Good morning. It is March 11th. It is sunny and spring-like 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. 

Let's start with some good news while we have any to work with. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines and accused mass murderer, is reportedly on an airplane on his way to The Hague to face charges at the International Criminal Court after being arrested in the airport in Manila on returning from a trip to Hong Kong. 

Closer to home in strongman politics, President Donald Trump went on social media to announce that he's going to buy a Tesla today as a response to what he calls radical left lunatics trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla. Now that liberty-loving plutocrats are in control of the government, compulsory consumption is at the center of the agenda of those free markets. Trump's stunt seems to have given Tesla's free-falling share price a brief lift at the opening bell, but then the plunge resumed, wiping out those gains and dropping it back into the red. 

The Dow Jones, S &P 500, and NASDAQ are all also continuing their nosedives as the world of business and finance gradually catches on to the fact that the candidate it supported for president is a senile lunatic working with crazed ideologues to crash the economy as hard and as fast as he possibly can. 

To that end, Trump also went on social media to announce that he was escalating his unprovoked trade war with Canada, doubling the tariff on steel and aluminum to 50 % in response to Ontario raising its price for sending electricity across the border. 

In still more Trump news, the New York Times reported yesterday that Elizabeth Oyer, who was the pardon attorney for the Justice Department until she was fired in another department purge this past Friday, was dismissed. The Times writes, “a day after she refused to recommend that the actor Mel Gibson, a prominent supporter of President Trump's, should have his gun rights restored, according to her and others familiar with the situation.” The Times reports that she had been working on a process dear to the hearts of right-wing activists to restore gun rights to convicted criminals. And her office, the story says, “came up with an initial batch of 95 people she considered worthy of consideration, made up principally of people whose convictions were decades old, who had asked for the restriction to be lifted, and for whom Ms. Oyer's office thought the risk of recidivism was low.” That list got refined down to nine people, but as she was preparing the memo, she was ordered to add Mel Gibson to the list, with no background investigation or other vetting.

In 2011, the Times writes, “Mr. Gibson pleaded no contest in Los Angeles Superior Court to a misdemeanor charge of battering his former girlfriend as part of a deal with prosecutors that allowed him to avoid jail time.” That substantially undersells the brutality of the incident in which he broke his girlfriend's teeth while screaming threats and for some reason working a whole racist rant into it. The story adds, separately, “Ms. Oyer was vaguely aware of a highly publicized episode in 2006 when Mr. Gibson was caught being verbally abusive and anti-Semitic to a police officer who had stopped him on suspicion of driving under the influence and recorded at least some of the exchange.” In brief, Mel Gibson fits exactly the profile of the sort of unstable rage-filled person with poor impulse control for whom the law revoking gun ownership rights was written. Nevertheless, when she refused the Times writes, “that she got a call from a senior Justice Department official, who she said ‘essentially explained to me that Mel Gibson has a personal relationship with President Trump and that should be sufficient basis for me to make a recommendation and that I would be wise to make the recommendation.’” She still wouldn't and now she's unemployed. 

In yet another story about corrupt officials who love out-of-control violent goons. ProPublica is reporting about how Mayor Eric Adams of New York City maintained his very own squad of ultra-violent cops halfway off the books who among other things provided him, but not the legally mandated repository of police activity with his own direct video feed from their live cams as they rampaged around the city. 

Among the accomplishments of Adam's community response team, the story recounts that “An officer chasing unlicensed motorcyclists killed a rider after swerving into him, body-camera footage shows. A commander punched a driver and kicked him in the head, according to cellphone video posted to social media. Officers stopped a young man without apparent cause, according to the audit, and, when he complained, a supervisor slammed him into a car window.”

Two of the squad's leaders, Kaz Daughtry, John Chell, have histories of suspected or confirmed wrongdoing. Chell, ProPublica writes, “shot a young man in the back in 2008, killing him. He was not criminally charged and has denied any wrongdoing. Chell said he fired by accident, but a jury in a civil suit determined the shooting was intentional. He now holds the NYPD's top uniformed position where he oversees a wide swath of the department.” 

Daughtry, the story continues, “has been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have repeatedly engaged in misconduct, including for pointing a gun and threatening to kill a motorcyclist. Adams recently chose him to be deputy mayor for public safety, a role that will likely place him at the center of the city's response to the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Overall, more than half of the officers assigned to the CRT have been found to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of civilian complaint review board records, that compares with about 15 % of officers across the NYPD. More than 40 have three or more cases of substantiated misconduct. The supervisor who shoved a man into the car window had 28.” 

In this morning's New York Times, we're gonna start with what's not on the front page, namely Mahmoud Khalil. The Times's reporting staff is working hard on the story of how the pro-Palestinian campus activist from Columbia and lawful U.S. permanent resident is locked up in Louisiana after federal immigration officers seized him from his home in Manhattan and the administration, all the way up to President Trump, offered no civil or criminal justification for having seized him or for their follow-up threats to deport him beyond vaguely accusing him of sympathizing with Hamas.

The stories note all this. Immigration and civil rights lawyers, the Times writes, “said the Trump administration appeared to be targeting and retaliating against Mr. Kahlil for engaging in constitutionally protected speech.” The coverage also notes that President Trump said that this was the first arrest of many to come, and looked back at Trump's long running history of threatening to do exactly what he did, arrest and deport people for protesting against Israel's slaughter in Gaza, but somehow this complete demolition of the bedrock of the Bill of Rights by the president of the United States targeted against a campus protester in New York City only rated page A21 with the people who decide how to package the Times's news priorities on page one. 

The lead news column is “EROSION OF I.R.S. PUTS ITS MISSION IN GREATER PERIL / INSIDE TRUMP’S MOVES / Audits Stall as President
Tries to Make Agency More Political,” documenting a grave abuse of power that is going to affect everyone in the country. But all of those things would still be the case if the Times had decided to hold the story for one day, to put the extraordinary and urgent news about Khalil on the front instead. 

But for that matter, “Stocks drop amid talk of recession.” not only doesn’t make the front page or the A section at all, but is below the fold on the front of the B section right down at the bottom.

Back on page one. The next story over is “Keeping G.O.P. in Line With the Threat of Ruin / Trump Secures an Iron Grip on Congress.” Another story that could have held another day to make room for economic collapse or the abduction of a protester but the striking thing about it is how different this packaging is from the packaging of the online version, which boggled minds yesterday with the headline “Trump with more honey than vinegar cements an iron grip on Republicans.” In that one, the news writing habit of vacuously using cliches managed to betray the absurd incoherence of the ideas it was trying to unpersuasively jam together. The honey-vinegar-cement blend couldn't even survive its own sub-headline. “In his second term, President Trump is cultivating warm relationships with GOP lawmakers and using the implicit threat of ruining them if they stray to keep them in line behind his agenda.” What the story documents is that he has so thoroughly menaced his political party that no one dares oppose him on anything anymore. The honey and the vinegar are leftover metaphors from a time when Trump might have needed to appeal to or attract the flies who constitute the Republican Party in Congress. Now the only choice is him or the fly swatter. 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. Continue sending those if you can. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again tomorrow.