Good morning. It is December 20th. The year is just about to hit bottom, daylight wise. A few flakes of snow have begun to drift down where a drizzle had been falling before in Manhattan, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Will, the government shut down at midnight tonight? Nobody knows. The headline on the front of Politico is “Johnson prepares to put forward another spending plan.” But Republicans don't know what it will be. Elon Musk, who demolished the original spending plan, spent the wee hours of last night tweeting his enthusiasm for the Alliance for Deutschland, the neo-Nazi party, in the German elections. On the front of this morning's New York Times, this story is “House kill's plan sought by Trump on spending bill. Shutdown is looming. Speaker back to drawing board facing Friday night deadline.” The lag between the print edition and reality doesn't seem like it was much of a problem here, since reality is too chaotic to resolve into a usable news update. The verb in the lead of the Times story is lurched, as in “the government lurched toward a shutdown after the House on Thursday rejected a hastily produced plan ordered up by President-elect Donald J. Trump to keep funding flowing. Dozens of Republicans,” the Times continues, “defied his demand to pair the spending with a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit. The vote sent Speaker Mike Johnson back to the drawing board ahead of a Friday night deadline with no clear path to keeping the government open. The Republicans rebelling against raising the debt limit, “the Times writes, “joined by Democrats who savaged the GOP for bowing to Mr. Trump and reneging on a spending compromise Mr. Johnson had reached with them only days earlier. The vote was 174 to 235 with one member voting present. It was,” the Times writes, “an epic meltdown that reflected the deep divisions among Republicans in Congress and a fraught dynamic between them and Mr. Trump that portends a difficult road ahead in January when the GOP will hold full control of Congress and he will be back in the White House. In particular, it suggested that the president-elect's ambitious fiscal plans, including a large tax cut, could face a rocky path on Capitol Hill, even with his own party in charge.” All of that seems to track, except the tax cut part. Not sure there is any configuration of politics in which the Republicans will not jam through a tax cut when the opportunity presents itself. None of the fiscal hawks are fiscal hawks about increasing revenue. Next column over, “Musk wields political might at fiscal deal, opposing a bill using threats and falsities.” Here, the Times makes up for downplaying Elon Musk's role in torpedoing the first deal in yesterday's paper, although the analogy they bring to the situation seems extremely misguided. “When President-elect Donald J. Trump picked the great Elon Musk, the world's richest man, to slash government spending and waste,” the Times writes, “he mused that the effort might be the Manhattan project of our time. By Thursday, that prediction looked spot on.” Come again? “By Thursday, that prediction looked spot on. Wielding the social media platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022, Mr. Musk detonated a rhetorical nuclear bomb in the middle of government shutdown negotiations on Capitol Hill.” Right. humanitarian and long term consequences aside, the people doing the Manhattan Project knew what they were doing and did it. This is more like if the Trinity test bomb had failed to detonate, but also had somehow set the atmosphere on fire. The story continues “in more than 150 separate posts on X. Starting before dawn on Wednesday, Mr. Musk demanded that Republicans back away from a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. He vowed political retribution against anyone voting for the sprawling bill, backed by Speaker Mike Johnson, who called Mr. Musk on Wednesday to ask that he stop posting about the bill. Mr. Musk also shared misinformation about the bill, including false claims that it contained new aid for Ukraine or $3 billion in funds for a new stadium in Washington.” The Times adds, “it was a remarkable moment for Mr. Musk, who has never been elected to public office, but now appears to be the largest megaphone for the man about to retake the Oval Office. Larger, in fact, than Mr. Trump himself, whose own vaunted social media presence is dwarfed by that of Mr. Musk.”Not sure of the value of citing the follower numbers on X, a site whose primary purpose now is to increase Elon Musk's follower count. But the fake numbers do in this case have the same shape as the imbalance of power this episode displayed between the exhausted president-elect and his overstimulated plutocrat ally. Next to that, another big end of year international feature. “Poppy boom in Afghan desert has gone bust. The story of how the Taliban, after encouraging and taxing the poppy business to fund the effort to drive US forces out of Afghanistan, have now cracked down on the drug business, shutting down the local economy that they had helped create.” And there's a story about how 20,000 crows like to roost in downtown Rochester at this time of year. On the page the crow story jumps to, there's a piece about a couple near Scotchtown, New York. Found two mastodon teeth in their backyard and might have the rest of the mastodon there. On the page facing that is a story about the still spreading H5N1 avian flu “mutating bird flu virus is called ‘COVID for cows.’” California governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency and the story says “Officials reported on Wednesday that the nation's first severe human case of infection had been identified in an individual in Louisiana who had been hospitalized with bird flu.” In The Times' deepening struggle about how to handle the iconography of Luigi Mangione, page A19 has a three-column photo of the perp walk the NYPD staged for him yesterday. It's rendered in black and white, but even without Mangione's jumpsuit rendered in flaming orange, his figure dominates the drab crowd of law enforcement officials and camera hunting Mayor Eric Adams, who were trying to showcase how they were in charge of the situation. That is the news, or as much of the news as there will be until the government decides whether it's going over a cliff or not. 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 by the subscription dollars and tips of you, the listeners. So please keep those coming. Enjoy whatever amount of snow may be falling around you while it still is. And if nothing unforeseen happens, we will talk again on Monday.