INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: [THE NEW YORK TIMES] "Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview, ‘Utah will end a harmful culture of permissiveness,' he said, ‘and guide homeless people towards human thriving.'” An accountability center. Because if there's one lesson that homeless people with drug addiction problems need drummed into them, it's that the things they do can have negative consequences. No more culture of permissiveness toward people not having a place to live. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Just doing a funny accent, gobbling up his ketchup treats, grooving to YMCA. Extremely normal things for the leader of a superpower on the world stage. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Inside the paper on page A20, the Times reports on a breakdown in solidarity fighting the shutdown. “Top Federal Workers Union breaks with Democrats over the shutdown. AFGE chief calls on Congress to open now and negotiate later. The largest union of federal workers called on Monday for Congress to pass a spending bill to immediately end the government shutdown,” the Times writes, “effectively siding with President Trump and Republicans who have opposed Democratic efforts to restore health care spending. ‘Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,' Everett Kelly, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in the statement. He added, ‘It's time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures and no gamesmanship.' The statement,” the Times writes, “was a remarkable shift for the Union. Before the shutdown began on October 1st, Mr. Kelly called on Republicans to negotiate with Democrats who are seeking concessions, including the extension of subsidies for plans under the Affordable Care Act that would stave off premium increases and the loss of coverage for millions of Americans. The union has also worked closely with Democratic lawmakers on efforts this year to oppose Mr. Trump's policies, particularly his wide-reaching campaign to slash the federal workforce and fire career civil servants. But,” the story continues, “amid the punishing effects of the shutdown on federal workers, Some 730,000 are working without pay and another 670,000 are furloughed entirely. Senate Democrats have blocked legislation that would pay the civil servants who have been working without pay, a move that would provide relief to the union's members but would weaken the bargaining position of democratic lawmakers. The Republicans, in turn, blocked a pair of Democratic bills that would have paid both those federal workers who are still working and those who have been furloughed.” “Provide relief to the union's members” there, then, would mean provide relief to a bit more than half of the union's members, while the others remain out of work and unpaid. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Bloomberg is reporting that Trump Media, the social media company owned by President Trump, the single person with the greatest power to personally cause events to happen in the world is going to start selling gambling contracts on prediction markets. “Trump Media and Technology Group Corp.” Bloomberg writes “plans to make prediction contracts available on its truth social network, allowing users to bet on events ranging from political elections to inflation rate changes, according to a statement on Tuesday.” Not sure that range of two different aggregates of public behavior is a real range. But with Donald Trump making drastic policy changes that affect consumer prices, while also exerting pressure on the people who report economic data, the opportunities for trading on insider information seem abundant. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: “With no end in sight to the nearly month-long federal government shutdown,” the Times writes, “funding for the nation's largest food assistance program, known as SNAP, will disappear at the start of November, according to the Department of Agriculture. On Friday, the Trump administration said in a memo that it would not tap into contingency funds to keep payments flowing to states.” The last part of that paragraph and the first part of that paragraph are sitting in pretty glaring tension with each other. Despite the Times's use of the evasive newswriter's “with,” it's true that the government shutdown is ongoing, but it is not true that it in any way necessitates cutting 42 million people off from their ability to buy food at the end of this week. The Trump administration is choosing not to spend the money to keep the assistance going. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: On the website, the Times this morning published a piece that really digs into and emphasizes the point that its reporters keep making, down inside the incremental coverage of Donald Trump's ongoing campaign of slaughter at sea. It's a NEWS ANALYSIS piece by Charlie Savage, “The peril of a White House that flaunts its indifference to the law. The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.” It's gonna take some restraint for me not to just read the whole story into the microphone. “Since he returned to office nine months ago,” Savage writes, “President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts, but his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.” That's really well-tuned. It avoids even the slight misstep of the subheadline by describing the targets of the president's attacks as people “accused” of smuggling drugs, not people “suspected,” since “suspected” is an internal state with a degree of imputed sincerity behind it that Donald Trump has absolutely not earned. