Good morning. It is May 8th. It is a sunny and more humid morning in New York City. There's a chance of thunder showers in the afternoon forecast. The New York Knicks throttled the Boston Celtics for the second consecutive game in Boston. Once again, storming back from being 20 points down by the simple expedient of refusing to let the purported defending champions make any buckets. The Oklahoma City Thunder became the first home team to win a second round playoff game. The Denver Nuggets went into the locker room at halftime with 56 points on the board, but trailing the Thunder by 31 as Oklahoma City, who will always be the unjustly stolen Seattle Supersonics, hung an NBA record 87 points on them in the half. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The word from the Vatican is that the Pope smoke says no new pope yet. Black smoke came out the chimney as the Cardinals in the Conclave finished their third round of balloting for a successor to Pope Francis without reaching agreement. And then they broke for lunch. More votes and more smoke are scheduled for the afternoon Vatican time. [BREAKING NEWS SOUND] We have late-breaking news as the Indignity Morning podcast was about to publish, Pope Smoke says, new Pope! The smoke is white, and we are holding your podcast to get the name. Meanwhile, CNN is doing maximum possible live news vamping, explaining to the viewers that it could have been one of the supposed front runners, but it may also be someone else. And now after a long delay, there's a name, and it's the first American pope, Cardinal Robert Prevost, born in Chicago, is going to be Pope Leo XIV. [breaking news exit sound] The question of whether any big time Democratic lawyers would leave the Paul, Weiss firm after Paul, Weiss led the pack of elite law firms surrendering to the Trump administration, has been answered, sort of. Reuters reports that the Obama administration's second term Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, is leaving the law firm, but he's doing it to go become the chair of the board of trustees of Columbia University. Where, as it happens the president sent the NYPD into the library yesterday to break up a protest. The Columbia Spectator reports, “New York police department officers arrested about 75 protesters and led them out of Butler Library into an NYPD bus on 114th Street, starting around 7.25 PM in response to a pro-Palestinian protest in the Lawrence A. Wien reading room. Could be Lawrence A. WINE. Online video is not especially helpful. Video posted to Instagram by the Spectator shows Columbia public security officers knocking a student to the floor in what was reportedly a struggle over Columbia's insistence that the students could not leave the building unless they showed their ID on the way out. Columbia's president, in a statement about the protest, called it utterly unacceptable, described seeing injured security officers being tended, and characterized the situation with the protesters as “The students were told they simply needed to identify themselves and then leave,” but most refused, which neatly conflates the question of whether the students were willing to leave the building, with the question of whether they were willing to be identified as part of a protest movement whose participants have already had government agents hunt for them, or outright abduct them from Columbia University property. Later on, castigating the protesters, the president wrote, “I am deeply disturbed at the idea that at a moment when our international community feels particularly vulnerable, a small group of students would choose to make our institution a target.” That is apparently how the president of Columbia assigns responsibility for protecting the campus community from the onslaught of the Trump administration. Today was scheduled to be the beginning of confirmation hearings for the Fox News personality, Janette Nesheiwat, to be the Trump administration's surgeon general. But Donald Trump withdrew her nomination yesterday after the conspiracist kook Laura Loomer aggressively came out against her on social media. Nesheiwat had been caught falsely claiming to have received an M.D. from the University of Arkansas when her actual medical school was the American University of the Caribbean. But Loomer also attacked Nesheiwat for supporting COVID vaccines. To replace Nesheiwat, Trump is instead putting forward as Surgeon General nominee Casey Means, an alternative health influencer who dropped out of a medical residency, leaving her education as a physician unfinished. Means has worked with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and shares his opposition to vaccines and enthusiasm for unpasteurized milk. On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece, “China Hints At Hardball In U.S. Talks / Set to Discuss Tariffs, But Issuing Warning,” “By agreeing to meet with the Trump administration to discuss trade,” the Times writes “China is seeking to cast itself as the responsible one in a bruising superpower competition that has roiled the global financial system and set off fears of a recession. For weeks, China had publicly said that it would not engage in trade talks with the United States under duress, refusing to ‘kneel down’ and compromise with a ‘bully.’ It insisted that Washington should first drop its eye-watering tariffs on China as a condition for negotiations. On Wednesday, Beijing indicated it would come to the table after all, saying that its top trade official, He Lifeng, would meet with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Switzerland this week. Even so, it maintained a tough stance, warning Washington against using the talks as a smokescreen to continue coercion and extortion.” The discussion of China seeking to cast itself as the responsible one, and then a China analyst telling the Times that China is trying to frame itself as the responsible party, gets a lot funnier when you take the jump and get into the nuts and bolts of exactly what China would be the responsible party compared to. “Chinese officials,” the Times writes inside the paper, “will likely be treating the trade talks as a fact-finding mission. ‘The Chinese want to find out what Donald Trump is really up to, and you can only get this by engaging in direct talks,’ said Wang Xiangwei, an associate professor of journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University. ‘Until now, for instance, it has not been entirely clear to Beijing which Trump officials were in charge of future negotiations with China,’ Mr. Wang said. “Part of the challenge,” the Times continues, “in dealing with the Trump administration on trade is that the direction of policy seems to vary depending on who is speaking. Peter Navarro, a senior White House trade advisor and the architect of many of Mr. Trump's trade plans has defended the tariffs as necessary, while Mr. Bessent has said the U.S. is willing to negotiate with countries.” Even that, of course, is a gloss on the actual situation, which is that people in the Trump administration who are concerned about the destruction that the tariffs are bringing about have reportedly been able to produce reversals or modifications of the president's public trade stances simply by catching him when Peter Navarro is not in the room with him and briefly steering his chaotic mind traffic onto a less apocalyptic course, for long enough for him to post something about it on social media. Next to that on page one is a report from Memphis on the acquittal of three police officers in the beating death of Tyree Nichols. “The three were convicted of witness tampering in a separate federal trial last fall,” the Times writes, “but acquitted of a more serious charge of violating Mr. Nichols' civil rights by causing his death. One of them in that trial had been found guilty,” the Times writes “of violating Mr. Nichols' civil rights by causing bodily injury.” The three were part of a set of five cops who beat Nichols to death on camera. In a tradition going back to Rodney King, the defense apparently succeeded in raising doubts as to whether the individual kicks and punches delivered by each individual police officer were really that bad. Here with the additional excuse that maybe it was one of the officers not directly on trial, whose share of the beating was what really beat Nichols to death. Next to that on page one, below a big photo of people watching the Cardinals before the Conclave on a giant Samsung TV in front of St. Peter's, the story is “Some Elite Law Firms Decline To Take Up Immigration Cases / Fearful of Challenging Trump’s Agenda and Inciting His Wrath.” The story begins with Gibson Dunn, a firm which has not been targeted yet by any Trump executive orders, and hasn't officially cut any deals with the Trump administration, dropping out of the effort by public interest groups, to oppose Trump's mass deportations, citing what it calls “five people with direct knowledge of the matter,” the Times writes, “Lawyers for Gibson Dunn explained that it was afraid of incurring Mr. Trump's wrath if the firm was associated publicly with a lawsuit that sought to restore legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children.” After the jump, the story looks at Davis Polk. “Davis Polk,” the Times writes, “was another big law firm that helped people ensnared in Mr. Trump's immigration policies during his first term. In January 2017, the firm deployed some of its lawyers to Kennedy International Airport with people who were searching for family members who had been detained as part of the Muslim ban. But, shortly after Mr. Trump won re-election, a prominent nonprofit reached out to Davis Polk to ask if the law firm would do research about the legality of one of Mr. Trump's immigration proposals. The firm simply said no, according to a lawyer with the organization who asked to speak without identifying her group.” And the next column over is, more NEWS ANALYSIS. “Offramp Seen In India Clash With Pakistan.” Who sees the off-ramp exactly? After the jump, Shashi Tharoor of the Indian Parliament, told the Times that in the exchange of strikes between the countries, the Indian side had sensitively calibrated its response to make sure any chance of escalation would be reduced. “‘I think it was done in a manner that sought to convey very clearly that we were not looking to see this as the opening salvo in a protracted war, but rather as a one-off,’ Mr. Tharoor said.” On the other side, the Times reports, Moeed Yusuf, a former national security adviser in Pakistan, said he saw the issue as one of deterrence to make clear to India that it cannot strike across international borders and get away with it. “‘There's debate within decision-making circles in Pakistan about whether its claims of success in downing Indian aircraft are enough,’ Mr. Yousaf said. ‘I think the options have been kept open,’ he said, adding that the ball is still in India's court.” Part of both sides declaring success, apparently, is that the story of what actually happened is fluid. The Times writes, “while there appeared to be a broad consensus on the damage inflicted by Indian strikes on the Pakistani side, the exact nature of the reported downing of Indian aircraft remained unclear. Public accounts from both sides suggested that it was unlikely that Indian aircraft had crossed into Pakistani airspace. All indications were that India had carried out its strikes either from the sky or with ground-based missiles from its own territory. If it is true,” the Times continues, “that Indian planes did not enter Pakistani airspace, it is unclear how Pakistan would have potentially brought down the Indian aircraft. Pakistani military officials said they had used air-to-air missiles to shoot down the planes, which could not be independently verified. In interactions with foreign diplomats, Pakistani officials described the face-off as a nearly hour-long dogfight along the line that divides India and Pakistan. Military analysts said that given the long-range missiles that both countries have in their arsenals, they would not need to breach each other's airspace to carry out cross-border strikes against air or ground targets. That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.