Good morning. It is April 17th. It is a brilliant sunny 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. 

A federal district court judge in Virginia ruled this morning in a federal antitrust suit that Google is an illegal monopolist in online advertising. The judge found MSNBC writes, “that Google unlawfully monopolized markets for publisher ad servers and the market for ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers.” She did rule that antitrust enforcers, the article continues, “failed to show the company had a monopoly in advertiser ad networks. The story goes on to say “Google will now face the possibility of two different US courts ordering it to sell assets or change its business practices. A judge in Washington will hold a trial next week on the DOJ's request to make Google sell its Chrome browser and take other measures to end its dominance in online search.” That story was delivered to me through a Google News search carried out in the Google Chrome browser. 

President Donald Trump put up a social media post this morning attacking Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who had said yesterday that the Fed was reluctant to make any moves cutting interest rates, given the risks of inflation and disrupted production created by Trump's tariff war. Powell, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “is always too late and wrong.” All caps on that last part. “Oil prices are down. Groceries, even eggs,” exclamation point, “are down. And the USA is getting,” all caps, “rich on tariffs.” He concluded Powell's termination cannot come fast enough. At least he's still describing removing the Fed chair as something that someone needs to do rather than asserting, contrary to law, that he himself is actually doing it.

The front of this morning's print edition of the New York Times reverses the usual layout, putting a photograph at top right, of the wife and baby daughter of a Venezuelan man, who was among those abducted by US immigration forces and sent to extrajudicial confinement in a Salvadoran maximum security prison. The picture goes with a special wide column feature treatment on a five byline story with which the Times puts the official stamp of its reporting on the fact that the administration's roundup of so-called violent gang members was nothing of the sort. “The Trump administration,” the Times writes, “claims that all of the 238 Venezuelan men now imprisoned in El Salvador are members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang born in Venezuela. Their expulsion, the administration argues, is part of its plan to deport the worst migrant offenders. The Times investigation,” the Times writes, “found little evidence of any criminal background or any association with the gang for most of the men. In fact, the prosecutors, law enforcement officials, court documents and media reports that the Times uncovered or spoke to in multiple countries suggested that only a few of the detainees might have had any connection to Tren de Aragua.” Seeking to provide a fuller picture of who was imprisoned, a team of Times reporters and researchers ran the 238 names through three US public records databases, checked backgrounds in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, scoured court documents and news articles, spoke to dozens of family members, and interviewed experts on Tren de Aragua. They found 32 % of the men connected to serious crimes. Another two dozen accused or convicted of infraction, such as, the Times writes, “trespassing, speeding in a school zone, and driving an improperly registered vehicle.” But for the overwhelming majority of the men, the only legal problems that the Times could find were the legal problems connected to their immigration status. The story also goes into the Alien Enemy Validation Guide that the US used to decide people were gang members. Well, it talks about how that guide scores people as potential gang members for wearing clothing associated with the gang, but it does not drill quite deep enough to get to the fact that clothing associated with the gang includes Chicago Bulls merchandise, such as a number 23 Michael Jordan jersey. The sign that someone is a gang member is that they are wearing what might be the most popular sports jersey on the planet. 

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen flew to El Salvador yesterday to try to see Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident whom the Trump administration admitted it had wrongfully sent to the prison, That is wrongfully above and beyond the basic illegality of the whole project and whom the administration is currently refusing to return in defiance of court rulings all the way up to the Supreme Court. Van Hollen's fact-finding mission is on page A8 of the Times. He did not get to see Abrego Garcia. He did meet with the vice president of El Salvador. After his meeting, the Times writes, “Mr. Van Hollen told reporters that the explanation the vice president provided for continuing to keep Mr. Abrego Garcia in detention in the absence of a criminal charge against him was that the Trump administration was paying El Salvador to do so. The Trump administration has professed powerlessness to influence El Salvador to release Abrego Garcia. And earlier in the week, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele went to the Oval Office, where, as the Times writes, “the leaders appeared side by side with Mr. Bukele saying he had no intention of releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia and Mr. Trump saying he was powerless to seek his return.” Despite that accurate rendering of the inherently nonsensical position the two leaders are staking out, Van Hollen's visit did allow the Times to retreat into vacuous transcription in the name of objectivity. “The Trump administration,” the Times writes, “has accused Mr. Abrego Garcia of being a member of the dangerous transnational gang, MS-13. Mr. Van Hollen portrayed him instead as an innocent family man who was illegally ‘abducted,’”—in quotes—“from the streets of Maryland in a miscarriage of justice, and bluntly accused the Trump administration of ‘lying,’”—in quotes—“to justify its mistakes in deporting him.” But the government's claim that Rodrigo Garcia is a member of MS-13 or even a top member, as Attorney General Pam Bondi felt entitled to say into TV cameras yesterday, is accompanied by no evidence. They keep repeating and escalating the claims while attaching nothing beyond a single hearsay police report filed by a discredited cop accusing Abrego Garcia of gang activity in a place he'd never been. They are quite self-evidently lying. And even within the most scrupulously deferential news writing rules of the Times, they can be safely objectively described as making those accusations without evidence. But instead, the Times stepped back and chose to treat this as an argument between a Democrat and the Republican administration. 

