Good morning. It's October 23rd. It's another properly bright and chilly October morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

We may or may not have some special podcast guests today in the form of the dudes upstairs who are doing some really banging-intensive construction work and talking loudly to each other about it. Also, the heat pipes are on some real gurgling action today, so, apologies for any unusually complicated soundscape in the background. 

The president has killed again, twice. Donald Trump has now expanded his military campaign of unprovoked attacks on unarmed vessels into the Pacific Ocean from the Caribbean. The New York Times reporters continue to stay on top of the story as the newspaper's editors remain hopelessly detached. The headline that someone slapped on this morning's news of the latest killing is, U.S. strikes second boat in Pacific as anti-drug operation expands. And the lead described the latest target as a vessel suspected of smuggling drugs as part of a summary attributed to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. But the story does go on to reiterate that this is all driven by falsehoods, nonsense, and blatant illegality. “Mr. Trump,” the Times writes, “falsely asserted that each such destroyed boat saves 25,000 American lives. In reality, about 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, but most of those deaths are caused by fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico. South America produces cocaine.” The story goes on to note that “The administration has also said that intelligence backs its accusations of the passengers identities and what they were doing, but it has not offered evidence. A broad range of outside experts,” the Times continues, “in laws governing the use of armed force have said the campaign is illegal because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians, even criminal suspects who are not directly participating in hostilities.” And later on, the story notes that “when one attack left survivors and the US sent one of the survivors to Ecuador, where he'd come from, prosecutors in Ecuador declined to charge that man and instead released him on the grounds that there was no accusation he had committed a crime inside Ecuadorian territory.” 

Disgraced New York Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of his reelection campaign, has now endorsed disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, whom he had previously called a snake and a liar, as the small but agitated band of plutocrats who refused to Cuomo's overwhelming defeat to Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary, keep casting about for ways to somehow possibly drag his independent fallback campaign to victory in the general election. Cuomo was in another debate last night with Mamdani and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, who continues to reject pressure to drop out of the race. Cuomo awkwardly weathered a recounting by Mamdani of his extensive and well-documented sexual harassment allegations, sticking to his current position that subsequent litigation, racking up tens of millions of dollars of expenses in public money, had disproven all 13 claims from all the individual women who said he'd victimized them. And then he showed up courtside in Madison Square Garden, in the middle of the New York Knicks game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, in a seat next to Adams. 

I also tried to clear away the experience of watching the debate by having a look at the Knicks game and watch them put away the Cavaliers down the stretch. Then I watched the first quarter of the Spurs Mavericks game in which Victor Wembanyama scored 11 points so easily that it was not at all a surprise to wake up and learned he'd ended up with 40 to lead the Spurs to a blowout victory. The Mavericks rookie Cooper Flag, the number one draft pick, didn't get his first NBA bucket till after I'd gone to bed, but he got 10 points and 10 rebounds and looked like he knew what he was doing. The announcers hailed Anthony Davis as looking like he could have an all NBA season if he doesn't get hurt, which is true, in the sense that I also could have an all NBA season this year, if I were suddenly to occupy a body with a different set of limits than the well-established ones my actual body has, but good for Anthony Davis. And overall, at breakfast, I was feeling pretty good about this state of pro basketball, after which I saw that the FBI announced it was indicting Portland Trailblazers head coach Chauncey Billups and the Miami Heat player Terry Rozier on gambling charges. Billups is accused of participating in a mafia-affiliated poker operation.

ABC News writes “the poker games, which included basketball players, to lend credibility to their authenticity, were allegedly rigged in favor of those running the games, using advanced technology such as rigged shuffling machines and even x-ray technology to read cards facing down on the table. U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr. said. Games were organized beginning in 2019 in the Hamptons, Manhattan, Las Vegas and Miami. Officials said the profits from the alleged poker scheme ran up to seven million dollars and counting. Officials said. The investigation took place across two years, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. The Rozier case, which ABC describes officials as describing as overlapping, is more directly entangled with professional sports' decision to embrace and collaborate with the rapid expansion of legalized sports betting. The FBI accuses Rozier and former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones of feeding inside information to sports bettors. The indictment,” ABC writes, “includes an example from March 23rd, 2023, when Rozier, then playing for the Charlotte Hornets, allegedly tipped off a co-defendant that he planned to leave the game early with a purported injury, sources said. He left the game nine minutes in. A co-defendant and others allegedly placed $200,000 in wagers, betting Rozier would underperform his statistics.” The proliferation of prop bets in particular, where players no longer need to recruit teammates into point-shaving or game-throwing schemes, but can simply tank their own statistics to benefit people who've been betting on their individual performance, all but guaranteed that these kinds of scandals would keep showing up. That said, all these allegations are being presented ultimately by FBI Director Kash Patel. So there's more than one side of this that seems ethically compromised. 

