Good morning. It is Friday, the 13th of September. The overnight humidity is supposed to be burning all the way off here in New York, but it doesn't feel like it's gotten there yet, and this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Machinists for Boeing went out on strike this morning in Washington state. The Washington Post reports that 96% of union members voted to reject Boeing's current contract offer and walk off the job. The company, whose ongoing failure to meet quality and safety standards left it open to criminal liability over the tendency of its 737 MAX jets to automatically crash themselves, could lose a billion dollars a week to the strike, according to the Washington Post. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story is that New York police commissioner Edward Caban resigned yesterday, saying that the federal investigation that led to his phone being seized last week was too much of a distraction for the police department. “NYPD boss out as inquiries roil allies of Adams” is the headline. The second sub headline says “commissioner not focused, lawyers say, but the target is unclear” as the Times is still stuck writing things like the resignation underscored the chaos swirling around the mayor's administration in lieu of having any printable information about which members of Mayor Eric Adams's administration are actually going to be charged with crimes and what those crimes might be. While attempting to say something, the Times did write, “an inquiry involving the city's top law enforcement official is rare and it casts doubt on Commissioner Caban's ability to supervise the department and make disciplinary decisions about his own force of 36 ,000 officers.” 

That last bit sounds good, but is simply not true. There is no doubt about how Caban was handling discipline. He got the job because the previous commissioner was forced out for having had the temerity to try to discipline officers. And Caban made sure that nothing like that would happen on his watch. Local news station NBC4 filled in some detail about what the departing commissioner's troubles might involve, airing an interview with a bar owner who said that Edward Caban's twin brother James, a former police officer himself, told him that he could help resolve the NYPD's investigation of recurring noise complaints against the bar in exchange for a $2,500 fee. 

Back on page one of the Times, Joe Biden is reportedly preparing to further thin-slice the rules of engagement or non-engagement between nuclear armed superpowers by permitting Ukraine, the Times writes, “to launch long-range Western weapons deep inside Russian territory as long as it doesn't use arms provided by the United States.” Instead, Ukraine would use British and French missiles. 

Next to that is a baffling headline choice. “Forecast easing for fires in West.” Does that mean that the wildfires that have been written up inside the paper lately are turning out not to be so bad? No, not at all. The subhead is “7 million acres burned, the most since 2018.” And the incremental update that the weather forecast is finally turning toward cooler conditions that might help firefighters get the multiple infernos under control doesn't come in until after the jump. 

Below that on the inside page is sort of the reverse treatment. “Storm brings harrowing night of howling winds and rising waters in Louisiana” is the headline. The story is that Hurricane Francine hit Louisiana as a category two storm but quickly subsided, leaving no reported fatalities. The flood waters were subsiding the next day, and the Times writes, “officials said the area appeared to have made it through Francine without significant damage.” 

Back on page one, there's a story about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis trying to use the power of his office or the powers he thinks he can grab by virtue of his office to undermine Florida's abortion rights referendum, using state funds to run commercials attacking the measure, and sending investigators to harass people who signed the petitions to put it on the ballot.

And speaking of creative applications of executive power, below that is the obituary of Alberto Fujimori, the transformative, corrupt and abusive former president of Peru, who ended up as the limited proof of concept for democracies locking up terrible leaders, as the Times wrote. “Mr. Fujimori was believed to be the world's first democratically elected former president to be found guilty of human rights violations in his own country.”

Not that it was an easy task to keep him in prison. He got a presidential pardon in 2017. Thanks to that president, the Times writes, “surviving an impeachment vote with the unexpected help of Mr. Fujimori's supporters in Congress, Peru's Supreme Court revoked that pardon. But then after he served four more years, the court itself sprang him at the end of last year, defying,” the Times wrote, “an order by an international court that said he should remain in prison.” That's all a lot more time than Donald Trump is ever going to serve.

Fujimori had such a nice long endgame that the byline on the obituary belongs to Sewell Chan, who left the New York Times five years ago for the LA Times, then moved on to the Texas Tribune, and is now starting as editor -in -chief of the Columbia Journalism Review. Time just flows differently on the obituary desk. 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. Our work is sustained by  subscription dollars and now online tips and donations from you the faithful readers. If you're able, please use those little buttons online to send us some funds, and if all goes well, we will talk again on Monday.