Good morning. It is August 29th. It's another gorgeous morning in New York City. Keep those windows open and the fresh air flowing to welcome the too early onset of Labor Day weekend. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

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. 

And in another feat of historical revisionism, this one, revisionism to get back to a previous act of revisionism, an army spokesperson announced that a portrait of Robert E. Lee dressed in his Confederate uniform with an enslaved person leading his horse in the background is supposed to be rehung in the library of the U.S. Military Academy in direct violation of a 2022 declaration from a constitutionally legislated commission that West Point stopped displaying items that commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy. The double degree of revisionism comes from the fact that the heroic portrait of Lee was not commissioned by his contemporaries in some sort of tribute to the underlying character of a man who happened to be on the wrong side of mass carnage for a treacherous and immoral cause, but was installed in 1952 as part of the backlash to the integration of the army and the increasing challenges to Jim Crow. 

And speaking of armed forces policy and turncoats, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, whose performance this year has included defending the Trump budget's Medicaid cuts by telling an audience “we are all going to die” and abandoning her previously career-defining position as a leading opponent of sexual abuse in the military to throw her support behind the nomination of accused rapist Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense, has told confidants, CBS News reports, she plans to reveal next week that she won't seek reelection in 2026. Earlier this week, Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the Iowa Senate in a special election where a district Donald Trump won by 11 points in 2024, swung 22 points the other way for an easy Democratic victory. CBS writes that according to one of its sources, “Ernst has told people close to her that she intended to serve only two terms. She has accomplished what she set out to do and intends to head to the private sector.” If that were true, that would mean that her choice to support Hegseth was not a matter of political expediency, but read literally, something that she set out to do. Although it's also possible that she turned against what were supposed to be her most important values to support a grossly unqualified Trump nominee because she saw going against Trump as physically dangerous or maybe just inimical to her private sector ambitions. 

The New York Times is reporting that Donald Trump's personal attorney turned Justice Department hatchet man, turned confirmed federal judge, Emil Bove, has apparently not actually bothered with that last bit of turning. The Times writes, “Emil Bove III, a senior Trump administration official, was narrowly confirmed last month to serve as an appeals court judge, brushing past a bitter confirmation fight despite concerns that he would carry out the president's directives while on the federal bench. Still,” the Times goes on, “Mr. Bove has continued to work at the Justice Department, appearing just last week at a department event to celebrate the crime-fighting takeover of the Washington police,” ahem, “according to video of the gathering. It was just one instance of Mr. Bove’s presence at the department, where he has also attended meetings, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the department's inner working.”

In other things that won't go away, COVID is having a vigorous end of summer. A Catholic school in Kansas City, Kansas, has already shut down to try to ride out a COVID outbreak there. But if you'd like to try to not catch COVID, the New York Times is reporting that it's going to be harder than usual to get a vaccination. The Times writes, “CVS and Walgreens, the country's two largest pharmacy chains, are for now clamping down on offering COVID vaccines in more than a dozen states, even to people who meet newly restricted criteria from the Food and Drug Administration.” The Times writes, “legal experts said that federal decisions were creating an extremely difficult situation for pharmacies to navigate. The biggest problem is that in some states, the law prohibits pharmacists from administering vaccines that are not recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel. The panel has not recommended this round of vaccinations yet. And” the Times writes, “as of this Thursday, the panel was not scheduled to meet for another three weeks. And after a slew of high level resignations at the CDC, Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate's Health Committee, has called for the meeting to be indefinitely postponed.” 

For whatever reason, the Indignity Morning Podcast's physical copy of the New York Times did not show up on the stoop this morning. But in the online facsimile of the front of the print edition, the lead news column is “KENNEDY INSISTED
C.D.C. CHIEF AGREE TO VACCINE POLICY / REFUSAL RISKED FIRING / Standoff on Leadership Paralyzes an Agency Already in Tumult.” 

“Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” the Times writes, “summoned Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to his office in Washington earlier this week to deliver an ultimatum. She needed to fire career agency officials and commit to backing his advisors if they recommended restricting access to proven vaccines or risk being fired herself, according to people familiar with the events. Dr. Monarez’s refusal to do so led to an extraordinary standoff on Thursday that paralyzed the nation's health agency, which is still reeling from mass layoffs and a shooting this month that killed a police officer and terrified employees.” 

In the next column over, the story is, “U.S. Is Taking A Hard Look At Transplants / Reports of Lapses in Organ Donor Safety.” 