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The process of tearing down the East Wing,” the story continues, “was expected to be completed as soon as this weekend, two senior administration officials said, as Mr. Trump moved rapidly to carry out a passion project that he said was necessary to host state dinners and other events. But,” the story then says, “the previously unannounced decision to demolish the East Wing was at odds with Mr. Trump's previous statements about the project.” What the Times means here is that the president just set about tearing down a huge chunk of the White House all on his own with no public consultation after having explicitly said that he was not going to do that, which is a self-evidently shocking scandal as long as you are not part of the New York Times' political coverage operation. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Donald Trump's demolition of the East Wing of the White House continued yesterday, advancing well past the facade to smash the main structure. The New York Times belatedly realized that this was, in fact, front page news, and put the picture on the front page at the top, four columns wide. But, being the Times, decided that the way to deal with the president unilaterally choosing to demolish a major section of the White House and replace it with an immense new structure designed to suit his own personal whims and taste, as if he were dispatching contractors to his own private property—though for that he would have been required to get permits—was to assign the strenuously clever Sean McCreesh to write yet another of his dispatches in which Trump's excesses and abuses of his office are archly treated as amusing expressions of his indomitable will. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Protesters showing up to wave Israeli flags outside the building does not mean that the "tension was spilling out of the synagogue." It's like when anti semitic protesters showed up on Broadway outside the fence of Columbia University, and their behavior was incorporated into the brief against the Columbia campus protesters, the people who are on the outside are on the outside for a reason, and if they were representative of the situation inside, they would probably be inside. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The headline is "Trump Weighs Transforming Refugee Policy / White People Would Be Given Preference." Here again, the bigotry is so blatant that the headline writers couldn't even sustain neutral euphemism long enough to get through the subhead. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: President Donald Trump announced that the United States had murdered six more people on the high seas yesterday, in its fifth unprovoked attack on unarmed boats in the Caribbean, "asserting," as the New York Times puts it, "without evidence that they had been transporting drugs." Along with the social media post announcing the killing, the Times writes, "the President also posted a 33 second aerial surveillance video showing a small boat floating and then being struck by a missile and exploding. Unlike some previous announcements, the President did not identify the nationality of the people who were killed, or name a specific drug cartel or criminal gang with which they were supposedly associated." The Times goes on to once again run through the ways in which these killings are entirely illegal and unjustified under every legal analysis, and how the Trump administration has produced no substantive arguments otherwise, and how Congress has not identifiably authorized any such use of military force. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: There's not much point in quibbling about a prize that already went to Henry Kissinger, but US-backed regime change and peace don't usually end up on the same side of the ledger. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The final story above the fold has the headline “Far Outside the U.S., Kirk's Memory Has Become a Political Tool / Public Tribute in Peru by a Mayor Seeking Trump's Help.” The story pretty heavily contradicts the headline, in that it documents that in Lima there really isn't any such thing as the memory of Charlie Kirk. Even more so than in the United States, people have little to no idea of who the guy was, or why politicians would make a fuss over him. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The Times's designated campus scold Anemona Hartocollis has a new headline to scandalize the readers. “Harvard Finds Skipping Class Part of Culture. Harvard University is one of the most difficult schools to gain admission to” she writes, “with the school turning away some 97% of applicants every year. But, once they get in, many of its students skip class and fail to do the reading. According to the classroom social compact committee, a group of seven faculty members that produced a report on Harvard's classroom culture that has been fueling debate since it was released in January.” January. It was released in January. It is now October. Here are some stories that are not on page A1 today, while the Times was staking out A1 for news of a 10 month old report on campus culture at Harvard. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Weiss's probably underrated advantage, and the thing that really got her to where she is now, is that her callow reactionary prejudices and politics largely overlap with those of the people who really call the shots in the purportedly liberal news business, but those attitudinal advantages are offset by the fact that she also shares their weird insularity toward the world and the people who work for them, but without any meaningful professional or executive experience to offset it. