Good morning. It is January 13th. It is a grayer morning in New York City and the forecast might have led one to believe, but it's one more day in the forties and thirties before it turns back to the thirties and twenties, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.

In Los Angeles. The national weather service has issued another of its rare, “particularly dangerous” situation warnings, as the winds rise again with three wildfires still burning. These are the standard incredibly dry Santa Ana winds gusting up to 70 miles an hour, according to the LA Times, not the mountain wave winds that gusted up to 100 and sent the original firestorm completely out of control, but the warning is still for explosive fire growth and the death toll so far stands at 24. 

Investigators looking for the origins of the Palisades fire, the biggest one, are, the Times reports looking around Skull Rock in Pacific Palisades? An area that was, the LA Times writes, “the site of a small fire on New Year's Eve that burned for a few hours before fire officials said they snuffed it out with help from a water dropping helicopter.” It's possible that that fire reignited. It's possible that some new fire happened in the same area. All the paper sources know so far is that they said it appears to have human origins. 

Those forecast winds and the risk of the fire spreading again rate the number two slot on the front of this morning's New York Times. “Ravaged Area Is Bracing Itself For More Gusts. Officials Are Expecting
Fires’ Toll Will Rise,” is in the second column from the right with the lead column occupied instead by “As L.A.’s Inferno Began, Its Mayor Was Not In Town. Travel Pledge Broken. Mounting Criticism of Bass Threatens Grip on Leadership.” The peg here is that when she was running for office in 2021, now-Mayor Karen Bass was the Times writes, “accustomed to circling the globe as a Democratic member of Congress and of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and had spent decades working on U.S.-Africa relations.” And so in an interview with the New York Times, she said, “‘Not only would I, of course, live here, but I would also not travel internationally. The only places I would go would be DC, Sacramento, San Francisco, and New York in relation to LA.’ That pledge,” the Times writes, has been spectacularly broken. That's the most important news about the LA fires is that the mayor said one thing to the reporters for the New York Times and then did another. “When a cascade of deadly and destructive wildfires erupted across the Los Angeles region on Tuesday, the mayor was on her way home from Ghana in West Africa where she had attended the inauguration of a new president. It was not,” the Times continues, “her first trip abroad as mayor. A review of her public daily schedule for the past year shows that Ms. Bass has traveled out of the country at city expense at least four other times in recent months before the Ghana visit. Once to Mexico for the inauguration of President Claudia Sheinbaum and three times to France for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.” That last violation of her pledge to the New York Times gets a little less scandalous when the story gets around to mentioning that Los Angeles is the host city for the 2028 Olympics. The story does not really work its way around to discussing the performance of any of the other executives in Los Angeles County, covering the areas outside the city of Los Angeles. It's always bad news for a mayor to whiff on a municipal disaster, but where the New York Times deemed that the most important important aspect of the ongoing catastrophe in Los Angeles, the front page of this morning's LA Times is “Bracing For A Long Fight Recovery. 
High Winds Expected To Return As Fire Investigators Look Back And Officials Look Forward. 
Assessing LA’s Rough Road Ahead. 
Towers Studied As Fire Origin. 
Newsom Eases State Laws To Aid Rebuilding. 
First They Lost Home Coverage, Then Homes,” And 
“Numerous Landmarks Gone In Mass Erasure Of Heritage.” 
The allegedly mounting criticism of the mayor that threatens grip on leadership is nowhere to be seen. 

The left-hand column on the front of the New York Times is “GOP gained in percentage of mail votes, but among Democrats participation slipped.” Great. Who cares? I guess it's useful information for looking ahead to election strategy in 2028. The only reason to put it above the fold on January 13th would seem to be the Times's weird, toxic sports-fandom relationship with the Democratic Party. It seems to be somewhere between the 20th and 50th most important political news story going on at the moment. 

But the inside of the paper seems equally addled in its own way. The lead story on the front of the national section is a critics notebook under the headline “Trump versus the bureaucrats. MAGA has turned the administrative state into a battle cry.” It's a think piece that doesn't really seem to say anything about Trump's plans to destroy the civil service that couldn't have been said a year ago. Albeit a year ago, it wouldn't have featured inset photographs of Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy. 

Page A11 has a news analysis piece. “As a felon, Trump upends how Americans perceive the presidency.” “Upends” is stronger than the claim that the story makes when it gets going, which is that his felony conviction is the latest shift in standards that once governed high office. Certainly true, also not new. One sign of how not-new it is, is that to find someone to complain about the prosecution of Trump, the paper turns to torture enthusiast John Yoo, who helped lead the George W. Bush administration's complete abandonment of the most baseline standards of law, and who rather than going to prison for it is now teaching at the University of California Berkeley, as the Times says. Certainly when you've signed off on illegal torture the idea of convicting a president for covering up hush money payments must seem like a petty prosecution, but the question of why George W Bush and John Yoo are living out their lives on this side of the bars is not the political question that John Yoo wants to complain about. 

While Karen Bass gets dragged on page one for not getting back to LA in time for a disaster warning, you have to turn to page A-12 for a look at how Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor nominated by Donald Trump to run the Department of Homeland Security, refused to deploy the National Guard in South Dakota to prevent flooding in South Dakota, arguing the Times writes that “the guard should only be called for a true crisis” and sparing them from sandbag slinging duty after she had mobilized the guard multiple times to send troops down to Texas as a pro-Trump anti-migration publicity stunt. 

And on page A13, down at the bottom of the page, “In North Carolina, Republicans try to reverse a state Supreme Court election loss.” Here, the Times is sort of bouncing up against the same problems that used to plague the coverage of Donald Trump lying. By reverse, what the story means is unambiguously, steal. As the Republican controlled state Supreme Court is considering a request by a losing Republican Supreme Court candidate to throw out 60,000 votes in a contest where a Democrat held on to her Supreme Court seat by 734 votes. “Several voters on the list of people whose ballots are being challenged,” the Times writes, “said the protest felt like disenfranchisement.” It feels like disenfranchisement because, as is their habit, the North Carolina Republicans are trying to prevent people from getting the results that they voted for. 

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 tips of you, our audience. Please do keep those coming. And if nothing unforeseen comes up, we'll talk again tomorrow.