Good morning. It is March 4th. It's an overcast morning in New York. Yesterday, I jumped the gun on saying mildness was on the way, maybe from relief at having left the frozen streets of Montreal behind. But today it's supposed to warm up for real. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

New York City reportedly now has or had two cases of measles of its own with no additional information about who or where. Last year they were 14. So this isn't necessarily anything but the suddenly increased salience of regular conditions. 

The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision split by gender declared this morning that it's fine to dump raw sewage into the water or specifically that if the EPA wants to keep the water from getting too polluted with raw sewage, it needs to specify in advance what preventative steps the sewage dumpers should take rather than enforcing pollution regulations because factually the water is being polluted. This rollback of pollution controls is brought to you by the city and county of San Francisco, California. Good liberal jurisdictions blowing a hole in the environmental protection agency's abilities because they didn't want to have to manage their sewage outflow better. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is nose diving and energy prices in New England are spiking as begun the trade war has. Donald Trump's tariffs against importing goods from Mexico and Canada took effect today. So did a bonus tariff on Chinese goods on top of the previous Chinese tariffs. And so in turn did the retaliatory tariffs from Canada as China announced retaliatory tariffs of its own and Mexico prepared to make its counter move. China's finance ministry, the Wall Street Journal writes, “said the country is imposing an additional 15 % tariff on U.S. chicken, wheat, corn, and cotton products, and an additional 10 % tariff on sorghum, soybeans, pork, beef, seafood, fruits, vegetables, and dairy products.” Those tariffs are due to start March 10th. 

In other news, at the junction of politics and business, Bloomberg reports that Tesla's share of American electric vehicle sales appears to have dropped below 50% in the fourth quarter of 2024. That's before Musk delivered his Nazi salute and consumer protests and boycotts really took off. Still, even as Tesla's share price has been on a long slide, Elon Musk is more than $120 billion ahead of Mark Zuckerberg on Bloomberg's leaderboard of the world's wealthiest people. 

Senate Democrats showed their first organized signs of life yesterday maintaining full party discipline to vote against letting a bill banning transgender girls and women from school and college sports advance to a vote. It turns out the arbitrary and obstructive processes of the Senate can be used to do a good thing sometimes rather than entirely evil things. Still, the Senate needs to abolish the filibuster and the country needs to abolish the Senate. 

On the front of this morning's print edition of the New York Times from the doorstep, after the outer heavy stock glossy advertising rap with its message that TikTok is indispensable to small businesses has been removed, below the $4 retail price listing and it's accompanying tiny but suddenly significant “prices in Canada may be higher” text, the trade warfare gets the first two news columns on the right. 

“25% TARIFFS SET TO HIT MEXICANS AND CANADIANS.” Hang on, that's so bad. I can't even get through the rest of the headline stack. The tariffs are not hitting Mexicans and Canadians. They're hitting American consumers of Mexican and Canadian goods. The Dow Jones is not cliff diving because Wall Street is worried that there are rough times ahead for Mexicans and for Canadians. Just a totally backwards headline. Also starting with a numeral and a percentage sign looks terrible. Subhead, “another 10 % on China. US industry scramble as Trump says levies begin on Tuesday.” 

And in the adjoining column, the headline is “China's silence in trade feud conveys plenty. Beijing trying to grasp what Trump wants.” Good luck, Beijing. The story goes on to say “Mr. Trump is moving quickly to transform the U.S.-China trade relationship. The Chinese are moving much more cautiously and deliberately as they try to assess Mr. Trump and determine what it is he actually wants from China.” The story goes on to say the situation “underscores the quandary for foreign leaders in dealing with a president as unpredictable and unconventional as Mr. Trump, who is making substantial changes to trade terms with little advance notice or preparation.” 

“Unpredictable” doesn't really seem right, despite the shock, despite the shock among the wizards of Wall Street, tariff warfare, especially against China, was one of Donald Trump's clearest and most consistent messages throughout his campaign for the presidency. The man is obsessed with tariffs. The man holds forth on how he wants to restore the United States to the tariff-backed greatness of the… late 19th century. The problem for the Chinese and for everyone else in the world, including Americans, is that on this subject, Trump is eminently predictable. He's just predictably committed to a destructive policy built entirely on fantasy. 

Speaking of ironclad commitments to crank ideas, down below that, below the fold, “Alarm That Kennedy’s Stance On Measles Sounds Too Feeble / Outbreak Is Met With No Explicit Directive to Be Vaccinated.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Health and Human Services secretary has so far carried on his previous role as a measles promoter, in his new post, dragging his feet about explicitly telling people to get vaccinated in response to the West Texas measles outbreak. He did get around to sort of doing something. “On Sunday night,” the Times writes, “he edged closer in an opinion piece for Fox News. Mr. Kennedy,” the Times writes, “acknowledged that vaccines protect individual children from measles and urged parents to talk with their doctors to understand their options to get the MMR vaccine. The decision to vaccinate is a personal one, he added,” that was apparently enough to outrage his anti-vax followers or rather as seems to be the case with the entire political base of second-term Trumpism, the people he has been trying to follow.

And also on page one “Drones Define a Deadlier Phase of Ukraine’s War / Cheap, Easy to Build, and Inflicting About 70% of Casualties.” THE MACHINES may have to file a fuller dispatch about this one, But the news is utterly horrifying. Dirt cheap remote controlled killing machines have taken over the battlefield. “As the precarious relations between Ukraine and the Trump administration threaten future military aid,” the Times writes, “the kind of conventional weaponry that the Americans have spent billions of dollars providing Ukraine is declining in importance. Of the 31 highly sophisticated Abrams tanks that the United States provided Ukraine in 2023, 19 have been destroyed, disabled or captured with many incapacitated by drones, senior Ukrainian officials said. Nearly all of the others have been taken off the front lines, they added.” What if you could combine the ethics of an invulnerable and well-hidden sniper with the indiscriminate volume of cluster bombs? It sounds like basically everyone in the world may have the opportunity to find out. 

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 with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Please continue to send those along if you can. And if nothing unforeseen gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.