INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST

EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: It's always been a pleasure to talk to you in the mornings about what's going on and how the press is covering it. But honestly, ever since the first Tuesday of last November, getting up in the morning and immediately surveying the state of current events has been pretty discouraging. Pretty much every day, the news has been that things are bad and they just got worse. Yeste...

EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: [THE WASHINGTON POST] "Mr. Cheney supported tax cuts and defense spending increases, like nearly all Republicans, but he joined the rightmost wing in voting against a federal holiday honoring the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor-piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South...

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

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...

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 w...

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 n...

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...

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 lega...

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...

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 cho...

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 outsi...

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 p...

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 lit...

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...

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 an...

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...

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 forec...

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 transportati...

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 wr...