Good morning. It is January 15th. It's cold again, but abundantly sunny 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. The high winds in Los Angeles have not, as yet, set off any new wildfires. The Los Angeles Times wildfire tracker map has the two day old Auto fire as the most recent one. The Auto fire is named for Auto Center Drive in Ventura, not for an automobile. The other three fires are eight days old. The LA Times lists the Hearst fire at 799 acres and 97 % contained. The Eaton fire is 14,000 acres and 35 % contained. And the Palisades fire, the biggest, 23,713 acres, 18 % contained so far. Impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol was taken into custody yesterday. A force of some 4,000 police descended on the presidential residence and worked their way through barricades, including buses, and crowds of lawmakers and other people loyal to Yoon. But, NPR reports, unlike in a previous attempt to apprehend Yoon earlier this month, no presidential security agents were seen trying to stop law enforcement. The Securities and Exchange Commission, CNN reports, sued Elon Musk, yesterday, for allegedly failing to properly disclose his ownership of X, then known as Twitter, as required by federal law, which allowed him to buy shares of the platform at artificially low prices. The SEC estimates that by concealing his early efforts to build up his stake in Twitter on the way to his takeover, he underpaid Twitter investors by more than $150 million for his purchases of Twitter common stock. The lawsuit, CNN writes, “is one of the last moves under SEC chair Gary Gensler, who is stepping down this month following President-elect Donald Trump's vow to fire him. It's unclear if the incoming SEC head will pursue the lawsuit. Musk is a major supporter of Trump and is taking a front-facing role in the administration as co-head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. Musk has clashed with Gensler for years, even mocking him on X.” Is it unclear whether the SEC enforcement against Dillon Musk is going to go forward? Only within the extremely cautious jargon of journalism. And speaking of journalistic conventions and mindsets, on the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column belongs to Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing to run the Department of Defense, for which the New York Times has created the headline stack, “G.O.P. Embraces Pick For Defense At Testy Hearing / Hegseth In Hot Seat / Democrats Question His Job Qualifications and Personal Conduct.” Each of those headlines is an accurate account of naming the events that happened in the hearing. Democrats were in fact asking questions that did deal with Hegseth's job qualifications and conduct, but the structure unavoidably turns Pete Hegseth's qualifications to run the US military into a matter of partisan dispute, where one party says one thing, the other party says another, and the press sits back as spectators or occasionally referees. The Democrats' opinions and approaches are not really relevant to the matter of Pete Hegseth's nomination. Last month, the New York Times headline writers were comfortable writing “President-Elect Donald J. Trump's Choice For Defense Secretary Led Two Nonprofits Into Debt And Episodes Of Drinking Continued Into His Days As A Fox News Personality.” Before that, the Times headline was, “Police Report Offers Graphic Details Of Sexual Assault Claim Against Hegseth.” Pete Hegseth has been widely described as a drunk. He's been accused in considerable detail of committing sexual assault. His career as an executive is brief and a complete failure, and the fact that no Republicans are able to even express reservations about any of this is not a story about the Democrats at all. “A signal of how things would go for him,” the Times writes, “came early in questions from Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, a sexual assault survivor and the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate. Ms. Ernst questions,” the Times writes, “had been highly anticipated, but she used her allotted time at the hearing mostly to help him. She asked Mr. Hegseth to appoint a senior level official responsible for sexual assault prevention and response in the military, something he already promised her he would do according to a statement she released last month. ‘Yes, I will,’ he said.” The Times goes on to write that “Ms. Ernst later announced on a radio show Tuesday that she would vote to confirm Mr. Hegseth.” Between the sexual assault accusation and Hegseth's extensive record of saying that women should not serve in combat, he is basically the embodiment of opposition to everything that Joni Ernst as an individual and a politician is supposed to oppose. Right below that story on the jump page, the headline is “Democrats say FBI background check on Hegseth omitted key witnesses.” Once again, the Democrats are the lead actors here. “Senate Democrats on Monday said that an FBI background check on Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump's pick to lead the Pentagon, omitted key details on major allegations against him, in part because it did not include interviews with critical witnesses. One missed opportunity,” the Times continues, “came when the Bureau did not interview one of Mr. Hegseth's ex-wives before its findings were presented to senators last week, according to people familiar with the Bureau's investigation.” Again, it's true that Democrats complained in public about this, but if people familiar with the FBI investigation are telling the Times that the FBI did an incomplete job, the incompleteness itself is the news story. The question of whether the FBI is putting in the effort to do full investigations of nominees goes all the way back to Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court appointment, and if this piece of the system is broken down, that's a direct concern for the newspaper of record, not just a political obstacle for the Democrats. Next to the Hegseth hearing story on page one, underneath the picture of Hegseth, another headline with tangled agency in it is “Report Refuses To Give Trump Pass For January 6th.” Refusing to give Trump a pass doesn't seem like a very accurate way of summarizing special counsel Jack Smith's published declaration that if Donald Trump had gone to trial for conspiring to steal the 2020 election and causing the January 6th attack on the Capitol, he would have been convicted. The report was not designed to decline an opportunity to give Trump a free pass, but to point out that he was escaping thanks to a free pass granted by others. Next to that, “Wildfire Evacuees Scrambling to Find Shelter.” 92,000 are displaced in a region already short on housing. Down below the fold, the EPA jumps aboard the Times's investigative reporting on how fertilizer sludge has been poisoning America's agricultural fields with forever chemicals. “In an extensive study,” the Times writes, “the agency said that while the general food supply isn't threatened, the risk from contaminated fertilizer could in some cases exceed the EPA safety thresholds, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.” Next to that is his story about how Mississippi police abused their tasers. And back up at the top of the page on the upper left, Hope Increasing Over Cease-Fire in Gaza Conflict. / “At The Final Stages” / Deals Swaps Prisoners For Hostages And Details Pull Out By Troops.” Believe it if it happens, and no sooner than that. Inside the paper, below the jump, is the extremely unsurprising news that a study in the Lancet concluded, that, as the Times writes, “deaths from bombs and other traumatic injuries during the first nine months of the war in Gaza may have been underestimated by more than 40 percent. The researchers, the Times writes, “concluded that the death toll from Israel's aerial bombardment and military ground operations in Gaza between October 2023 and the end of June 2024 was about 64,300, rather than the 37,900 reported by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The estimate in the analysis,” the Times writes, “corresponds to 2.9 % of Gaza's pre-war population having been killed by traumatic injury or one in 35 inhabitants. The analysis did not account for other war-related casualties, such as deaths from malnutrition, waterborne illness, or the breakdown of the health system as the conflict progressed. The study found that 59 % of the dead were women, children, and people over the age of 65. It did not establish what share of the reported dead were combatants.” 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 is sustained through the subscription dollars and tips of you, the audience. Please do keep those coming. A scheduling conflict may well prevent the recording of the podcast tomorrow morning, but if nothing unforeseen happens, we will talk again on Friday.