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: This just all seems like extremely strange framing for a CONGRESSIONAL MEMO in 2025. Are the House and Senate really blasé about the shutdown exactly or or have they just ceded all their power to a president who can't be made to care? There isn't really much point in working late into the night or even performing the role of working late into the night, when the only person who has any control over the process is sundowning. After the jump, which arrives accompanied by a sly little postage stamp photo of the Capitol dome with an out of focus, DON'T WALK sign in the foreground. The story delivers a revealingly garbled analogy. "Former representative Patrick McHenry, The Times writes, The North Carolina Republican who helped steer the house away from a shutdown in 2023 predicted that the gridlock would continue until lawmakers felt more consequences from their voters for doing nothing. He compared it to a professional wrestling match, where both sides need to force the opposition to submit. 'It's not goodwill that brings policymakers together,' Mr. McHenry said 'it's pain. There's no urgency until the political pain increases.'" Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: There is no job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning. The numbers were reportedly compiled but are not being released, due to the government shutdown. Surely this is a neutral logistical decision on the bureau's part, and the numbers would stay in a file drawer even if they were positive for the Trump administration's economic performance, which most forecasters expected they would not be, or are not. Not sure what tense to use for data that exists but can't be seen. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: There we have one of the basic problems with writing about the Trump administration and what its officials said, in that pretty much every part of that paraphrase is false. The review was not in response to Donald Trump's executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. It was quite obviously in response to the government shutdown. Likewise, the specific transportation department rule that Duffy was citing was hastily issued to create a pretextual mechanism for taking away the funds. Duffy announced that the funding had been put under review, and that that review was unfortunately on hold because the lawyers who would do it were unavailable under the shutdown, in a single integrated action. The story also does not mention that the particular contracting requirements the Duffy claims may violate the rule that he just issued are congressionally mandated and longstanding contracting rules. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Back on page one, at the top left of the page, the headline is, “Comey Is Stuck In Long Feud With President / A Bad Start Escalated Into an Indictment.” The bad start was James Comey as FBI director telling Donald Trump in their first meeting when Trump was president-elect that there were allegations circulating about Trump and Russia. And so after that meeting, the Times writes, “the two men would be set on a path of escalating conflict and mutual loathing that led last week to a prosecutor handpicked for the task by Mr. Trump, securing an indictment of Mr. Comey.” Sorry, but no, this ain't a feud. This is the president of the United States using all of his available powers and then some to persecute somebody. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: This is how Peter Baker decided to respond to the spectacle of the complete collapse of the rule of law, by somehow simultaneously assuming the posture of a kindergarten teacher and of a child sucking its thumb on a sleepy mat. Boy, those Republicans sure wouldn't like it if someone treated them the way that they're treating their opponents right now. Yeah, right. That's why they're trying to fix it so that political power never changes hands again. That's the heart of their entire approach. What even is the use of exploring the dumb hypothetical that the Democrats might prove equally lawless in the future? The real question that demands NEWS ANALYSIS right now is whether if the Democrats do manage to take power again, they will shed their own chronic inhibitions and ignore the hand-wringing of people like Baker, and take swift and decisive action not to emulate crimes of the Trump administration but to punish those crimes decisively, abandoning the presumption going all the way back to Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, if not to the violent unwinding of Reconstruction after the Civil War, that the proper way to deal with lawlessness corruption and misrule is to grant the wrongdoers impunity so as not to stir up a fuss and provoke future bad behavior. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Marjorie Taylor Green, whose entire politics is built around not being able to get along with people, is not getting along with people. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Speaking of declining literacy, in the international news on page A6, there's the headline, “Some Poo-Poo an Italian City Tax Designed to Combat Dog Waste.” That's P-O-O hyphen P-O-O. Completely amateur attempted wordplay. The term “pooh-pooh” for disparaging something is spelled with H's, so it's not a clever piece of wordplay. It's just the wrong-ass word. Real dogshit effort there. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Below the jump for that story on page A15, the headline is “SEC dropped a civil complaint against a former client of its Trump-picked chairman. In 2018,” the Times writes, “Paul Atkins was paid $1,450 an hour to be an expert witness by Devin Archer's lawyers as they tried to undermine accusations that their client defrauded a Native American tribal entity and others out of $60 million. While Mr. Archer was convicted anyway, he was pardoned by President Trump in March.” You could write a story about how Republicans would feel if the same fact pattern had unfolded under Joe Biden's SEC. But why bother? The question isn't how they feel about conflicts of interest. It's how they feel about Donald Trump. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The great difficulty in trying to convey what happens with this president and this presidency is that Donald Trump is a profoundly addled and frivolous person who doesn't care or understand the things he says or does, but he is also the president of the United States, so that the things that he says and does are real and serious. Trying to start from the fact that he is the president and impose a kind of sanity and meaning on his behavior that isn't there while addressing his absurdity and irrationality as supplemental detail to be euphemized or paraphrased creates a perniciously false picture. What the Times did in today's paper is to frankly start with the incoherent rambling and then to assemble a sort of collage around the serious things it means. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: In the abstract, in principle, this isn't a terrible way for a mainstream publication to express skepticism toward official claims, but to politely and firmly rebut the claims put forward yesterday, to rationalize them into a new step toward reframing autism, is to miss the entire tenor of the thing. The story then tries to dig in. “The briefing at the White House,” the Times continues, “featured often unsubstantiated medical advice from Mr. reminiscent of his first term when he encouraged Americans to try unproven treatments for COVID. The president on Monday repeatedly issued strong warnings that flew in the face of the recommendations of leading medical groups. ‘Don't take Tylenol. Don't take it. Fight like hell not to take it.' He urged pregnant women to ‘tough it out' when in pain, except in rare instances such as a dangerously high fever.” After the jump, the story also says “Mr. Trump mentioned that he and Mr. Kennedy had long discussed the possibility of a vaccine link to autism. He also amplified Mr. Kennedy's views, saying that the childhood immunization schedule loads up children with too many vaccines. The president said without evidence that babies are given as many as 80 shots at once.” Writing “the president said without evidence that babies are being given as many as 80 shots at once,” sounds like you are really holding the president's feet to the fire. But the words that came out of the mouth of the president of the United States on this subject, or at least some of the words, were actually, “it's too much liquid. Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing when you look at it. It's like 80 different vaccines and beyond vaccines. 80. You give that to a little kid.” Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Jeremy W. Peters' nonsense, flattering as it does the sensibilities and sensitivities of the people who run the paper, gets page one, and again, a straight news story package, whereas Adam Liptak, writing about how the actual removal of Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves, as the Trump administration threatened to use its regulatory powers against ABC, was intentioned with the conventional understanding of what the constitution allows, lands on page A18 with a NEWS ANALYSIS tag on it. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Knowing that the Senate went ahead and jammed through Kimberly Guilfoyle's appointment to be an ambassador at the expense of longstanding procedural rules just affirms the already established situation of the Senate. Framing it as a steady erosion of John Thune's values as an institutionalist is kind of funny, but likewise not super revealing about what it means to be a Republican at the moment. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Before we get to the larger news, we're going to start with something very small, or at least something petty, that turns out astonishingly and yet obviously, to be of world historic import. It's in a passage by Ben Smith writing for Semafor. “The Trump administration,” Smith writes, “from the president down to the middle levels of obscure cabinet departments is populated by people whose defining experiences in public life involved being silenced by social platforms. This predates the social media wars of the late 2010s.” Smith continues. “One Trump appointee told me that a radicalizing experience was being booted out of the Gawker comments section way back in the day.” Of course it was. Of course the vicious dullards and bigots who are running the country into ruin are the same people who were being dullards and bigots in the comment section back in the day. From Trump on down, and laterally out through the titans of Silicon Valley and their fascist enthusiasms, this is a political movement built on profoundly unpleasant and unlikable people being furious that they can't make other people like them or respect them. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Hamstringing the FBI's ability to investigate financial fraud doesn't seem like things backfiring for the Trump administration exactly. Seems more like one of their more successful integrated policy initiatives. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The administration may have accused Venezuelan cartels of bringing fentanyl into the United States, but the New York Times has reported that Venezuela plays essentially no role in the fentanyl trade. The story does return to the fact that there is no legal basis for these killings, but it mostly slides past the fact that the extralegal basis doesn't hold up either. Mostly though, the question is when an unrepentant killer racks up new victims, does that make the overall story smaller or bigger? Is the Times here to tell us the story of an out-of-control killing spree or the story of business as usual? Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: It's one thing to ruin the lives of civil servants, it's quite another to inconvenience Bayer. