Good morning. It is December 5th. It is a gray, cold, raw morning in New York City. The podcast microphone and the podcast recording software are not on speaking terms with one another right now. So apologies for any lower fidelity than usual. But this is, nevertheless, your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

CBS News did a story yesterday evening about the widespread phenomenon of law enforcement officials acting as straw gun buyers, using their positions to acquire weapons unavailable to civilians and then passing them on to civilians for money. “Adair, Iowa,” the story begins, “had a population of 794. So it seemed suspicious when its three-person police department asked regulators to buy 90 machine guns, including an M134 Gatling-style minigun capable of shooting up to 6,000 rounds of ammunition every minute. Federal agents later discovered Adair's police chief Bradley Wendt was using his position to acquire weapons and sell them for personal profit. A jury convicted Wendt earlier this year of conspiracy to defraud the United States, lying to federal law enforcement, and illegal possession of a machine gun. Wendt is unapologetic and has appealed his conviction. ‘If I'm guilty of this, every cop in the nation is going to jail,’ Wendt told CBS News just days before a federal judge sentenced him to a five-year prison term.” You don't say. “A CBS News investigation,” the story continues, “found dozens of law enforcement leaders, sheriffs, captains, lieutenants, chiefs of police, buying and illegally selling firearms, even weapons of war, across 23 US states, Puerto Rico and Washington DC, from the deep south to the Midwest, Northeast, and California coast. In several cases,” the story says “the guns wound up in the hands of violent felons and were used to commit crimes, including drug trafficking, international arms dealing, and in one case, the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy attending a high school football game.” People are forever demanding that police abolitionists explain how they would go about realistically fighting crime in the absence of police. But for some reason, nobody ever has to justify how anyone is supposed to fight crime with the actually existing police encouraging and facilitating criminality. 

In this morning's print New York Times, there sure is a lot of news. The lead news column is speculation about the fate of defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth. “Hegseth asserts he won't give up as support sways, meets with senators. Amid allegations. Trump said to like DeSantis in defense post.” The Times' Trump World Beat reporters write that “Donald Trump appeared to be having serious conversations about picking Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and his one-time primary rival, to be the defense secretary instead.” They continue, “Mr. Trump has told people close to him that he likes the idea of giving Mr. DeSantis the job, saying it would be a big story if he resurrected Mr. DeSantis after defeating him.” Sounds both very, very stupid and very, very plausible. Or maybe stupid and plausible are the same attribute here. 

The next column is yesterday's big news sensation. “Insurer CEO gunned down in Manhattan. Shooter coolly awaited target outside hotel.” This is a story where the print edition can't possibly be on the news. It begins with a sprawling manhunt with police officers, dogs and drones spread citywide on Wednesday. But then it just recounts what happened in the shooting, since the manhunt was moving faster than the printing presses. This morning, there's the news that ammunition and shell casing recovered from the scene had “deny, defend, and depose” written on them. The city's blanket of surveillance cameras has coughed up images of the suspect cycling out of Central Park onto West 85th Street yesterday morning. And police have now put out photos of what they say is the suspect with his mask down, showing his face, so there'll probably be even more news incoming soon. He seems to be white, so they can probably run him through facial recognition software. And while we wait for that to spit out a name, there's time to ponder the epistemology of the Times' write-up of the incident itself. “Surveillance video,” the Times writes, “shows the victim, Brian Thompson, wearing a blue suit, walking toward the hotel entrance in the pre-dawn dim. The shooter, seen from behind walks up and fires at least three times, striking Mr. Thompson in the calf and in the back with a pistol that appears to be fitted with a silencer. The victim manages a couple of steps and turns to face his attacker before collapsing on the sidewalk. The shooter's pistol jams during the shooting, the police said, but the gunman quickly clears the jam and resumes fire.” The part about the gun jamming apparently required the expert interpretation of the police to decipher what was going on, on the screen. 

Next to that on page one, “court poised to uphold ban on transgender care.” Adam Liptak and Emily Bazelon are not bothering with the charade that after oral arguments, the Supreme Court justices need to retire to their chambers and think things over and talk among themselves, as at least five members of the court yesterday made it clear that they don't care that Tennessee's ban on trans youth care clearly discriminates on the basis of sex. “Members of the Supreme Court's conservative majority,” they write, “seemed ready on Wednesday to uphold a Tennessee law denying transition care to transgender youth, with some of them saying that judgments about contested scientific evidence should be made by legislators rather than judges. ‘The Constitution leaves that question to the people's representatives rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,’ Chief Justice John G. Roberts said.” This rather neatly bulldozes the question of leaving the decision to doctors and their patients. Pleading that judges aren't qualified to decide medical questions, but the Tennessee state legislature is, is facially absurd. Even before you get to the fact that this same majority of the court also invented a new doctrine that regulatory experts in the executive branch are subject to being constantly overruled by judges who know nothing about the topics at hand. Judicial ignorance is apparently only a problem when it threatens to come in conflict with legislative ignorance.

Down at the bottom right of the page is the story of the collapse of the French government. “French far right and left unite in vote to oust prime minister.” The story somehow recounts the collapse of Emmanuel Macron's centrist government under Prime Minister Michel Barnier as a matter of left and right wing intransigence rather than as a matter of the centrist having relied on the left to fend off the far right in the election and then pivoted into an alliance with the far right to avoid sharing power with the left. Who could have guessed that an alliance with fascists to try to keep the left out of power could ever backfire on these centrists and conservatives who tried it? 

And in other extremely weird foreign news writing. The left-hand column at the top of the page is about the coup attempt in South Korea. “Effort to expel leader builds in South Korea. Martial law bid yields to impeachment vote.” It begins, “emboldened by their forceful rejection of military rule, Members of South Korea's political opposition moved on Wednesday to impeach President Yoon Suk-Yeol after his abrupt declaration of martial law failed spectacularly.” Somehow they're casting the opposition as “opportunistic” for trying to throw out the president who tried to overthrow civilian rule. The story goes on to say “Mr. Yoon's surprise declaration of martial law on Tuesday night, the first attempt to impose military rule in more than four decades, incited chaos within one of America's closest allies, and evoked memories of the dictatorial regimes that ruled South Korea until the 1980s. It was,” the Times continues, “an audacious attempt by the president to break the gridlock in government between a mostly progressive assembly and a conservative executive that has hobbled his nearly three years in power.” An audacious attempt to break gridlock is one way to describe a coup, but it's a pretty sociopathic one. I guess the mob on January 6th was just trying to break through the polarization of our closely divided American political system. 

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 work is sustained by money from you, listeners, through your subscriptions and tips. So please keep those coming. And if nothing unforeseen happens, we will talk again tomorrow.