Good morning. It is October 8. It is a rainy morning in New York City. The words “breezy, rain at times” appear on soggy paper in the top corner of the bagless copy of The New York Times that arrived this morning, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host. Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. On the Internet this morning, the news stories are grim and alarming. The Associated Press has the headline, “Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar.” The story begins with a two year old boy starving to death in May in an internment camp, and goes on from there. The story describes people in the camps near the Thailand border, where the victims of the Myanmar government's elimination campaign against the Rohingya minority are trapped, scrounging desperately for food. The story also recounts “in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that killed more than 3,800 in March, the US sent three aid workers to Myanmar, all of whom received notices of their impending termination from the Trump administration while in the disaster zone.” Reuters, meanwhile, reporting off publicly observable facts this morning, has the headline “Trump calls for jailing Democratic leaders as troops prepare for Chicago deployment.” “US President Donald Trump on Wednesday,” Reuters writes, “called for jailing Chicago's mayor and the governor of Illinois, both Democrats as his administration prepared to deploy military troops to the streets of the third largest US city. Neither Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson nor Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has been accused of criminal wrongdoing, though, both have emerged as prominent opponents of Trump's immigration crackdown and deployment of National Guard troops into Democratic leaning cities. Trump's call to imprison the two elected officials comes as another high profile political rival, former FBI Director James Comey, was due to appear in court to face criminal charges that have been widely criticized as flimsy. Trump has frequently called for jailing his opponents since he first entered politics in 2015 but Comey is the first to face prosecution on his social media platform,” Reuters writes, “Trump accused Johnson and Pritzker of failing to protect immigration officers who have been operating in Chicago. ‘Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE officers. Governor Pritzker also,’ Trump wrote referring to US immigration and customs enforcement personnel.” It's pretty amazing what it all sounds like if you just write it up as straight news. And on the New York Times website, the top of the page is taken up by live news and related analysis. The breaking headline is “James Comey, longtime Trump target, pleads not guilty trial set for January 5.” Below that, it's “how Trump is using the Justice Department to target his enemies,” with a graphic alongside featuring headshots of the indicted Comey, plus New York Attorney General Letitia James and California Senator Adam Schiff, who are under investigation, and below that, images depicting other people or institutions that Trump has threatened with investigation, threats which might have sounded hollow before the Comey indictment was handed down by a brand new prosecutor, a Trump loyalist, installed in the job because he had fired the previous prosecutor for deeming that there was no case against Comey. So that's the tenor of the news in general, but the front of the morning New York Times seems to have been put together in the same spirit as the delivery operation that went and chucked an unprotected paper out into the Morning rain on the left hand side of the page. The story is that ice successfully hunted down an undocumented immigrant who had hidden his undocumented status. Ian Roberts, the Guyanan born, former Olympian superintendent of the Des Moines public schools. “Star educator kept a secret his citizenship, misleading biography, then arrest by ICE.” When Roberts was arrested, people responded with outrage and horror and assumed that ICE had captured the wrong person, but in fact, by their lights, they had the right target. “Roberts,” The Times reports, “had falsely claimed to be a US citizen, and had also falsely claimed some of his educational credentials,” and failed to mention what the Times calls “encounters with law enforcement that ICE has described, including an arrest in 2020 for weapon possession.” The Times writes that that seems to be a case where he was at LaGuardia airport when a gun was discovered during a routine check of his bag, leading to his arrest by Port Authority police officers. The Times writes “that all of this raised a fundamental question, How could someone the government says should be removed from the country have risen to lead the public school system of a large American city?” It does raise that question, but the question is rather complicated. After getting bachelor's and master's degrees in the United States on a student visa, he was turned down when he applied for permanent residency in 2001 and then he just went into education anyway. And the reason that he rose to the top appears to have been that he was really, really good at it, salvaging a failing school in Baltimore, then going to what the Times calls “a struggling high school in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington that began offering more advanced placement courses and vocational options while he was principal.” And the Times writes, “he spent about three years in the district office of St Louis public schools and worked at a charter school network, developing a reputation as a specialist in turning around underperforming urban public schools, one of the toughest jobs in education.” Should the people who supported him feel betrayed? Sure, might everyone be having a better time of it. If ICE were just doing something else? Seems likely. Next to that, the Times’s designated campus scold Anemona Hartocollis has a new headline to scandalize the readers. “Harvard Finds Skipping Class Part of Culture. Harvard University is one of the most difficult schools to gain admission to” She writes, “with the school turning away some 97% of applicants every year, but once they get in, many of its students skip class and fail to do the reading. According to the classroom social compact committee, a group of seven faculty members produced a report on Harvard's classroom culture that has been fueling debate since it was released in January.” January. It was released in January. It is now October. Here are some stories that are not on page A1 today, while the Times was staking out A1 for news of a 10 month old report on campus culture at Harvard, page A15 “Back pay for furloughed staff may be denied, Trump says.” That's a story about the government shutdown. The government is shut down right now, an ongoing story that did not rate any spot at all on the front of the Times. This particular story inside the paper at the bottom of the page is about how the President declared his intention to absolutely explicitly violate federal law to try to inflict more pain on the workers who are caught in the shutdown. Besides stuffing the story deep inside the paper, the Times also smothers it in euphemisms and evasions. Hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers,” the Times writes, “may not automatically receive back