Good morning. It is January 24th. The temperature in New York City is supposed to venture all the way up to the freezing point today, and this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Los Angeles Times fire tracker has nine fires burning right now in Southern California. From the Hughes fire north of Santa Clarita, which has burned 10,000 acres in two days, down to the day-old Border 2 fire, which has burned a thousand acres and is, per the name, just above the Mexican border. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times. Well, on the front of my New York Times is a water wrinkled sticker reading, “please deliver the papers in a plastic bag.” The third straight day since I asked the Times for a little waterproofing that the paper has borne that message while being chucked unprotected into the persistent grimy salty puddle on the stoop. Customer service aside, the lead news column is “Hegseth nearing Senate approval despite concern, abuse claim rebuffed, GOP clears way for a final vote on Trump's pick for defense.” Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were the only Republicans to vote against advancing Pete Hegseth's nomination toward a final vote today. Before the vote, the Times writes “Ms. Murkowski said that she could not, in good conscience, support installing Mr. Hegseth at the Pentagon. ‘While the allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking do nothing to quiet my concerns, the past behaviors Mr. Hegseth has admitted to, including infidelity on multiple occasions, demonstrate a lack of judgment that is unbecoming of someone who would lead our armed forces,’ she said in a statement, which also cited reports of alleged financial mismanagement at two veterans' organizations he ran, as well as his past statements disparaging the role of women in combat.” None of that even gets into his fanatical Christian nationalist beliefs, but those don't matter either. Given Hegseth's role as the avatar of a political party built on nothing but oppositional behavior, now granted control of the country, there doesn't seem to be anything that would convince Republicans not to vote for him. The word “rebuffed” in the headlines says it all. The Republicans are not rebutting the charges of abuse against Hegseth, let alone refuting them. They just refused to care. Beyond that, the story could have used one touch of slightly more attentive editing to spare the time from publishing the paragraph that reads, “Samantha Hegseth, Mr. Hegseth's second wife, has said publicly that he never physically abused her, but a Trump transition official informed the leaders of the Armed Services Committee last week that she had told the FBI during a background interview that Mr. Hegseth abused and continues to abuse alcohol, according to a person with knowledge of the findings.” An unfortunate bit of parallelism there created by the careless use of the word, but. 

The number two news column is “Pardon is won by leveraging Trump's needs. Libertarians help free online drug kingpin.” It's the story of how after not pardoning the Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht, at the end of his first term, Donald Trump turned around and almost immediately did so when he returned to the White House. The story casts this mostly as a matter of Trump courting the political enthusiasm of the libertarian movement and the Bitcoin set. Mr. Albrecht, the Times writes, “was regarded as a libertarian hero for building an illegal market outside the government's reach.” The attentive follower of American politics might ask why a president who wants to declare war on Mexican drug cartels is turning loose someone whose career was built on facilitating international drug dealing. But for the answer to that, you have to find a subordinate clause set off inside dashes after the jump, after describing the libertarian and cryptocurrency that wanted Albrecht pardoned. The Times writes, “As it became clear last year that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee, they waged a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to secure a pardon — including pledging to raise money for his election bid — in what has turned into a case study of how a special interest group can mobilize to influence the president.”

“Influence,” i.e. again Pledging to raise money for his election bid. Then the story goes back to talking about how Ulbricht's mother so very very much wanted him freed and how she worked all her connections to try To convince Trump world to support her cause a cause also supported by David Bailey the chief executive of the news publication Bitcoin magazine who reappears in the final column of the story. On social media, the Times writes, Mr. Bailey announced that he planned to raise a dollar sign 100M. That's 100 million dollar warchest for the Trump campaign. Did he deliver? The story never specifies. Nor, for that matter, does it talk about Trump raising $300 million on the crypto market for his own stunt meme coin the week before he took office. It does quote a Trump staffer emailing Albrecht's mother, “promises made, promises kept.” 

In other extremely normal news about the relationship between government and financial incentives on page a 18. The headline is “Kennedy would keep financial stake in HPV vaccine suit if confirmed.” Apparently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made more than two point five million dollars as a rainmaker directing plaintiffs who want to bring back the age of unchecked cervical cancer by suing the makers of the human papilloma virus vaccine, because the nominee to run Health and Human Services is not only an anti-vax lunatic, but a committed scammer. 

Down below that on the page, if you're trying to figure out how wide the curtains should be for the Overton window, John Ratcliffe, the Trump attack dog who became director of national intelligence in Trump's first term on a party-line Senate vote, and who then the Times writes, “declassified material on Russian election interference despite concerns from Democrats who believed that the release would endanger sources and methods,” that same John Radcliffe sailed through the Senate yesterday to be appointed director of the CIA, confirmed on a 74 to 25 vote, meaning nearly half the Senate Democrats went along. 

On page A15, the big headline is “Medicaid and more may be cut to pay for Trump's agenda.” 

Next to that, in a single column, “DC officers convicted of murder get pardons. President Trump on Wednesday,” the Times writes, “issued full and unconditional pardons to two Washington, D.C., police officers convicted after a chase that killed a young Black man in 2020, an episode that led to days of protests and clashes in the nation’s capital.” Lower down the Times writes, “On Tuesday, he had hinted at the pardons, which prevent any punishment associated with the convictions. ‘They were arrested, put in jail for five years because they went after an illegal,’ Mr. Trump said on Tuesday. ‘And I guess something happened where something went wrong, and they arrested the two officers and put them in jail for going after a criminal.’

In fact, Mr. Hylton-Brown was an American citizen, said David L. Shurtz, a lawyer representing the Hylton-Brown estate. And it was the police officers, not Mr. Hylton-Brown, who were found to have committed a crime that amounted to ‘a disservice to the community and the thousands of officers who work incredibly hard, within the bounds of the Constitution, to keep us safe,’ Matthew M. Graves, then the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a statement when the officers were sentenced in September.

The D.C. Police Union, which had expressed “dismay” over the Jan. 6 pardons, praised Mr. Trump’s decision on clemency for the two officers as righting ‘an incredible wrong.’” 

The incredible wrong here was that the officers were punished for starting a high speed chase after someone who'd been riding a moped without a helmet on the sidewalk, including driving the wrong way down a one-way street, till he eventually got hit by another car. And then, according to prosecutors, tried to cover up what they'd done while the victim lay bleeding in the street. 

On page A14, the Times gets around to the Episcopal bishop who exhorted Donald Trump to turn aside from cruelty and have mercy at the inaugural prayer service. In the story, the Times gets so tangled up in its institutional condescension toward an ignorance of religion that it grinds out the paragraph. “For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach.” Nearly a decade. The struggle over whether women should be allowed to preach has been, according to the New York Times, the newspaper of record, going on for “nearly a decade.”

But there's more. They've fought over “whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of gay people.” Again, “nearly a decade” of struggle before, say, 2016. There were no disputes over the place of gay people within American Christianity. “The definition of marriage,” the Times adds. Another issue that flared only in the last decade. “The separation of church and state.” The separation of church and state.

“Nearly a decade,” give or take 400 years. Anyway, “Black Lives Matter?” No, not even “Black Lives Matter” falls within that time frame of less than a decade. What was it that happened a decade ago? Here goes, “And at the heart of much of it has been Mr. Trump’s rise as the de facto head of the modern American church.” 

As the de facto what of the fucking what? What the fuck are you talking about? Do you even know what the word “church” means? Besides complicated architectural space for future condo conversions. Jesus H. Christ. 

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 listeners. Please do keep those coming. Enjoy the scant two-day weekend. And if nothing too unexpected happens, we'll talk again on Monday.