Good morning. It is January 17th. It's a perfectly ordinary winter morning in New York City, sunny and passing through the freezing point on the way to a high of 40 in the forecast, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Israel's security cabinet voted to accept a ceasefire deal in the Gaza war. Later today, the cabinet as a whole is supposed to vote on it. Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, the most fanatically genocidal member of the government, is still calling for the deal to be rejected. 

The Supreme Court ruled this morning that the TikTok ban is constitutional. It was a unanimous decision, affirming that the national security rationale of stopping a Chinese company from collecting data on Americans was permissible under the First Amendment, while declining to rule on whether Congress's announced desire to stop China from potentially manipulating content on the platform would be constitutional or not. 

Yesterday was a big day in the privatized intra-oligarch space race that has replaced the idea of government accomplishment. Jeff Bezos, the world's second richest person, saw his company Blue Origin launch its new Glenn rocket into space for the first time, although the mission failed to retrieve the supposedly reusable rocket booster, later in the day, Elon Musk's SpaceX Starship project had a successful booster retrieval with the minor accompanying setback of the rocket itself undergoing what SpaceX chooses to call a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” meaning it exploded on its way up, sending multicolored streaks of debris burning across the sky over Turks and Caicos. CNN reports that the Federal Aviation Administration said flights departing Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport were being delayed for an average of one hour due to a rocket launch anomaly. A separate FAA alert said flights were delayed due to debris. 

Three wildfires are still burning in LA, but the Los Angeles Times reports that firefighters are making progress in containing them. The big one, the Palisades Fire, is now 31 % contained. And the Eaton Fire, which, like the Palisades fire has been burning for 10 days, is listed as 65 % contained. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead story is sort of pointless as the Times was caught between noting the importance of the most important news, and wrapping up a version of a news story about it in time to print in the newspaper, so the headline in that right-hand column is “Disputes Delay Key Israeli Vote On A Gaza Truce / Race By Negotiators / Rifts Imperil Stability of Netanyahu’s Fragile Government.” The rifts, or at least Ben Gvir's share of the rifts, are still there, but the votes are happening. 

Likewise, running behind the breaking news, although not obviated by it, is the story in the second news column, “Trump Weighs Order to Keep TikTok Online / Move May Not Survive a Legal Challenge.” The Times credits the Washington Post for scooping it on this particular piece of news, right up in the second paragraph. After that, the story says if the supreme court upholds the law which will ban the app unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns it, sells it to a non-Chinese company. “Special treatment from Mr. Trump might be the only way for TikTok to continue operating in the United States in the near term.” So now that the supreme court has upheld the law it would come down to that executive order. Maybe What would the order be? “An executive order, the Times writes, could try to direct the government not to enforce the law or to delay enforcement to complete a deal, a move that past presidents have used to challenge laws. It is unclear if an executive order would survive legal challenges or persuade the app stores and cloud computing companies to take steps that could expose them to huge penalties.” 

NBC News, in its writeup of the Supreme Court decision this morning, notes that the Biden administration has also signaled it will not take any action to enforce the law on Sunday, which is when it's supposed to go into effect, one day before the change of administrations. 

Down below the fold, David Lynch gets a nice three-column sendoff under the fairly awkward headline, “Melded Capra and Kafka in Eerie Film Oeuvre” The lead of the obituary is nice and clear despite being stuffed with tons of material. David Lynch, a painter turned avant-garde filmmaker whose fame, influence, and distinctively skewed worldview extended far beyond the movie screen to encompass television, records, books, nightclubs, a line of organic coffee, and his foundation for consciousness-based education and world peace has died. He was 78.” Everybody's busily writing their tributes. I scarcely know what to say. The shock of recognition when David Lynch showed you how he saw America, or how he saw violence, or how he saw grief, or loss, or sin, or the overwhelming absolute terror and concentrated joy of existence, and the fundamental inseparability of all of these things, will far outlive him, and, at the rate we're going might see us through to the end of civilization

Also in the obituaries with a referral box down in the corner of page one is Bob Uecker, the mediocre catcher and world-class humorist, who was the voice of the Milwaukee Brewers for half a century, and who carried an entire generation of athlete pitchmen on his back, successfully creating the impression that because he was funny in TV commercials, athletes in general must be funny in TV commercials, Uecker was 90. 

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. Have a restorative holiday weekend, and if nothing too unforeseen happens, we will talk again on Tuesday.