Good morning. It is January 14th. It's a bright, dry morning in New York City, and this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Hearings are underway in the Senate for the confirmation of defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, the accused boozehound and rapist covered in crusader tattoos, whose only executive experience is running a pair of minor nonprofits into the ground, and who openly cheerleads for war criminals, and disdains diversity, and especially, the presence of women in the armed forces. But the question is not whether Pete Hegseth is fit or unfit to oversee the world's most powerful military. The question is whether the Republican Party is going to join Donald Trump in jamming the most flamboyant avatar of his commitment to misrule into the position. And so far, there is no reason to suspect that the answer is going to be anything but yes. 

A new wildfire near Ventura Beach has joined the three other active Los Angeles wildfires, as the Santa Ana winds keep the city under the most extreme degree of fire warning available. The LA Times reports that the winds have been gusting up to 72 miles an hour so far. 

Special counsel Jack Smith released his investigative report on the now-thwarted criminal prosecution of Donald Trump over his attempt to steal the 2020 election. In it, Smith flat out declares what everybody already knew, which was that only Trump's reelection prevented him from being taken to trial and that the prosecutors believed they were going to win a conviction.

None of which is going to change anything, but it's nice to have a record of what would have happened if we lived in a country governed by laws. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the LA fires once again, take up the whole span. There's a five column map of building destruction in Altadena, which is pretty close to being just a map of buildings that were in Altadena. The lead news column is “hunt for clues at ‘crime scene,’” in quotes, “of Palisades fire. Answers are elusive. Blaze scorched the same steep hillside just days earlier.” No one seems to know anything more than they did before about whether this was a rekindled New Year's fire, maybe from fireworks or something caused by later visitors to the site or yet another power line failure. Below the map, the story is “daunting task awaits in toxic debris cleanup. Remnants of buildings laced with asbestos, gasoline, and lead.” It's not exactly a speculative piece because these are known phenomena, but nobody really has a handle on the extent of the damage yet or what the cleanup logistics would need to be beyond that it's a gigantic mess. ‘

Down below the fold, the Times reports that the congestion pricing in New York is doing exactly what congestion pricing was known to do. “After new toll in Manhattan, gridlock eases. The first data,” the Times writes, “for New York City's new congestion pricing program, shows that gridlock lessened in its initial week as fewer drivers traveled into the core of Manhattan, though traffic continued to be heavy in parts of the tolling zone. In the first six days of the program, officials estimated there were tens of thousands fewer vehicles entering the busiest parts of Manhattan below 60th Street, which includes some of the city's most famous destinations like Times Square, the Empire State Building, and the High Line.” Damn, the High Line really came up in the world, didn't it? Take that, Rockefeller Center. “With only one week of data,” the story says later on, “it is far too early to know definitively whether the program is working. MTA officials said that the data is preliminary and reflects the very early days of a major policy shift. There is no historical data on the number of vehicles that entered the zone daily before the program, so perfect comparisons are not yet possible.” But with anecdotes to work from, the Times writes that “the data seemed to confirm what some New Yorkers have said they have already noticed. Fewer traffic jams, less honking, and more curbside parking on some blocks in and near the congestion pricing zone. Traffic moved faster through most major bridges and tunnels connecting Manhattan with the other boroughs and surrounding suburbs, according to the MTA. On Thursday, vehicles heading westbound on the Williamsburg Bridge traveled 45 % more quickly than on Thursdays in January last year.”

The story also reports that there are more people on the MTA's express buses and the buses are running faster. Reporters found a construction worker from Hackensack arriving via bus with a coworker saying, “it's very expensive now to get to work. My boss doesn't cover it. So we're taking the bus.” More people on better-running transit in smoothly flowing streets was pretty much the whole point. It really does seem like if the program is in fact working.

What put it over the top was the freakout by the plan's opponents, which made the $9 toll sound like a brutal imposition even after it had been slashed from its original $15 target. 

And on page A7 in the international section, for reference to the larger goals of the $9 toll that people want to complain about, “As each year is hotter concerns grow over unlimited warming. The goal of holding the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius has melted away faster than an Arctic glacier.” It's centered around two big graphs, one of the temperature going up and up and up, the other of carbon emissions doing the same with no motion to bring them down. Last year, the Times writes, was, “according to the World Meteorological Organization, the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Above those, the planet experienced at the start of the industrial age. The 1.5 degree threshold,” the Times writes “was never the difference between safety and ruin, between hope and despair. It was a number negotiated by governments trying to answer a big question. What's the highest global temperature increase and the associated level of dangers, whether heat waves or wildfires or melting glaciers that our society should strive to avoid.” Well, we didn't avoid this level and now we know what it looks like. It looks like that map of Altadena. 

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 do keep those coming. And if nothing unforeseen happens, we will talk again tomorrow.