Good morning. It is June 30th. It's still hot in New York City, but staying out of the 90s, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

After a weekend of procedural moves and theatrics, the Senate is debating Donald Trump's budget bill. This morning, Senate Republicans chose to embrace a fake accounting maneuver in which the $3.8 trillion expense of extending Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts, past their expiration date, doesn't count as an expense since the tax cuts are in effect right now. This directly contradicts the accounting that was used to pass those tax cuts in the first place. Bloomberg writes, “the 2017 Trump tax cuts were not scored as permanent when they were enacted. The new bill,” the story continues, “also contains a series of temporary tax cuts, including a five-year increase in the limit on the state and local tax deduction that are kept short term in order to reduce the price tag.” Even within this package, then, they're using two diametrically opposed theories of how to measure the cost of tax cuts. 

Republican Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina jettisoned his own political career over the weekend, casting a procedural vote against the Republican package, and then after Donald Trump attacked him for it, announcing his retirement, followed by a Senate floor speech denouncing the Medicaid cuts in the bill, Politico writes the Tillis “said he could not vote for the Senate's bill because of provisions that he said would kick some 663,000 residents of his state off their health care plans. He called on the Senate GOP to jettison its artificial July 4th deadline and rewrite the bill. ‘I respect President Trump. I support the majority of his agenda. But I don't bow to anybody when the people of North Carolina are at risk and this puts them at risk,’ Tillis told reporters after he left the floor.” 

Another person turning against the budget package was Elon Musk, responding to the news that not only is the Senate trying to wipe out the clean energy tax credits currently in effect, but that the Republicans have inserted a new tax proposal. The Wall Street Journal writes, “it would apply to wind and solar projects completed after 2027, if they use a certain percentage of components from China, the industry's primary supplier of everything from critical minerals to batteries. Musk,” the Journal reports, “called the Senate's latest version of the bill, ‘utterly insane and destructive’ on social media. ‘It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future,’ said Musk, CEO of electric carmaker Tesla.” When he's right, he's right. 

Two firefighters were killed and another injured in an ambush on a mountain outside Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, yesterday after someone apparently started a brush fire to draw them and then opened fire. A 20-year-old suspect was found dead, shot either by law enforcement or by himself. The attack reportedly happened on the date 24 years ago that firefighters burned the buildings on the compound forfeited by the Aryan nations in a lawsuit as a training exercise.

The Washington Post has a story from Sudan about some of the individual specific deaths inflicted by the United States through the Trump administration's decision to shut down USAID. Behind the large estimated numbers, there is a three-year-old boy named Amran who died of a treatable chest infection because the United States cut off the supply of medicine. Likewise, a local doctor lists the preventable deaths of the post reports. A man with a scorpion bite, a woman with cholera and a diabetic who needed insulin. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the two top right columns are occupied by a NEWS ANALYSIS piece. Suspense builds in Iran as theocracy staggers. “Suspense Builds in Iran As Theocracy Staggers / Flicker of Hope for Freedoms After War,” dateline Dubai, starting with a look at an exiled Iranian dissident watching Israel's attacks on Iran, and, Roger Cohen writes, “torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country’s immense potential and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a cease-fire vied with each other.” This meditation on whether intervention by outside powers might be the thing that brings the Iranian theocracy to an end, does not bother explaining to the readers how exactly this theocracy arose, beyond saying that “Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini promised freedom when he came to power in the 1979 revolution that threw out a Shah seen as a pawn of the secular and decadent West.” But, where did the Iranian perception that the Shah was upon the secular and decadent West come from? Not a word. Was it the secular and decadent nature of the West that the Iranians objected to? Or is it just possible that they objected to the fact that the United States had overthrown the country's democratically elected president in 1953 to prevent the nationalization of the oil industry, and replace him with the Shah as dictatorial monarch. 

That might cast a different light on the question of whether joint U.S.-Israeli military operations directed against the current regime are likely to be received by the Iranian people as a positive and constructive development. The lead of the analysis piece specifically talks about the Iranian exiles' response to the bombing of Evin Prison, where she had been held in 2009. Inside the paper, on page A11, a story reports that the official death toll from that attack was 71. “Detainees, visiting relatives, and prison staff were among the dead,” the Times writes, “according to a statement from a spokesman for Iran's judiciary that was carried by the state news agency IRNA.” The Times writes, “among Evin's thousands of inmates are hundreds of political prisoners, including opposition politicians, activists, lawyers, journalists and students.” I guess you could say that it's an attack on a symbol of the regime's repression but functionally, doing that with airstrikes seems to just mean blowing up the regime's opponents.

The top left side of the page is a single column on the tax bill “Senate Tax Bill Could Lift Debt By $3.3 Trillion / Price Tag May Alienate G.O.P. Fiscal Hawks.”

That obviously was printed before they decided to pretend that cost didn't exist. 

The rest of the top of the page is a tall three-column picture from the Pride Parade in New York. “Millions packed the streets of Manhattan,” the caption says, “to celebrate amid the most hostile political climate for LGBTQ Americans in decades.” After the parade and after the print deadline, two teenagers were wounded by gunfire near the Stonewall Inn. The New York Post, for what that's worth, citing police sources, for what that is worth, says that a 16-year-old girl “opened fire at another group during street beef on Sheridan Square. She allegedly hit a 17-year-old bystander in the leg. Another person in the shooter's group,” the Post writes, “then fired at their rivals a second time, but mistakenly hit her pal who fired the first shot, striking her in the head, sources said.” 

Back on the front of the Times, on the right side, just above the fold, the headline is, “Sheik at Top of Soccer World is Stealthily Arming Warlords.” A piece about Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The Sheikh, “a younger brother to the powerful ruler of the United Arab Emirates,” the Times writes, “is recognized in the West as a collector of super yachts and racehorses,”—a bad hyphen break makes it actually say ‘supery-achts’ and racehorses—“and is perhaps best known as the owner of Manchester City, the hugely successful English soccer team. Last year, his team in New York won approval to build a $780 million soccer stadium in Queens, the first in the city. Yet,” the story continues, “there he was in February, 2023, openly entertaining a notorious commander from the deserts of Western Sudan, someone who had seized power in a coup, built a fortune on illicit gold, and was accused of widespread atrocities.” That's Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces.

“A flood of evidence,” the Times writes, “has emerged of massacres, mass rape, and genocide by General Hamdan's forces. The Emiratis deny arming any side in the war, but the United States has intercepted regular phone calls between General Hamdan and the leaders of the Emirates, including Sheikh Mansour. The intelligence,” the Times writes, “helped American officials conclude that the unassuming Emirati royal has played a central role in the effort to arm General Hamdan's forces, inflaming a devastating conflict that has led to famine and the world's biggest humanitarian crisis. 

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. 

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