Good morning. It's January 10th. The bitterest of the cold is easing in New York City. And this is your indignity morning broadcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Wildfires are still burning in Los Angeles as some get extinguished and others break out. The Sunset Fire has been contained, but there are five active fires right now led by the Palisades Fire, which the LA Times Fire Map reports is 6 % contained and closing in on 20,000 acres burned. The paper has the latest on the damage at 10 dead, more than 9,000 homes or other structures damaged or destroyed, and 130,000 people under evacuation orders. Firefighters continue to struggle with depleted water supplies, and the high winds that have kept the firestorm going are expected to continue today, to subside on Saturday, and to pick up again on Sunday. 

The fire once again occupies the full width of the front of the New York Times. “Firefighters in LA race to corral inferno as gusts ease, blazes may grow again as wind resurges.” The five column photo today is not of the flames, but of the wreckage left by the Palisades fire. A scant handful of recognizable houses scattered on a landscape of lots full of rubble with standing chimneys. Ryan Mack of the Times, posting photographs on Blue Sky from on the scene reporting, found hardened rivulets of aluminum on the pavement where the more meltable portions of car engines had liquefied and flowed. The lead story is a straight news story. “Firefighters aided by calmer winds and planes and helicopters dropping water were racing on Thursday to try to gain control of roaring wildfires that have upended life in Los Angeles, incinerated neighborhoods driven thousands from their homes and killed at least five people.” The death toll having gained since press time. There's a concise and grim context paragraph. “The scale of the destruction across diverse communities of every socioeconomic status is already without precedent. The fires have put 360,000 people under mandatory evacuation orders, federal officials said, and have scorched more than 30,000 acres, equivalent to nearly 23,000 football fields.” Not sure that once you get up to 23,000 of them, a football field is a really good mental reference point for envisioning space. All things considered, it might be better to go with equivalent to two Manhattan Islands. Unfortunately, the Times, being the Times, could not resist the urge to take that simple context paragraph, and blow it up into a whole piece about what it means, under the strikingly generic headline, “Catastrophe Cuts Across Geography and Class,” which starts off okay by emphasizing the fact that LA is so gigantic that major horrifying disasters can happen there while leaving the majority of the city unaffected and that the wildfires stand out from that history by being everywhere at once. But as the story grinds along, caught up in the Timesian impulse to sound definitive, even about events that are nowhere near being over, it delivers the kind of condescending paragraph that reminds the reader that the New York Times building is separated by only one crosstown block from having Saul Steinberg's legendary view of America from 9th Avenue. The Times writes, “To outsiders, Los Angeles can come off as a faceless sprawl filled with artifice and isolation. But those who live there discover that every neighborhood and every backyard is its own universe. Each hub of the region has its own character, cuisine, vernacular, soul and landmarks.” You can drop that same paragraph into an article about real estate, the arts scene, hamburgers, anything the Times deigns to notice about that mysterious far western metropolis, but the 19th century explorer tone seems especially rude while the city is burning down. 

Below the fold on page one is Jimmy Carter's funeral, “Lofty Tribute to a Public Servant and Humble Grandfather: Five presidents gather to remember Carter. Dateline Washington, it begins. “The nation bade farewell to former president Jimmy Carter on Thursday with a majestic state funeral for a man who saw himself as anything but, remembering a peanut farmer from Georgia who rose to the heights of power and used it to fight for justice, eradicate disease, and wage peace, not war. And most of it just sort of goes exactly where you'd expect it to go from there, interrupted only as everything must be interrupted by the pernicious phenomenon of Donald Trump. “Mourners,” the story says, “craned their necks to gauge the body language as President-elect Donald J. Trump sat near his four peers, none of whom care for him and most of whom ignored him. Adding to the unspoken drama,” the Times continues, “two leading figures from countries that Mr. Trump has threatened in recent days sat barely 30 feet away. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and former President Martín Torrijos of Panama. Both of their fathers served in the same positions during Mr. Carter's presidency, but more urgent at the moment was Mr. Trump's talk of annexing Canada and seizing the Panama Canal.” The intra-ex-presidential politics and body language get a deeper dive later in the story. “In addition to Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton attended, along with the former first ladies, Melania Trump, Laura Bush, and Hillary Clinton. Vice President Kamala Harris, her husband, Doug Emhoff, and several former vice presidents were on hand as well. Michelle Obama, who has expressed deep personal disdain for Mr. Trump and by protocol would have been seated next to him, stayed away, attributing her absence to a scheduling conflict. This was the first time, the Times continues, the five surviving presidents have gathered in the same place since Mr. Trump defeated Ms. Harris in November to win a second term.” Not really the most impressive time peg there. We're talking two months. What are they going to do? Get together for Christmas? Anyway. “Neither Mr. Biden nor Ms. Harris engaged with him, nor did the Clintons. Mr. Bush strode past Mr. Trump without acknowledgement, but gave Mr. Obama a friendly pat on the belly and shook hands with others nearby.” Okay. “Positioned near the far edge of the second row, Mr. Trump kept leaning over to speak to Mr. Obama, who smiled and indulged him in cordial chit chat.” 

Also down on the lower half of page one is the headline, “Trump seeking a disease to pin on immigrants. The story begins “President-elect Donald J. Trump is likely to justify his plans to seal off the border with Mexico by citing a public health emergency from immigrants bringing disease into the United States. Now, he just has to find one. Mr. Trump last invoked public health restrictions, known as Title 42, in the early days of the pandemic in 2020 when the coronavirus was tearing across the globe. As he prepares to enter office again, Mr. Trump has no such public health disaster to point to. Still, his advisors have spent recent months,” the Times continues, “trying to find the right disease to build their case, according to four people familiar with those discussions. They have looked at tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases as options, and have asked allies inside the Border Patrol for examples of illnesses that are being detected among migrants. They have also considered trying to rationalize Title 42 by arguing broadly that migrants at the border come from various countries and may carry unfamiliar disease, an assertion that echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that minorities transmit infections.” The Times writes that “this would amount to a radical expansion of the public health measure in pursuit of an immigration crackdown,” which it would, but this brings up one of the hardest aspects of dealing with the various threats presented by a new Trump administration, because while Trump would clearly abuse the possibilities far beyond what any president might do, Joe Biden already violated the underlying principle. As the story points out, eventually, “after Trump invoked Title 42 in response to COVID, when Mr. Biden came into office, he initially kept the public health rule in place at the border, even when CDC officials told his top aides, there was no clear public health rationale for keeping the border shut to asylum seekers. Both the Biden and Trump administrations argued the rule was needed to prevent the spread of diseases in detention facilities at the border, but Mr. Biden's top White House aides were privately concerned that lifting the rule would lead to a surge in migration.” 

Relatedly, right below the jump on page A14, the headline is, “Senate advances bill to expand deportations of migrants accused of crimes.” As Democrats, as far as they can ever possibly be from having to face election, rolled over in the Senate to allow Republicans to keep pushing a bill that would allow and encourage deporting undocumented people who have been simply arrested or charged with petty crimes, regardless of whether they're convicted. The Democrats seem bent on continuing to give Trump's anti-immigrant movement every tool it needs to carry out the broadest possible crackdown. 

And, in breaking news this morning in Manhattan, Justice Juan Marchand, bowing to what he said was the legal mandate surrounding the presidency, which he carefully distinguished from the person holding the office of president, sentenced Donald Trump to an unconditional discharge on his 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records, officially concluding Trump's trial and inscribing his status as a convicted felon, a formality that appears to be the only criminal consequence of any sort that Trump will ever face. 

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, the audience. Please do keep those coming. Have a safe weekend. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again on Monday.