Good morning. It is September 26th. The morning is sunny and too warm 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. 

And blech, what a slurry of news we've got. Far from the most urgent development, but somehow maybe the most characteristic is the word delivered on social media by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth via an account that unlawfully labels him Secretary of War, that the Trump administration intends to preserve 20 medals of honor issued to soldiers who slaughtered Lakota Sioux in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Those medals had been under review. Hegseth claimed that a report upholding the medals in what he called the Battle of Wounded Knee was completed in October of 2024, but that the previous Defense Secretary, Austin, deferred doing anything about it because he wanted to be, in Hagseth's words, politically correct rather than historically correct. The soldier's place in our nation's history, he said, is no longer up for debate. The Army, the AP writes, killed an estimated 250 Native Americans, including women and children while attempting to disarm Native American fighters who had already surrendered at their camp. 

In other Pete Hegseth news, the secretary has reportedly issued a summons calling in generals and admirals from around the world for a sudden surprise meeting at the Quantico Marine Corps base in Virginia next week. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations General Assembly this morning that Israel rejects a two-state solution between Palestine and Israel, or at least he told the General Assembly chamber that, after the majority of representatives had walked out. According to Netanyahu, the audience for the speech also included everyone with a cell phone in Gaza who had the speech broadcast to their devices by Israeli intelligence. 

Donald Trump had a busy afternoon and evening yesterday. The president went on social media to announce the details of a new barrage of intended tariffs, including, Trump wrote, “a 25 % tariff on all heavy, big trucks” made in other parts of the world. The term heavy, big trucks, that's quotation mark, capital H, heavy, parenthesis, capital B, big, exclamation point, close parenthesis, capital T, trucks, close quotation mark.

There's also, Bloomberg writes, “a 30 percent levy on upholstered furniture and a 50 percent import fee on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, as well as what Trump said was a 100 percent tariff on branded or patented pharmaceuticals.” 

Trump also put out a memorandum to the secretaries of state, treasury and homeland security and the attorney general under the heading Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, in which he presented a litany of violent events or supposed violent events that included no right-wing political violence and declared it to be culmination of sophisticated organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. He called it a pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism which included common threads of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity, as well as extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. The memo calls for deploying a joint terrorism task force against these enemies and for using the Treasury and Justice Departments to punish participants, ordering the Internal Revenue Service Commissioner to take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism. 

And yesterday evening, the president's Department of Justice secured an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey after Trump forced out a federal prosecutor for declining to bring charges. The Comey news makes the second column of the front of this morning's New York Times. “A Grand Jury
Indicts Comey, A Trump Target / Charges Tied to Senate Testimony on Russia. A federal grand jury,” the Times writes, “on Thursday, indicted James B. Comey, the former FBI director, a culmination of President Trump's relentless demand to exact retribution against him for investigating his 2016 presidential campaign over possible ties to Russia. The grand jury indicted Mr. Comey on charges of making a false statement and obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 30th, 2020. The indictment by a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, came over the objections of career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who found insufficient evidence to support charges but were overruled by Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump defense lawyer handpicked by Mr. Trump to run the office a few days ago.” 

The jump for that story on page A17 is accompanied by two more thematically connected stories. “U.S. attorneys told to prepare investigation of Soros Group. A senior Justice Department official,” the Times writes, “has instructed more than a half dozen U.S. attorney's offices to draft plans to investigate a group funded by George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor whom President Trump has demanded be thrown in jail. The official's directive, a copy of which was viewed by the New York Times, goes as far as to list possible charges prosecutors could file from arson to material support of terrorism. The memo suggests department leaders are following orders from the president that specific people or groups be subject to criminal investigation, a major break from decades of past practice meant to insulate the Justice Department from political interference.” Yes, it would seem to suggest that. 

Also on the page, “Case on ex-CIA chief of a Russia inquiry stalls. Federal prosecutors are struggling to put together a criminal case against John O. Brennan, the former CIA director, over his agency's response to Russian election interference in 2016, according to senior administration officials. The development, the Times adds, is likely to anger President Trump and his Republican allies, who have long had Mr. Brennan, a persistent critic, in their crosshairs.” 

Picking up on news that the Times credits Axios with originally breaking, the story notes that there is more undermining the investigation than just the fact that it's ginned up by the president. “Senior administration officials,” the Times writes, “said on Wednesday that prosecutors believed they were making progress in the investigation of Mr. Brennan. But the decision last month by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to revoke the security clearances of current and former national security officials has deeply hampered the inquiry. The official said a number of the people stripped of their clearances were likely to be interviewed by Justice Department prosecutors over their involvement on the intelligence community assessment of Russian influence. At least three officials, all of whom worked at least indirectly on the assessment, lost their jobs after their clearances were revoked.” The story goes on to say “some administration officials said they believed that the officials whose clearances were revoked would be unlikely to cooperate with prosecutors. Others said they believed their credibility with juries might be impaired.” 

