Good morning. It is December 27th. The New York City temperatures are supposed to inch above freezing today, with rain coming tonight to clear out our modest but durable white Christmas, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Just shy of two weeks after South Korea's legislature impeached President Yoon Suk-Yeol for his abortive attempt to impose martial law on the country, it has now followed up by impeaching the acting president, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo. The issue, the Times reports, was Han's refusal to seat three new judges in empty seats on what's supposed to be the nine-member Supreme Court. The Constitution requires six votes from the Supreme Court to convict and remove the suspended President Yoon in his impeachment trial. The opposition-controlled legislature was supposed to have the power to name these next three justices and avoid having a trial that would require a unanimous vote. But Han argued that as acting president, he didn't have the authority to seat them. The National Assembly countered that as acting president, Han could be impeached and suspended by a simple majority rather than the two thirds vote required for a full-fledged president. And so they did that. Next up is the finance minister, Choi Sang-mok.

While South Korea has its constitutional crisis, the United States is having an extra constitutional crisis. As the shadow advisors to the Trump presidency in waiting, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are at war with the more fanatically xenophobic elements of the Trump coalition over the issue of whether the planned crackdown on immigration should stop short of restricting the skilled immigrant visas for educated tech workers that Silicon Valley expects and relies on. Since everyone involved is one variety of racist or another, it's turning into a posting contest about competing racial hierarchies, and Musk, the eternal free speech champion, seems to be quashing the far-right accounts that disagree with him, after having spent the last two years tweaking the site to promote them. All this is going on with still three weeks and a weekend to go before the MAGA movement has to start actually exercising executive power.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the game is to still pretend to take the incoming administration seriously. In the center of the page, “Trump's picks want pharmaceutical ads off TV. An uphill battle that has failed before repeatedly.” The story says “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president-elect Donald J. Trump's choice for health secretary, is a longtime critic of pharmaceutical advertising on TV, arguing that it leads broadcasters to more favorable coverage of the industry and does not improve Americans' health. He has repeatedly and enthusiastically called for a ban on such ads.” The story continues. “Elon Musk, who is spearheading a government cost-cutting effort, last month wrote on X, his social media site, ‘no advertising for pharma,’ and Brendan Carr, Mr. Trump's pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, said that his agency could enforce any ban that is enacted. ‘I think we're way, way too overmedicated as a country, he said.’”

After discussing how much revenue the pharmaceutical industry gets through advertising and how much money the TV networks get by delivering the advertising, the story comes around to note “efforts to modestly restrict drug ads have repeatedly been defeated in the courts, often on First Amendment grounds. The first Trump administration tried to require that commercials mention the drugs price, but a judge blocked the move, saying that it lacked authority from Congress.” The people who created the Anything Goes Pharmaceutical Advertising Environment, to say nothing of the Even More Anything Goes Supplement Advertising Industry, are the same people who worked tirelessly to create the legal and political conditions that made a Trump administration possible. Will the prodigiously incompetent RFK Jr. be able to disentangle the jurisprudence so that only the quack remedy scammers survive, while the overly aggressive merchants of actually-tested medicine lose out on their payday. Who knows? These are unprecedented times, but the fact that the FCC guy is talking about the overmedication of America rather than any aspect of communications law or policy makes the Times's prediction of an uphill battle sound just about right. 

The lead news story in the paper, two columns wide, is “Israel loosened limits on strikes multiplying risks to Gaza civilians, flawed methods for assessing targets.” Here's the useful side of the Times' view of itself as a newspaper of record. Seven bylines to report something that isn't exactly new or unknown, but that it's helpful to put down all in one place. The word multiplying in the headline is accurate. As the Times reports that after the October 7th attacks, Israel vastly expanded its list of targets, lowered the threshold for approving strikes, and abandoned its existing framework for judging how many civilian casualties were acceptable. “In previous conflicts with Hamas,” the Times writes, “many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be hurt. Sometimes, officers could risk killing up to five civilians, and only rarely did the limit rise to 10 or above, though the actual death toll was sometimes much higher.” After October 7th, that paper limit of 10 civilians per target reserved for the most high-level targets was doubled to 20 dead civilians allowed and applied to any and everything that the Israeli military might want to shoot at. The Times further reports, “on a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 non-combatants, crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.” Continues, “the military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a pre-war database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence on a vast scale. The military,” the Times continued, “often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error. The model mainly depended on estimates of cell phone usage in a wider neighborhood, rather than extensive surveillance of a specific building, as was common in previous Israeli campaigns.” And the Times writes, “from the first day of the war, Israel significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks or warning shots that give civilians time to flee an imminent attack. And when it could have feasibly used smaller or more precise munitions to achieve the same military goal, it sometimes caused greater damage by dropping dumb bombs as well as 2,000-pound bombs.”

And then after the bullet points, there are two more full pages offering examples of how all of this played out. Again, this is exactly the picture of the war that was available all along, but it's useful to have it all pulled together under the authority of the Times. 

Next to that, on the top of the page is a photograph of the tail of a crashed passenger plane in Kazakhstan. The caption is, “In a drone view. the site of a crash in Kazakhstan, experts raised the possibility on Thursday that a Russian missile hit the plane.” Not sure what the specification that it's a drone view does for the reader looking for top line news, but it's a good angle. Putting some distance between the emergency responders standing around the tail of the plane and the thing itself. So you can look over them and you can see all the way in the distance to the Caspian Sea, which the doomed flight crossed looking for a place to make an emergency landing.

The headline on the story itself is “Russia suspected in lethal crash. Air defense may be tied to downing of jet.” “Air defense may be tied to downing of jet” means air defense seems to have shot jet down. Aviation experts, the Times writes, “cast doubt on a Russian agency's contention that the Azerbaijan Airlines jet had hit a flock of birds, saying images of the crash site show holes in the plane that appeared unlikely to have been caused by birds.” Just below that, inset in the story is one of those pictures. It's the tail of the jet matching the livery pattern visible in the top photo, and the birds appear to have penetrated the skin of the airplane perpendicular to the direction of flight, which does seem like an unlikely thing for a bird to do. 

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. 

Have a comfortable weekend. Gather your strength for the next round of the holidays. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again on Monday.