And speaking of wholesale corruption, the Wall Street Journal has broken the news that Donald Trump has pardoned the cryptocurrency exchange operator and convicted money launderer Changpeng Zhao. Following the story says “months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family's own crypto company. Zhao's company, Binance, also pleaded guilty to money laundering violations. The Justice Department,” the Journal writes, “imposed a record $4.3 billion fine and burdensome oversight on Binance, which the department said had become a colossal money laundering hub through which sanctioned groups and criminal organizations laundered billions of dollars in illicit funds. Binance has also supported the Trump family's World Liberty financial venture. Binance,” the Journal writes, “has been one of the main drivers of the growth of World Liberty's dollar pegged cryptocurrency called USD1. It delivered World Liberty's first big break this spring when it accepted a $2 billion investment from an outside investor paid in USD1. Binance has also incentivized trading in USD1 across platforms and controls.” 

Wow, that's a lot of new-news this morning. We didn't even get to the part where the Cuomo campaign posted an AI slop video attacking Mamdani with gutter racist imagery or the NBC News story about how ICE recruits, in addition to struggling with an already lowered physical fitness standard, are having trouble passing an open book test about the laws and rights involved in searches and seizures, but let's get to the front of this morning's New York Times while we still can. 

The lead news spot is “Elevating 2020 Deniers, Trump Fuels 2026 Fears / Backers of False Election Claims Get Power and Could Erode Security Measures.” The lead describes how a gathering of state election officials got on a conference call about security for the midterms with the Homeland Security's election integrity point person, Heather Honey, who the Times writes, “used portions of the meeting to echo rhetoric that has infused the right-wing election activist movement that emerged since President Trump falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud, according to five people with knowledge of the call.” 

On the left-hand side of the page, under a great big photo of people having a bonfire on King William Island in Canada, promoting a story inside the paper about how global warming is opening up the Northwest Passage, is the Times's latest attempt to grapple with Donald Trump's now wholesale demolition project of the White House's East Wing without seeming to be unsophisticatedly alarmed by it. The headline is “Trump Razing The East Wing Despite Pledge.” That “despite pledge” would be the news angle if the Times weren't so committed to seeming knowing and jaded. “As roaring machinery tore down one side of the White House” Luke Broadwater writes, “President Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that he was having the entire East Wing demolished to make room for his 90,000 square foot ballroom, a striking expansion of a project that is remaking the profile of one of the nation's most iconic buildings.” 

“Acknowledged” there, also points at what the news is, but does it sideways. “Mr. Trump was unsentimental as news of the demolition spread.” Again, the fact that the “news of the demolition” is spreading, is a glancing way of talking about what the story is here. “’It was never thought of as being much,’ he said, of the East Wing, which was home to the First Lady's office and spaces used for ceremonial purposes. ‘It was a very small building.’ The process of tearing down the East Wing,” the story continues, “was expected to be completed as soon as this weekend, two senior administration officials said, as Mr. Trump moved rapidly to carry out a passion project that he said was necessary to host state dinners and other events. But,” the story then says, “the previously unannounced decision to demolish the East Wing was at odds with Mr. Trump's previous statements about the project.” What the Times means here is that the president just set about tearing down a huge chunk of the White House all on his own with no public consultation after having explicitly said that he was not going to do that, which is a self-evidently shocking scandal as long as you are not part of the New York Times' political coverage operation. But if you are, part of the New York Times' political coverage operation, your job, as you understand it, requires you to follow up the news that the president lied about his plans to reduce the East Wing to rubble, that that action “underscored his intention to blast through the sensibilities of many in Washington to continue putting a lasting imprint on the White House.” Look, when a bold man of action takes a bold action, it would be unsophisticated to get all worked up about it.

Next to that, speaking of the president's fearless willingness to blast through the sensibilities of people in various places, there is a picture of masked agents in tactical vests in Manhattan, referring the reader to page A17, for coverage of Tuesday's raid on Canal Street and of the protest and response. 

And on the right-hand side of the bottom of the page, with a little picture of a Roombot-ish robot above the fold, and headline below the fold, it's “Amazon wants robots to take 600,000 jobs. Interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by the New York Times,” the story says “reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift, replacing more than half a million jobs with robots. Amazon's U.S. workforce,” the Times writes, “has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon's automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs, and delivers to its customers.” Later on, the story says, “Amazon is so convinced this automated future is around the corner that it has started developing plans to mitigate the fallout in communities that may lose jobs. Documents show the company has considered building an image as a good corporate citizen through greater participation in community events such as parades and Toys for Tots. The documents contemplate avoiding terms like automation and AI when discussing robotics, and instead using terms like advanced technology or replacing the word robot with “cobot,” which implies collaboration with humans. Amazon said in a statement that the documents viewed by the Times were incomplete and did not represent the company's overall hiring strategy. Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said the documents reflected the viewpoint of one group inside the company and noted that Amazon planned to hire 250,000 people for the coming holiday season, though the company declined to say how many of those roles would be permanent.” 

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. Don't trip over any cobots out there. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow. Cobots. Good grief.