Back on the front page, the lead news column is “AMAZON WILL PAY
UP TO $2.5 BILLION TO END F.T.C. SUIT ACCUSED OF TRICKERY / One of Agency’s Largest Settlements Benefits Prime Customers. Amazon,” the Times writes, dateline “Seattle, agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion to settle claims that it tricked tens of millions of people into signing up for its prime membership program and then made it hard for customers to cancel when they wanted out. The settlement announced on Thursday came days into a jury trial that began in Seattle this week over the issue, which stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission in 2023.”

This appears to be one area in which President Trump's personal spite may coincide with the public interest, as the FTC has kept going after Amazon on actions initiated before Trump purged the commission of Democratic appointees. “The FTC case,” the Times story says, “centers on the idea of dark patterns, whether a website's design knowingly steers customers into subscriptions they don't really want or makes it too complicated for them to cancel. For example, it documented that when someone wanted to buy an item, Amazon showed a page with an orange button that blared, get free same day delivery that would enroll the customer in prime. If someone didn't want to enroll in prime, the only way to proceed with a purchase was to click a small text link that read, no thanks, I do not want free delivery.” 

The rest of the top of the front page is a picture of college students in hard hats and safety vests working on mockups of building interiors at Texas State Technical College in Waco. To go with this story, “Students Are Ill Prepared for College and Beyond / Declining Reading and Math Skills Affecting the Work Force. The US military,” the Times writes, “is seeing lower scores on its Armed Forces qualification test. At Texas State Technical College, a two-year college based in Waco, students increasingly have to take a basic math class alongside their college-level courses to get ready for careers in welding, heating, and air conditioning, and manufacturing. And at selective four-year colleges, professors complain that students have lost their reading and writing stamina. New national test results for 12th graders,” the Times continues, “released this month, showed significant declines in students' math and reading abilities since 2019, results that are now being felt in college and the labor market.” 

Speaking of declining literacy, in the international news on page A6, there's the headline, “Some Poo-Poo and Italian City Tax Designed to Combat Dog Waste.” That's P-O-O hyphen P-O-O Completely amateur attempted wordplay The term poo poo for disparaging something is spelled with H's So it's not a clever piece of wordplay. It's just the wrong ass word. Real dogshit effort there.

Back on page one again just above the fold “Shooter’s Notes Show Hostility To ICE Agents. Federal officials said Thursday” the Times writes that “the gunman who shot three detainees at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas had been aiming for immigration agents, pointing to notes that they said he had left at his home that showed a hatred of the federal government and a desire to cause immigration agents ‘real terror.’”

In a perfect follow up to law enforcement officials reporting that they had found anti-ICE messages written on bullets, which turned out to be literally the text “anti-ICE” written on a casing. Here, the Times writes, “that a US attorney said the shooter very likely acted alone.” And the Times writes had left many notes which investigators found while searching his home. One read, “Yes, it was just me.” 

And down below the fold, the fact that our fully Republican controlled government seems to be on course to fail to pass a funding bill is once again teed up as a bipartisan situation. “Parties Barrel Toward Shutdown As Trump Threatens Big Layoffs” is the headline, though the story itself does describe the situation as the White House pursuing fiscal brinksmanship. “With only five days remaining to fund the government,” the Times writes, “the White House is threatening to use a shutdown to conduct mass federal firings, hoping to pressure Democrats into caving and accepting a short-term deal.” But then the story immediately says “the threat underscored the intransigence gripping the two parties as they barrel, with no negotiations underway toward a highly disruptive shutdown on Wednesday driven by opposing political incentives and policy motivations. Democrats on Thursday condemned the threat by Mr. Trump and his top aides to fire droves of federal employees during a federal closure, and said they would not be cowed into dropping their demands for health care spending concessions because of it.” Those “demands” are to extend the existing subsidies under the Affordable Care Act and to undo Medicaid cuts. The reason there are no negotiations underway between the intransigent parties, the story goes on to acknowledge is that this week, “Mr. Trump sat, then abruptly canceled, a meeting with Democratic leaders to discuss the terms of spending deal. If the subsidies expire on December 31st, as scheduled under current law,” the Times writes, “around four million people are projected to lose coverage starting next year, and premiums would increase for around 20 million more. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 10 million more Americans would become uninsured over the next decade as a result of the Medicaid and other health cuts included in Mr. Trump's tax cut law. 

And on the back of the newspaper, on page A22, The Times reports that a 60-year-old woman who lives in Hempstead on Long Island has preliminarily tested positive for the chikungunya virus, a painful mosquito-borne disease that can cause long-term disability, and which has crossed over from the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western Hemisphere in this century, establishing itself around the Caribbean. “The last time the disease was known to have been transmitted locally in the United States,” the Times writes, “was about a decade ago when fewer than 15 cases were detected in Florida and Texas. The woman in Hempstead,” the story says, s”aid she had not traveled anywhere recently and had been shocked when she saw the test results.” 

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 through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.