. One Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has already declared that he will oppose him. In appearances on Fox,” the Times writes, “Johnson predicted that he would be elected on the first ballot and also said, ‘I think the reason they're all going to vote yes is this. We're shifting into a brand new paradigm. We have unified government that begins tomorrow.’” The question is whether you can really have a unified government if you don't have a unified president. Trump may have endorsed Johnson this week, but as the story notes, “the current specific grievance that the House right-wingers have against Johnson is that he went ahead and passed a continuing resolution to keep the government funded without winning Trump the terms that he demanded after Trump called for the original budget deal to be defeated.” And while also ignoring Elon Musk in his role as Trump's instigator and hype man, when Musk went further than Trump and demanded the government be shut down until Trump takes office. Everyone is trying to represent the true spirit of the leader. The true spirit of the leader is that he just wants to demand whatever people will get excited about. Somehow this is all supposed to settle into a stable governing arrangement for the next two years. 

In the lead news column on the right hand side of the page the claims by law enforcement officials in yesterday's paper that the New Orleans truck attacker had accomplices Have evaporated the way accomplices and conspiracies nearly always evaporate in mass killings. “FBI is confident driver in attack didn't have help is the new headline. New Orleans reopens. Investigators see no link to Cybertruck blast in Las Vegas.” 

That didn't stop the Times from running inside the paper facing the jump on that story. A weirdly unsupported explainer “Amid New Orleans attack telltale signs of Islamic State's brutal legacy. The weakened. group has never stopped planning or inspiring terror.” The word “inspiring” is doing nearly all the work there, as the Times takes a rather different approach to the ontology of violence committed in the name of, or with the banner of in this case, Islamism, than it does with domestic and international fascist-inspired violence. If you say you're with ISIS, you're part of a movement. If you say you're mad about great replacement theory, you're just one more disturbed individual.

Speaking of actually unifying attitudes in the carnage, the Times story about how Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar had no apparent accomplices after all, quotes an FBI counterterrorism official as saying that the attack was “100 % inspired by ISIS,” and then quoting the same official goes on to say that Jabbar posted five videos on Facebook in which he explained that he “originally planned to harm his family and friends, but was concerned that news headlines would not focus on what he called the ‘war between the believers and the disbelievers’”. By 100 % inspired by ISIS, then, what they mean is inspired by murderous interpersonal urges centered around domestic violence, which were then rationalized into a larger ideological framework. That is, the usual story. 

The gig and hustle economy gets its little piece of the story as well, in a short piece inside the paper about how the Turo  app was used in both the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks. The Times reports that in the New Orleans case, the truck's owner, who did not want his name used, said that “he had been renting five cars on Turo as a second income stream, but that he did not plan to use the platform again after the attack.” 

On page A11, “a glowing ring of metal more than eight feet in diameter and weighing more than 1,100 pounds fell from the sky and crash landed in a remote village in Kenya this week, causing no injuries but frightening residents who feared a bomb or worse. The Kenya Space Agency,” the story says, “identified the object as a separation ring from a launch rocket and said it was investigating the ring's origin and ownership.” 

The story goes on to explain last year, “the European Space Agency estimated that there were more than 14,000 tons of material in low Earth orbit. About a third of that is junk, according to Sarah Webb, an astrophysicist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. With about 110 new launches each year and at least 10 satellites or other objects a year breaking into smaller fragments,” the story says, “the amount will continue to increase, the space agency said, and more of these objects are falling back down to Earth without breaking up on reentry as they are expected to. Last March, a 1.6-pound chunk of debris from the International Space Station tore a hole through the roof of a home in Florida, and the following month, several sizable fragments of metal from a SpaceX capsule were found on a Canadian farm. A similar piece of metal, estimated to weigh about 100 pounds, was discovered in May at a camping site in North Carolina. 

On the front of the national section is a Fear on the Subways story. “Subway violence stubbornly defies all efforts to quell it.” Today's New York Times description of the New York subway system is, “that crucible of confined space, deadly machinery, and the frequent presence of people capable of lashing out.” Violent crime is also up above ground from its levels of five years ago, but topside New York does not get its own atmospheric description despite having plenty of deadly machinery and unstable people in it. 

Below that, in a tabloid-y quote-and colon-construction, “‘War Zone: Fireworks Explosions Kill 3 during new year celebrations in Honolulu. Officials,” the Times writes, “said on Wednesday that the blasts happened around midnight in the Salt Lake neighborhood after a person set off an illegal device known as an aerial cake firework, which contains multiple tubes, during a New Year's Eve party. That firework rocketed into other fireworks caches, they said, causing a series of explosions that sent fire and debris ripping through the residential area. ‘It's a tragic way to start off the new year,’ the mayor of Honolulu said.” 

On page A14 is the news that “federal agents on Thursday morning searched the home of Jeffrey Maddrey, the former chief of department for the New York Police Department. Maddrey resigned his position as chief of department two weeks ago. After,” the Times writes, “a lieutenant accused him of coercing her into sex.” That appears to be what the feds are investigating. Although with Maddrey as a representative of the fractally scandal-plagued Adams administration, that's not the only scandal to go with. “In an appearance by Mayor Eric Adams on a retired New York City police inspector's YouTube program on Monday,” the Times writes, “when asked whether he had overlooked problems involving Mr. Maddrey, including when Mr. Maddrey voided the arrest of a retired officer accused of waving a gun at three boys, Mr. Adams said, ‘I’m a firm believer that the worst day of your life should not define your life.’” 

And down at the bottom of the page, the Times catches up with the New Year's break-in at Gracie Mansion, in which a 20-year-old man allegedly climbed a fence, went into the mayoral residence, stole a Christmas ornament out of a drawer, and filmed himself doing it. Adams was not at Gracie Mansion when the event happened at 4.23 a.m. “Mr. Adams celebrated New Year's Eve in Times Square,” the Times writes, “but the spokeswoman for his office declined to say where he went after the events in Midtown ended. There have long been questions over where Mr. Adams lives. He owns an apartment in Brooklyn and co-owns a co-op in New Jersey with his longtime partner. And he was known to sleep at Brooklyn Borough Hall when he was borough president during the pandemic.” So it goes with the mayor of everywhere and nowhere. 

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 efforts are sustained through the subscription dollars and tip dollars of you, our listeners. Please do keep those coming. Stay warm out there. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again on Monday, the Monday of a normal five-day week.