pay once the government reopens, President Trump signaled on Tuesday, prompting renewed fears that the administration might try to circumvent federal law and maximize the pain of the shutdown.” “Circumvent” is not a synonym for “break,” and break is what the President is talking about doing. “The President's comments,” the Times continues, “which echoed a draft memo that has circulated at the White House contradicted the administration's own guidance that furloughed employees would receive retroactive pay shortly after, Congress strikes a funding deal following the longest shutdown in history, a five week closure that began under Mr. Trump at the end of 2018, Congress adopted a law that guaranteed back pay for the millions of federal workers who often bear the financial brunt of funding lapses. That measure, known as the Government Employee Fair Treatment act, applied not only to that closure, but also future fiscal lapses, quelling a major source of uncertainty for federal workers caught in the political fray. Mr. Trump signed that measure into law in 2019, but his administration, six years later, now appears to have interpreted its guarantees much differently.” They're not “interpreting the guarantees differently.” They are declaring that they're not going to honor the guarantees. That's not an interpretation. That's an attempt to break the law. Also inside the paper, because it's less important than what a panel found in January about the study habits of Harvard students, on page A11, the headline is “By attacking, Bondi avoids hard queries about agency.” Here, the headline writers did a better job than the people writing the story, which begins “Attorney General Pam Bondi's approach on Tuesday to fielding hostile questions posed by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee about the perceived political weaponization of the Justice Department was simple and brutal. Don't answer just attack.” That's a more or less completely upside down way of saying that Pam Bondi refused to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, choosing to attack the senators instead. The Times writes “Ms Bondi attempted to cast more than four hours of stonewalling senatorial queries about decisions on her watch as an aggrieved defense of President Trump, herself and other administration appointees.” She wasn't attempting to cast something. She was stonewalling. You have to get four paragraphs in before the piece tells you one of the things she was stonewalling on, namely, if the White House had consulted Ms Bondi on the deployment of federal troops to Chicago. A little further down, it says “Senator Sheldon, Whitehouse Democrat of Rhode Island, asked her about the Justice Department's decision to drop an investigation into Tom Homan, the Trump administration's border czar, who was recorded in September 2024 accepting a bag with $50,000 in cash in an undercover FBI investigation. ‘What became of the $50,000,’ Mr. Whitehouse asked. Ms Bondi did not answer the question, and instead attacked Mr. Whitehouse by demanding to know why he once took campaign donations from Reid Hoffman, a democratic donor Republicans have linked to Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious sex trafficker. Later, Mr. Whitehouse said that he had scanned campaign finance records and determined that nobody by the name of Reid”— or Reed spelled within ei and an EE respectively— “Hoffman had ever contributed to his campaigns. ‘Attorney General Bondi made up nonsense to avoid answering whether the White House border czar returned the $50,000,’ he said in a statement.” Right, if the Attorney General was lying to the Senate in a hearing in the course of refusing to answer questions that seems like something that a newspaper could substitute with its own reporting, rather than leaving it as something for a senator to rebut in a statement. And again, here on the morning that James Comey is getting rung up on apparently bogus charges the Attorney General's actions yesterday in the hearing seem like pretty urgent news, but it just can't compete with telling the readers about those dreadful Harvard students. “When they do show up for class, Hartocollis wrote, “,they are focused on their devices and are reluctant to speak out. Sometimes it is because they are afraid of sharing ideas that others will disagree with. But often they have not read enough of the homework to make a meaningful contribution. The report concluded.” That's the January report. Anyway, if you're actually interested in learning something about what can go wrong with the culture of an elite college. After you get through all the stuff about what lazy, ideologically coddled deadbeats the students are, near the end of the very last column on the junk page, Hartocollis gets around to mentioning a whole other reason that students may be skipping courses. “Harvard,” she writes, “may be partly to blame for encouraging student absences with a policy that allows students to enroll in two classes that meet at the same time.” Elsewhere on page one in another, urgent matter. Kenneth P Vogel has an investigative report. “Biden’s Son Pursued Land Deal Near Embassy / Plan in Romania Used Ties Made During Vice Presidency. While his father, Joseph R Biden Jr, was vice president,” Vogel writes, “Hunter Biden began developing relationships that led to an audacious proposal to sell the land around the United States Embassy building in Romania to a group that included a Chinese company. Hunter Biden was involved in the proposed deal from multiple perspectives, creating what he privately acknowledged to an associate was an ethical quagmire, according to documents and for people with knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak about it.” Right? Okay, Hunter Biden did crooked, scummy deals seeking to enrich himself based on his father's position. But, it's 2025. The lead here, is “while his father was vice president,” a period which ended in 2017. That was when he began developing the relationships, when did he set about trying to use those relationships? After the jump, the story says “the land deal collapsed in 2017,” that comes right after the sentence “this article is adapted from the forthcoming book ‘Devil's advocates, the hidden story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden and the Washington insiders on the payrolls of corrupt foreign interests.’” The paragraph before that, says “Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings mostly came as he spiraled from addiction and self destructive behavior that exacerbated family and financial problems amid his grief over the illness and death of his older brother Beau.” Right. It's October 8, 2025. Foreign influence is bad. Hunter Biden did scuzzy things. Give Ken Vogel the bottom of the front of the Sunday paper to air out his book. Slapping a Hunter Biden scandal story, not even a new Hunter Biden scandal story, just a deep dive, above the fold, on a weekday, is just not newspapering. Heck, right below it stuck below the fold is a picture of Saul Zabar in front of the Zabars cheese counter, referring readers clear out of the A section to page B 12 to find his obituary. The man died at the age of 97, why make him take a back seat to Hunter Biden? 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 this along if you are able, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.