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The Times writes, “Mr. Kirk would arrive at colleges ready for rhetorical combat, willing to engage on the thorniest topics from abortion rights to race. the topic of race.” Ah, that “topic” of race. Right. His opinion on the "topic" of race was that black people were inherently mentally inferior to white people and only owed their current position in society to organized efforts to disadvantage white people. The Times writes, “his campus visits regularly provoked impassioned protests from students who disagreed with Mr. Kirk's stances, like his criticism of transgender rights and endorsement of the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which claims that non-white immigrants will displace white Americans.” Yes, that would be the Great Replacement Theory that has inspired multiple massacres. But you know, the important thing is the healthy exchange of opinions. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Shooting a retreating unarmed vessel and then making sure to massacre any survivors, would be absolutely illegal in a war, which again, is not what this was. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Donald Trump's participation in Jeffrey Epstein's sleazy birthday book makes its way onto the front page in a NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “Epstein Revelations Hindering Trump's Attempts to Turn Page.” It's illustrated with an infographic, “Signature With a Characteristic Flourish. The president has denied signing a birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein, but his signatures from that time are close matches.” It features six annotated copies of the name Donald, one from the Epstein birthday book and five others from authenticated Trump signatures. They're completely identical. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Way inside the paper, on page A16, down at the bottom, the headline is “Drawing for Epstein, apparently signed by Trump, is released.” “Key congressional committee on Monday,” the Times writes, “obtained a note and sexually suggestive drawing, apparently signed by Donald J. Trump, and included in a book for the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. A drawing that Mr. Trump has insisted is fake.” The story includes a picture of the document, a center-justified poem or imaginary dialogue between Trump and Epstein, with the torso and remarkably small breasts of a female figure drawn around the words and with Trump's signature, "Donald," in his familiar spiky style, centered at the bottom right around the pubic area. The drawing seems to be in line with other pages from Epstein's birthday book that were released, which were characterized reasonably accurately by the Bluesky user and state level democratic organizer going by the handle “Bobby Big Wheel” who posted "For decades everyone on the list argued they only knew Epstein in a professional capacity while all the notes to him are "I sure love being pedophiles together with you, my friend Jeffrey Epstein" Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: “In the three weeks since President Trump flooded the streets of Washington with hundreds of troops and federal agents,” the Times writes, ”there have been only a few scattered protests and scarcely a word from Congress, which has quietly gone along with the deployment.” Actually, the AP reports there were thousands of people out in the streets of Washington, D.C. on Saturday, precisely to protest Trump's incursion on the city, but the online version of this story went up on Saturday, and what are going to do? Get someone to revise it before you print it in Monday's paper? Anyway. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Maybe even more than the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, as Secretary of Defense, the Kennedy confirmation certified that there was absolutely no limit on Republicans readiness to roll over for Donald Trump, no matter what principles were involved or what obvious damage would be the result. And, RFK Jr.'s behavior has amply illustrated that he knows he doesn't have to answer to anyone but Trump, which is why the reports from the hearing seem to document that the only thing that really made him squirm was his attempt to align himself with Donald Trump's own completely self-contradictory positions that the development of the mRNA COVID vaccines under Operation Warp Speed was a tremendous triumph for Donald Trump and that the anti-vax movement in general and the anti-COVID vaccination movement in particular are righteous and correct and he is their champion. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Again, this big win for Harvard is on page A19, as opposed to page A1, which is where in June, the Times ran, “Harvard is said to be open to spending up to $500 million to resolve Trump dispute.” And where in July, the Times ran, “Behind closed doors, Harvard officials debate a risky truce with Trump.” Surely New York Times standards editor Patrick Healy is already preparing his explanation of how Times editors and reporters so badly misjudged the state of play in the Harvard case. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The Times goes on to say he said the strike “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in international waters transporting illegal narcotics heading to the United States.” Before any external information has come in about exactly who was on the boat in the black and white snuff video of the airstrike that Trump put out, the administration is already unable to keep its own story straight. The online version of the Times story says that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a different story about where the boat was heading. In a deviation from Mr. Trump's account, however, the Times writes, “Mr. Rubio said that the vessel's destination was probably Trinidad or another country in the Caribbean.” So the boat that was blown up because it was smuggling drugs to the United States was not bound for the United States. No matter how many other pieces of the story likewise end up being contested or debunked, the people on the boat are still going to be dead. Despite having done, in Trump's own version of events, nothing that would rate the death penalty if they had simply been arrested, tried, and convicted. