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/