Back on page one, at the top of the page, the second column from the right is “Judge Warns White House On Contempt / A Threat to Investigate Deportation Flights.” That's James Boasberg's ruling that we talked about yesterday, that he had probable cause to investigate the Trump administration for criminal contempt for its having flown prisoners to El Salvador after he'd specifically ordered them not to. 

Next to that in the leftmost column is a story about how the Trump administration is trying to eliminate all the safety regulations that govern everyday existence in America. “BEHIND THE RUSH
TO DISCARD RULES AND RESHAPE LIFE / TRUMP’S NEXT BIG PLAN / A Target on Regulations for Food, Work Safety, Health and Travel.”

“At the Department of Health and Human Services,” the Times writes, “Trump administration officials want to reverse a regulation that has required nursing homes to have more medical staff on duty. At the Mine Safety and Health Administration, powerful lobbying groups have asked the administration to eliminate a rule to protect miners from inhaling the dust of crystalline silica, a mineral that is used in concrete, smartphones, and cat litter, but that can be lethal in the lungs. And at the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates radio and television broadcasting and satellite communications, President Trump's appointees published a seemingly exuberant notice asking for suggestions on which rules to get rid of titled, DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.” All caps on those. The Times continues, “across the more than 400 federal agencies that regulate almost every aspect of American life, from flying in airplanes to processing poultry, Mr. Trump's appointees are working with the Department of Government Efficiency, the Cost-Cutting Initiative headed by Elon Musk and also called DOGE, to begin a new phase in their quest to dismantle much of the federal government, deregulation on a mass scale.” All of this is, in addition to being incredibly harmful, lawless, or as the Times puts it, “rests on a set of novel legal strategies in which the administration intends to simply repeal or just stop enforcing regulations that have historically taken years to undo, according to people familiar with the plans. The White House theory,” the Times continues, “relies on Supreme Court decisions, some recent and at least one from the 1980s, that they believe give them the basis for far reaching change.” This is the work of project 2025 architect Russell Vought, now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, doing what he said he was going to do if Trump got elected again, but, which the campaign press decided not to harp on, after Trump perfunctorily denied that the plan was the plan.

Among the changes the Times mentions are speeding up meat processing lines, relaxing chemical pollution limits, cutting eligibility for sick leave and overtime, and restoring predatory hidden fees to two-event tickets and hotel reservations. Just what the people wanted. 

Relatedly, down at the bottom of page one, there's a picture of a big crowd in Folsom, California, above his story about the tens of thousands of people, adding up to hundreds of thousands of people, who keep turning out for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their Fighting Oligarchy tour across the West. The jump page for that story features two related pieces. One is “Protests and arrests bring chaos to Greene town Hall” about how in the course of a public session held by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, police officers, the Times wrote, “escorted at least six people from the room. According to a spokesman for the Akworth, Georgia Police Department, the story describes how two of those people were subdued with stun guns and three were arrested in all.” And next to that, the story is “Grassley audiences raucous with little patience for Senator.” 

“Angry constituents on Tuesday confronted Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, about President Trump's refusal to bring back a Salvadoran immigrant mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador. Story describes how “Grassley told the crowd that returning Abrego-Garcia was not a power of Congress, after which audience members noted that Mr. Grassley chairs the Judiciary Committee, which oversees immigration policy and judges, prompting the senator to stammer, then fall silent and wait for the shouting to die down before trying to respond.” Story goes on to say, “‘El Salvador is an independent country,’ Mr. Grassley said. The president of that country is not subject to our U.S. Supreme Court. The crowd practically erupted in jeers.”

 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 Socca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.