Good morning. It is January 9th. Today's supposed to be a tiny bit less cold in New York than it was yesterday, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Wildfires continue to burn in Los Angeles. The LA Times webpage has the current death toll at five. Two thousand buildings destroyed. One hundred and thirty thousand people evacuated. The winds subsided enough for  firefighting aircraft to get up to take on what are now five separate fires. 

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, ABC News wrote yesterday, “spoke to President-elect Donald Trump by phone Tuesday to recommend to one of his former law clerks for a job in the new administration. ‘William Levi, one of my former law clerks, asked me to take a call from President-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position,’ Justice Alito confirmed to ABC News Wednesday. ‘I agreed to discuss this matter with President-elect Trump, and he called me yesterday afternoon.’

“The call,” the story continues, “occurred just hours before Trump's lawyers on Wednesday morning filed an emergency request with the justices, asking them to block a New York judge from moving forward with sentencing Trump on Friday in his criminal hush money case. Alito said that he and Trump did not discuss the matter. ‘We did not discuss the emergency application he filed today. And indeed, I was not even aware at the time of our conversation that such an application would be filed,’ Alito said. ‘We also did not discuss any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the president-elect.’” Just an extremely normal phone call between a Supreme Court justice and a former and future president discussing the favor that one might be able to do for the other. And that is the public version of the call, that's the version that Alito thinks sounds good for him. The clerk in question had already worked for the previous Trump administration, under Attorney General William Barr. There is no way on earth that the highest officials in two separate branches of government would have needed to discuss his qualifications beyond presumably, the fact that the former clerk, like Barr, bailed out of Trump's bid to steal the 2020 election before it reached its violent end game. So possibly Alito just needed to reassure Trump that this guy meets some mutually agree-upon standard of loyalty to Trump, and or willingness to break the law, as Alito himself does. CNN reported that according to a new book, while Donald Trump was running around on the campaign trail, promoted conspiracies that friendly network officials fed Kamala Harris questions, someone inside Fox News, in fact, leaked Trump the questions for his town hall on that network. Politico reporter Alex Eisenstadt wrote that a half hour before the town hall, someone started texting the Trump camp, images of all the questions Trump would be asked, and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. 

The front of this morning's print edition of the New York Times gives the LA fires the full width. “Wind-whipped walls of flame consume enclaves of LA, running low on firefighters and water.” Most of the space belongs to a five-column photo in hellish red, of palm trees either in flame or silhouetted against the red sky, with embers blowing along the ground. Below that is a three-column photo of someone on Sunset Boulevard hemmed in by smoke trying to fend off the fire with a garden hose. 

Next to that, with Jimmy Carter's funeral happening today, is a piece by Adam Nagourney, “Party haunted by caricature of Carter era.” A look at how his presidency, Nagourney writes, “was long caricatured as a symbol of ineffectiveness and weakness. This perception,” the story continues, “has shadowed the party for nearly 40 years. It was forged in the seizure of American hostages by Iranian militants in 1979 and the failed military attempt to free them, as well as the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. And it lingered in memories of Mr. Carter wearing a cardigan as he asked Americans to conserve energy or bemoaning what he called a ‘crisis of confidence’ in an address to the nation that became a textbook example of political self-harm. Mr. Carter's political legacy,” the story says, “produced what many analysts argue was a kind of conditioned response, an overreaction among Democrats anxious to avoid comparisons to him on foreign policy issues.” All of this is true, but bizarrely incomplete in two important dimensions. One is that the caricature of Carter extends far beyond foreign policy to the idea that he was feckless on inflation and other economic concerns and that he was too solicitous toward black people, women, and other groups attempting to undo long-standing injustice, and that all of this cast the Democrats as the enemies of a naturally conservative, white, hard-working, real American majority, that rallied to Ronald Reagan, and eventually to Donald Trump. And the other is that this self-loathing concession of the mythic American high ground to conservative Republicans and the neurotic desire to make a show of suppressing any signs of excessive liberal sympathies, or desire for liberal policy goals, which happens incidentally, to offer a license to preserve and protect the influence of reactionaries, and the ownership class, is by no means restricted to the organized Democratic Party, but has become the guiding mindset of other major liberal institutions, most obviously every morning on the doorstop, the New York Times. 

The whole spirit of deference that animates the paper's political coverage comes on a straight line from the events of 1980. 

Right next to that story on page one is a news analysis piece, “Trump Echoes Age of Empire. His bravado unsettles the world's diplomats.” Down in the story, that's modified to “scattershot bravado.” Still, his revival of overt American territorial imperialism gets judicious consideration, including on the jump page, a story “Greenlanders are loath to be annexed by the U.S.” 

Also on page one, there's a profile of Pam Bondi, “In pick for attorney general, a ‘business friendly’ lawyer,” the opening of which is a mind boggling application of the Times's editorial philosophy that where there's fire, there's smoke halfway through the first Trump administration. The story begins “Carnival Corporation, the world's biggest cruise line, had a problem in Cuba that it wanted the president to fix. So Carnival, a Miami-based company, hired a new lobbyist, Pam Bondi, who developed a close relationship with Donald J. Trump during her two terms as Florida's attorney general, the state's top law enforcement official.” Blah, blah, blah. “Carnival feared it could be sued for damages for parking at Havana docks. The company wanted Mr. Trump's aid. With Ms. Bondi's help, Carnival's chairman, Mickey Harrison, got a meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. In the end, the president did not side with the company. But Ms. Bondi's involvement demonstrated that she could help grease relations with the Trump administration for her new clients.” What does it accomplish to start the story with an account of unsuccessful influence peddling? The reader has to go past the jump, slogging through stuff like Senator Marsha Blackburn of the Judiciary Committee, calling Bondi “a fierce, determined woman who will be a champion for the American people,” before it starts talking about how, when she was attorney general, various corporations would lobby her not to investigate them. 

And, the Times writes, “these appeals to Ms. Bondi to not pursue various investigations were often paired with donations and free travel.” This included accepting a free trip to Mackinac Island, to join a group of other Republican AGs at the Grand Hotel, where the lawyer who paid for her trip convinced her not to join other states in suing his client, 5-Hour Energy, for deceptive marketing, a request followed up by a $10,000 donation from the investment fund that owned 5-Hour Energy also, even more pertinently, there was the case where she collected $25,000 from the Donald J Trump Foundation, before deciding not to act on behalf of the victims of the Trump University scam. Weirdly the piece does not mention her role in making sure that the banks using fraudulent paperwork to carry out mass foreclosures against homeowners caught in the mortgage crisis were able to get away with it unpunished. A fact of some relevance to the public as she prepares to run the law enforcement operations of the entire federal government. 

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 through the subscription dollars and tips of you, our audience. Please keep those coming. And, barring any logistical breakdowns, we will talk again tomorrow.