INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST

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...

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 eff...

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 $...

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...

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 Time...

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 co...

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 Repu...

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...

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 th...

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 ef...

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 t...

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 d...

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 Saturda...

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 t...

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...

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 s...

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! htt...

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 cha...

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 tr...

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 floa...

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, bu...