Good morning. It is October 31st. It is a hot Halloween in New York City. 

And two of the biggest festivals on the people watching calendar have arrived simultaneously, as today is both the final day of costume or outfit season, and it is the day the Yankee caps all disappear. That's right. Last night at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees jumped out to a five-nothing lead against the Los Angeles Dodgers, coughed it all up by allowing five unearned runs on a flurry of errors in the fifth inning, and then lost an ensuing duel of sacrifice flies, as the Dodgers claimed a 7-6 victory, and a lopsided World Series Championship, four games to one. Congratulations to the Dodgers, a tough defeat for the Yankees, who just ran into a better-funded, more comprehensively well-constructed team with superior star power. Victory goes to the strong, fellas.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the number two news story, right up high, has the headline, “Biden misstep delivers grist to Harris foes.” Five days before election day, the most important piece of campaign news that the New York Times wants to share with its readers is that yesterday, as the Times puts it, “Donald Trump sought to amplify a muddled remark from President Biden in which he appeared to call Mr. Trump's supporters ‘garbage.’” Why was the word “garbage” in play at all? You got to take the jump of the story to get to the context that Trump was desperately trying to slap back after three days of negative coverage of how the insult comedian he chose to open his Madison Square Garden rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. “Mr. Biden,” the Times writes down at the bottom of page A20, “tried to denounce that racist language in a video call with Hispanic supporters on Tuesday night. But he garbled his words, saying: ‘The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.’” And so the Trump campaign, as the Times notes, saw this as an opportunity to reboot the Hillary Clinton “deplorables” controversy. And as the Times did not note, major media outlets, like the New York Times, decided to cooperate. 

The top of the second column on page one is a more prominent placement than the Times gave to any of its coverage of the original Floating Island of Garbage remark, let alone the comedian's racist watermelon joke or the bigoted remarks by other rally participants. None of that was quite as momentous a development in the campaign as something that Joe Biden, not running for reelection, said or appeared to say or could be interpreted to have said by people desperate to manufacture a controversy on a Zoom call. 

Also less important in the Time's estimation than one word in a fractured sentence is the story we talked about when it broke yesterday morning. “Justices allow 1,600 voters to be purged in Virginia.” That's on page A17. 

Other campaign news less important than Joe Biden saying the word “garbage” and the Trump campaign feigning outrage over it is Kamala Harris's Tuesday rally, on the site of Donald Trump's January 6th insurrection speech on the ellipse, which made page A15, as fodder for a news analysis piece, “Harris aims to discredit Trump, but reach out to his voters. Her approach,” the Times writes, “amounts to a tacit admission of an inescapable political reality. Mr. Trump is not a fringe figure. The thunderous applause at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, not just for Mr. Trump, but for some of the darker acts that preceded him offered a vivid reminder that he has become the soul of the Republican Party. Win or lose next Tuesday, roughly half the nation has already rallied behind him.” That “roughly” is sure doing a lot of work. “Roughly” half the nation is not going to vote at all. And the entire Republican electoral strategy is built on the premise that their support and Trump's support is capped somewhere clearly below 50 % and the path to winning revolves around obstructing, discouraging, and disenfranchising as much of that non-Trump majority as possible. If you're going to talk about the thunderous applause at Madison Square Garden while discussing Trump's appeal as a problem for Kamala Harris, it seems worth reporting that the capacity of Madison Square Garden is 19,500, while Washingtonian Magazine reported that Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who conducts research for the Crowd Counting Consortium, said that a federal official told NBC that 40,000 people went through security screening to enter the ellipse, and another 20,000 were estimated in the overflow area by the Washington Monument. That gives a minimum turnout of 60,000. The Harris campaign claimed 75,000. And the crowd counting people say it's reasonable to pick a point in between at 67,500 or so. Nevertheless, in the Times's formulation, it is Harris who has to reckon with Trump's support and not the other way around. “In the final days of her campaign,” the Times writes, “Ms. Harris is trying to separate the man from his movement. Gone is the framing of Republicans as ‘extreme MAGA,’ the catchphrase attack adopted by Mr. Biden during the 2022 midterms. Instead, in ways big and small, Ms. Harris is extending an open hand to Republicans who may have voted for the former president in the past.” Does this framework require the Times to bring up Biden's semi-comment about garbage again? You bet it does. 

Facing that story on page A14, is another piece that didn't rate the front page. “Putting Trump's election lies into action, the rise of a movement ready to challenge the 2024 vote.” It's a full page story, drawing on leaked recordings from the Election Integrity Network. The group set up after Donald Trump's failed attempt to steal the 2020 election to clog up and undermine elections operations around the country in the hopes of pulling off a more successful steal in 2024. The group's members, the Times writes, “have huddled in private weekly meetings methodically laying the groundwork that could be used to contest a defeat of the former president. The New York Times,” the New York Times continues, “has obtained recordings of more than 400 of those meetings, over 400 hours of conversations, along with additional documents and training materials. It is a trove that provides an extraordinary behind the scenes look at how misinformation is used to manufacture a movement.” That sounds really interesting and important, but again, Joe Biden said one word and the Trump campaign declared that it had to be a scandal. And so you have to dig inside the paper to find these 400 hours of conversation among the people who want to rig the 2024 result. 

Still more non-front page campaign news shows up below the fold on page A20. News analysis piece, “What Muslim Ban? Trump Tries to Side Step Years of Islamophobia.” It's a piece about how after saying things like, “the Democrats have a plan to turn the Midwest into the Middle East, and praising what he called his famous travel ban on some Muslim countries,” as the Times describes it. Donald Trump is now trying to woo Muslim voters at the last minute to exploit people's unhappiness about the Biden-Harris administration's ongoing support of Israel's indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza, indiscriminate slaughter that Donald Trump himself is strongly in favor of. But putting the screws to Donald Trump over Donald Trump's own words cannot match the urgency and acute public interest of putting the screws to Kamala Harris over something Joe Biden sort of said. Got to put the grist in the grist mill. 

Back on page one, the lead story is “Musk expanding SpaceX into role for the military, spy satellite deals, US relying on him as it pours billions into a race with China. SpaceX, over the last year,” the Times reports, “started to move in a big way into the business of building military and spy satellites, an industry that has long been dominated by major contractors like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, as well as smaller players like York Space Systems.” This is, in the Times is phrasing, “generating a new wave of questions inside the federal government about the company's growing dominance as a military space contractor and Mr. Musk's extensive business operations in China and his relations with foreign government leaders, possibly including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.” His ketamine habit seems to be folded into the part where the Times says, “Mr. Musk is also unpredictable in a sector in which security is often perceived to be synonymous with predictability.” As always, the situation being described as a tricky one is in fact incredibly straightforward. Any country that took its national defense seriously would, as we've previously discussed, simply take SpaceX out of Elon Musk's hands and have the government run the government's business. 

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 ongoing pursuit of Podcasting Adequacy™ is sustained by the subscription dollars of you, our listeners, so please get a paid subscription if you can, and if all goes well, we'll talk again tomorrow.