Good morning. It's July 30th. It is cloudy again and humid again in New York City. The Aurora Borealis is making a comeback with another solar storm, though it's not expected to reach quite down here. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The Washington Post has a piece of slightly old but previously unreported William Calley, the army officer who was the only person to experience any legal consequences for the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968, died in hospice in April at the age of 80. For his role in the butchery, he served about three years, mostly in home confinement. Before he went to serve his country and become a mass murderer, the Post recounts him scuffling along through various kinds of low -grade failure, including a stint as a railroad scab. When replacing striking workers as a conductor, he, the Post writes, once let freight cars get loose and smash into a loading ramp. After having most of his original sentence of life at hard labor wiped out, he married into a family of jewelers and worked in the jewelry business, in enough peace and obscurity that it took three months for anyone to figure out that he died.

On the front of the New York Times this morning. The lead story is "Netanyahu vows severe reaction to rocket strike" after yesterday's lead story about diplomats frantically trying to tamp down the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon after the weekend's rocket strike against the Golan Heights. Today we have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doing his usual anti -tamping routine saying, "our response is coming and it will be severe."

On the jump page for that story, A5, there's a brief piece with the understated headline, "nine Israeli reservists hold an abuse inquiry" recounting how far -right Israelis, encouraged by Netanyahu's most extremist ministers, stormed a military base to express their outrage that the reservists would even be investigated for allegedly having sexually abused a prisoner. 

Back on page one, the print edition catches up with the Venezuelan election taking a more empirical tack than the online packaging of the story yesterday with "nation's doubt election result for Venezuela." Next to that, it's back to the Trump assassination attempt. 

"Gunman kept one step ahead of Secret Service." They've now pretty much filled in the timeline of what the shooter was doing that day and how the security at the rally was and wasn't responding. Today's big incremental gain in the coverage seems to be that the cops didn't just spot the future shooter lurking around looking weird, but one wrote in a text message, "I did see him with a rangefinder looking towards stage." Really, how could anyone have expected the Secret Service to keep up with such a careful and professional assassination plot? 

And in the left hand column at the top of the page, "Biden lays out plan to change Supreme Court. Term limits in a code of ethics face snags." Couldn't even get through the subhead before they started undermining it. "The proposal," the Times writes, before describing the contents of the proposal. "The proposal would require congressional approval and has little hope of gaining traction in a Republican -controlled House and a divided Senate." Wow, that makes it sound super pointless. Too bad there isn't any opportunity in the offing to change the composition of the House and the Senate. Maybe even for the express purpose of checking the power of the Supreme Court. You have to go 14 paragraphs into the story, past a smarmy quote from Leonard Leo, the man who was generously paid to craft the Supreme Court's current majority before you get to what the proposal actually is. In his remarks on Monday, the Times eventually writes, "Mr. Biden said a system of lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court gave a president undue influence for decades, and he endorsed 18 -year term limits for the justices. He said he supported a code of conduct that would require justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. He also proposed a constitutional amendment that would," the Times writes, "state that the Constitution does not confer to former presidents any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing." But, the Times says, "a constitutional amendment limiting that decision would be difficult to enact, requiring two -thirds vote in Congress or at a convention called for by two -thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three -fourths of the state legislatures." Right. That is how a constitutional amendment works. It is a heavy lift and a drastic step, which makes it seem like a pretty appropriate response to the Supreme Court's completely unhinged declaration that presidents enjoy absolute immunity. 

Right below the jump on that story, where you would have had to have gone to find out what the proposal was, there's an Adam Liptak column reflecting on just how bad the Trump immunity decision was. The device here, in a little bit of jiu -jitsu that isn't really gonna convince anyone who would need convincing, is nevertheless, or therefore, what some legal scholars are going with. Liptak compares the decision to Roe vs. Wade, which right -wingers in particular always accused of having manufactured legal principles out of thin air with no reference to the actual text of the Constitution. Surely now that their attention has been called to that inconsistency, they will change their position out of embarrassment and take it all back. That is the news.

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