“The federal government,” the Times writes, “is cracking down on the US organ transplant system, investigating donation groups accused of safety lapses and overhauling policies meant to protect donors and recipients. The efforts,” the Times Rights, “come after congressional scrutiny and reporting in the New York Times, revealed troubling problems in the system, including at organ procurement organizations, the nonprofit groups in each state that arrange transplants. A federal investigation recently found that the organization in Kentucky had ignored signs of growing alertness in critically ill patients being prepared for organ donation.” Here is a case in which the New York Times focused its repertorial attention and its news space on a question of medical care and is now, albeit through the evasive journalistic use of the word “after,” communicating to its readers that those stories helped play a role in changing public policy. This is, as the Indignity audience is probably aware, the direct opposite of its position on the question of the relationship between its extensive coverage raising questions about youth trans care, and the wave of restrictions and outright bans on trans care that followed.

There, the newspaper couldn't possibly bear any responsibility for what might have appeared, to the unsophisticated reader, to be the consequences of its actions. 

Next to that, across the top of the front page, is a picture of a woman standing with her arm around a child in a street strewn with debris in Kiev. “An Hourslong Assault on Kyiv” is the caption. “An overnight barrage of Russian missiles and drones killed at least 18 people in Ukraine's capital, including four children.” 

Below that is a story about how the United Arab Emirates ended up detaining an Egyptian dissident after he was apprehended by Lebanese security forces. “His case,” the Times writes, “appears to be the first in which a broad Emirati law countering rumors and cyber crimes was applied beyond the country's borders.” His infraction was apparently criticizing the Emirati regime, a regime he again did not live under, in online videos. The headline notes, and the story amplifies, the fact that the UAE, the country asserting the power to extradite foreign nationals for being critical of it, is a United States ally.” 

Next to that the headline is “Got $1 Million? New York State May Need You.” The words “may” and “need” are both doing a lot of work there, the story begins, “The rate at which New York state has been adding millionaires to its population in recent years has fallen below that of other large states, potentially costing the state billions in unrealized tax revenue, according to a new report from a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group. At the same time, California, Florida and Texas had large increases in the number of people with annual incomes of at least one million dollars residing in their states, all adding them at a faster rate than New York did from 2010 to 2022. The millionaire population in New York nearly doubled over that same time period,” the Times writes, “but it more than tripled in those other states.” That would be a call then for the millionaire population of New York to increase even more disproportionately relative to the overall population increase than its current disproportionate increase. “The report,” the Times continues, “published on Thursday by the Citizens Budget Commission, comes at a time when the topic of millionaires in New York City, the taxes they pay, and broader concerns about income, inequality, and affordability have been the most prominent themes in the race for mayor. ‘We have a debate about affordability, but we need to raise more revenue,’ said Andrew Ryan, the president of the Citizens' Budget Commission. ‘And we can raise even more revenue if we have even more millionaires.’” The story goes on to say “Mr. Ryan said the timing of the report's release, about nine weeks before election day, had not been influenced by politics or any campaign. The group's trustees and its executive committee include officials from some of the largest corporations in the city. He said the commission has tracked the composition of New York's earners and the state's competitiveness for decades. But” the Times writes, “the group's arguments that New York needs more millionaires and that any increase in personal income taxes could drive them away mirror positions held by two candidates, Mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo, and are in opposition to the platform of Zoran Mamdani, a state assemblyman, and the Democratic nominee, Mr. Mamdani proposed a new 2 % tax on income greater than $1 million.” Well, even the New York Times is going to raise an eyebrow at the idea that that particular line of analysis at this particular moment is nonpartisan, especially given that the conclusions in no way follow from the data at hand. You can, after all, also increase how much revenue you get from millionaires by collecting more revenue from the millionaires you have. And the Times goes to a different nonprofit for a little more information on that. “Emily Eisner, the chief economist at the nonpartisan Fiscal Policy Institute, said that the country's distribution of millionaires was not a zero-sum game in which population shifts in other states was detrimental to New York state.” Should have been “were” detrimental.  “‘Over the past five years, she noted, New York state consistently collected more tax revenue than projected, driven by high wage growth among top earners.’ Also, Ms. Eisner said the latest migration trends showed that millionaires were not leaving New York City and that, according to her research, they do not move in response to tax increases. ‘Middle and upper middle class families, those in the $200,000 to $300,000 income range, are departing at the fastest rate,’ she said.”

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 sending those along if you are able. Have an enjoyable, too-soon holiday weekend and a happy Labor Day or Labour Day, if you're in Canada. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Tuesday.