Good morning. It is May 22nd. It's another dark and rainy morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, broadcasting from the Auxiliary Indignity Morning Podcast Studio, which includes a little more traffic noise on wet pavement than the usual setup and is making the cat anxious and liable to crash into the setup at any moment, but even so, we're taking a look at the day and the news. 

Every morning's news is terrible, but the past 24 hours really were noticeably worse than even the awful baseline. The House of Representatives passed by a single vote, Donald Trump's catastrophically destructive budget plan. There's a certain amount of theater involved in the vote margins as the more fractious members of the Republican conference wanted to make a show of going along as grudgingly as possible. Nevertheless, even if House Speaker Mike Johnson would have had a few more potential votes in his pocket in case of emergency, it can't help but reflect that the Democrats were, as yesterday's podcast covered, down a seat because Jerry Connolly of Virginia died of the esophageal cancer that he knew he had when he was sworn in as a member of the new Congress in January. The bill will go on to the Senate eventually after our lawmakers take a little break. 

The Republican Senate majority, meanwhile, yesterday effectively ignored the existence of the filibuster, claiming the power to rescind California's electric vehicle mandate under the Congressional Review Act, which avoids the filibuster, even though the Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian on the latter of whose word Senate Democrats dropped their efforts to raise the minimum wage and do immigration reform under Joe Biden, ruled that the Congressional Review Act did not apply to what the Republicans intended to do. The Democrats had deferred to the parliamentarian because if they had evaded the filibuster when they had a majority, they would have been opening the door for future Republican majorities to thwart the filibuster themselves. Well, well, well.

Also in Washington, D.C. last night, two staffers at the Israeli embassy, a couple who planned to be married, were shot dead outside an event at the Capitol Jewish Museum. The person who apparently did the shooting reportedly turned himself in, shouting, free Palestine, as he did so. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column deals with or tries to deal with the horrifying and preposterous spectacle in the Oval Office yesterday. The headline is “TRUMP BROADSIDE EMBROILS LEADER OF SOUTH AFRICA / TENSION IN OVAL OFFICE / Sharing a Video Echoing False Assertions Over White Genocide.” The headline desk's dissociation powers are really being pushed to their limits there. The president of the United States somehow becomes an adjective attached to a “broadside,” a broadside that then “embroils” the South African president. This generates a mood, a mood of “tension.” And then comes a little action, sharing a video, but the video is only echoing false assertions over white genocide. “Over” is just a weird space-filler wrong choice of preposition there. Apparently, “of” would have left the line too short. But what is this “echo” of an “assertion?” Where was the assertion coming from that the video that the president of the United States played only contained a reflection of its substance? The story itself gets right down to it. “In an astonishing confrontation in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump lectured President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa with false claims about a genocide against white Afrikaner farmers, even dimming the lights to show what he said was video evidence of their persecution. The meeting had been expected to be tense,” the Times continues, “given that Mr. Trump has suspended all aid to the country and created an exception to his refugee ban for Afrikaners, fast-tracking their path to citizenship, even as he keeps thousands of other people out. But the meeting quickly became a stark demonstration of Mr. Trump's belief that the world has aligned against white people and that black people and minorities have received preferential treatment. In the case of South Africa, that belief has ballooned into claims of genocide.” The story then goes on to describe some of what happened with Trump ordering the lights turned down. “A booming video mashup,” the Times writes, “began to play, including footage of people calling for violence against white farmers in South Africa. One clip showed white crosses planted alongside a rural road stretching far into the distance, which Mr. Trump said were part of a burial site for murdered white farmers. The crosses were actually planted by activists staging a protest against farm murders. By the end, with the stunned South African president looking on, Mr. Trump had begun flipping through a stack of papers, apparently showing white victims of violence in South Africa. ‘Death, death, death,’ he said.” Agency France-Presse reported that one of the images he used on a printout from the far right website, the American Thinker, showed dead bodies from the Democratic Republic of Congo. As he showed off the Democratic Republic of Congo photo, AFP writes, “Trump said, ‘look, here's burial sites all over the place. These are all white farmers that are being buried.’” The Times story also left out some of the details reported by its own staff in their shocked live blogging of the spectacle. As it was unfolding, for instance, White House reporter Sean McCreesh posted, “the South African delegation continued to calmly try to explain to Trump the situation on the ground in South Africa but he remained unmoved. ‘Dead white people, dead white farmers,’ he said.” 

The story does mention Trump losing his temper in the Oval Office session when a reporter asked about the fact that the administration had just formally accepted Qatar's gift and or bribe of its unwanted luxury jumbo jet to serve as a potential Air Force One. The Times writes that President Ramaphosa “even attempted to joke with the president who had become irate when a reporter asked him about a free plane from the Qatari government. ‘I’m sorry, I don't have a plane to give you,’ Mr. Ramaphosa said to Mr. Trump. ‘I wish you did,’ Mr. Trump replied. ‘I’d take it. If your country offered the US Air Force a plane, I would take it.’” The actual taking of the plane is on page A15. 

On page one, the second news column is “Judge Rebukes U.S. for Flight Of 8 Deportees / Finds Sudden Ouster to Africa Defied Order.” That's yesterday morning's news about the court hearing about the administration's sending a plane load of people to South Sudan in defiance of a court order. 

Next to that is a big map with a story showing where half a trillion dollars worth of as yet undone projects under the inflation reduction act would happen. The headline is “G.O.P. Aims to Cut Clean Energy Perks Flowing to Its Own Turf,” because much of the spending is focused in Republican areas of the country. “At least three dozen Republicans,” the Times writes, “have asked their colleagues to keep at least some tax credits to protect jobs in their districts and reduce electricity prices. But a nearly equal number of conservative House members are pushing publicly to kill the climate law altogether.” The Times writes, “if the tax credits are completely rescinded, it would sharply reduce future demand for electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines, according to projections by the Rhodium Group. The effect would be compounded if the Trump administration moved forward as planned with undoing Biden era tailpipe pollution limits for cars and trucks, which would have pushed automakers to sell more electric vehicles.” The story continues, “‘right now we see a lot of folks just waiting,’ said Jason Grumet, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, a renewable industry trade group. ‘People are not canceling things, but they're also not breaking ground. There is a remarkable tension right now between probably the best fundamentals for investment in the energy sector that we've seen in a generation and the greatest amount of uncertainty that we've seen in a generation,’ Mr. Grumet said. ‘That is a collision that all manufacturing now is trying to navigate.’” 

As of this morning, there is less uncertainty, but not in a good way. As the Politico Energy and Environment vertical reports that the struggle between the Republicans who wanted to protect the tax breaks and the Republicans who want to stop any kind of climate action was resolved in favor of the latter. “The legislation,” Politico writes, “would now enact even steeper restrictions on Inflation Reduction Act tax incentives, including quicker phase downs of technology neutral production and investment credits. Nuclear energy, however, emerged a big winner in the negotiations.” 

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. Keep on sending those in if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.