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: "In the past several weeks, the rioters and their lawyers have pushed the Trump administration to pay them restitution for what they believe were unfair prosecutions.” And once they get that, they will demand something else because what they've learned in the past four years and eight months is that nobody is going to stop them. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: It's a big week for traitors. Donald Trump's Air Force yesterday announced that it would reverse the Biden administration's decision and offer a military funeral to Ashley Babbitt, who was shot dead by a police officer defending members of Congress as she tried to lead an attack through a broken window of the locked door to the Speaker's lobby, seeking to seize the House chamber by force and overturn the 2020 presidential election result. Babbit's status as basically the only January 6th participant to have gotten what they deserved, has been one of the great outstanding grievances of the Trump restoration movement. And now that the coup she died for has succeeded, the armed forces, in obedience to Trump, are signing on to the false account of who she was and what she was trying to do. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The Times writes, “four other high profile CDC officials quit en masse, apparently in frustration over vaccine policy and Mr. Kennedy's leadership.” The word “apparently” is not really necessary there, given that at least one of them specifically said so. Daskalakis posted his resignation letter to x.com. In it, he wrote that he was “unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health. He also wrote, have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people that the administration has put people with dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor in charge of recommending vaccine policy to a director hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader. Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.” He wrote that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should not be considered a source of accurate information and wrote of the shooting at the CDC building in Atlanta that it was the result of “the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that his and his minions words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur.” Again, no reason to tack apparently onto the motivations. He just out and said it. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: On the front of this morning's New York Times, all the way down at the bottom of the page is a little referral box directing the reader to page C2 to read about the news that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey are engaged to be married. If you do a search for Taylor Swift on Google, or at least when I just did one, it sets off a cascade of animated confetti and some kind of floating glyph that kind of looks like the Sacred Heart of Jesus with an animated bubble above it that is shooting off hearts and seems to be saying that something, maybe the animation itself, has 93.64 million likes. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The New York Times did not think that the mayor, in the midst of his reelection campaign, having his people hand out cash bribes in public, was anything that its readership might need to know in a timely manner. They got scooped on the news simply because the bribery was so widespread and so blatant that another outlet, one that actually cares about reporting on the city, bumped into a bribe on its own. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: You just invented a completely fake justification for lawless behavior from the president and then appealed to the authority of experts to say that it's completely fake. The reader gains nothing from the effort to reframe completely abnormal behavior as if it were normal, followed by the conclusion that the frame just doesn't fit. The president is shaking down companies for ownership shares. Don't pretend there's some sort of case that this could be something other than what it is. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: Nowhere in this story about malicious and defamatory behavior by the so-called group Libs of TikTok, the account, the Times writes, “did not respond to questions regarding its post about Mr. Paris.” Is there a single mention of the name Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The fact that Andrew Cuomo, whose own residency in New York City is extremely tenuous and recent, even by the most charitable accounts, is trying to recover his standing by pounding away on the Hamptons fundraiser circuit, could be an embarrassing front page story in its own right. It just emphasizes that the anti-Mamdani movement, such as it is, basically represents the desires of a bunch of jerks who want to rule the city from afar, and of the people who operate the New York Times. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.: The Times describes Trump's deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops in Washington, DC as “an actualization of one of his most tried and true political arguments. Democrats, often black Democrats, have let lawlessness run rampant in the cities and states they were elected to run.” Now, is that an actualization of the argument? Or is it an invitation to treat the argument as having been actualized? This declaration of what purpose Donald Trump is achieving gets as counterweight the Times writing, “among Democrats, there is widespread agreement that Mr. Trump is stoking fear for political gain and exaggerating statistics to justify a power grab.” Is Trump's relationship to the actual crime statistics something for Democrats to debate among themselves? Or is it something for a newspaper to publish as a fact? Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/