Good morning. It is September 29th. It is a mild and mostly cloudy morning 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. 

This was a weekend of slaughter around the country in Grand Blanc, Michigan. A 40-year-old ex-marine who'd served in Iraq reportedly crashed a pickup truck through the doors of a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started shooting people and set the building on fire. At least four people, plus the gunmen, are dead. 

On Saturday night in North Carolina, a 40-year-old ex-marine who served in Iraq allegedly pulled up in a boat outside a waterfront restaurant and opened fire on people there, killing three and wounding five. The boat left the scene on the Intracoastal Waterway, but the suspect was reportedly arrested after being spotted coming ashore at a boat ramp. 

Later that night, right around midnight Texas time, someone shot up the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass, Texas, killing two people. A 36-year-old suspect was arrested after a highway pursuit. 

And on Sunday afternoon in Lake Ariel, Pennsylvania, a shooter killed a security guard at a private community called The Hideout and wounded two other people. A 26-year-old suspect was arrested. 

The Michigan and North Carolina shootings are in this morning's print edition of the New York Times on pages A-19 and A-18 respectively. The lead news column on page one is about New York Mayor Eric Adams, who after declaring there was no way that he would drop out of the mayoral race, dropped out yesterday. “ADAMS ABANDONS RE-ELECTION BID, SHAKING UP RACE / MAYOR SPREADS BLAME / Seeing ‘Insidious Forces’ in City, He Declines to Endorse a Rival.” The Times presents this as a dramatic development rather than a pathetic one. “Mayor Eric Adams of New York, the Times writes, announced on Sunday that he would abandon his Foundering campaign for a second term, upending the race to lead the nation's largest city just five weeks before Election Day. In a nearly nine-minute video message that began with Frank Sinatra's ‘My Way,’ the mayor conceded that despite his best efforts, he could no longer see a path to reelection and would conclude his tumultuous mayoralty at year's end. He blamed ‘continued media speculation about my departure’ and a decision by the city's campaign finance board to deny him public matching funds for his campaign, which has flagged amid anemic poll numbers and a cloud of scandal around City Hall. 

The idea that the race has been shaken up or upended is just self-important news writing. Adams delayed the decision so long that he's still going to be on the ballot, which means that this decision is only capable of having an electoral impact on whatever fraction of the 7 % or so of voters who've told pollsters they support Adams, who are presumably not the most avid consumers of news, managed to find out that he's officially not running. 

The Times writes that “Adams offered voters what appeared to be a veiled warning about Assemblyman Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and front runner and what he characterized as growing extremism in politics. Without naming Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, the politically moderate mayor,”—is he?—“warned that ‘insidious forces’ were pushing ‘divisive agendas’ in city politics. He claimed that ‘our children are being radicalized to hate our city and our country.’” 

The story goes on to say, “in a copy of his prepared remarks, shared with the New York Times shortly before the video's release, Mr. Adams also vented about former governor Andrew Cuomo, another third party candidate whom he has called ‘a snake and a liar.’ In the prepared remarks, he said that politicians who waffled on key issues and sought to push others aside in their quest for power ‘cannot be trusted.’ But the comments appeared to have been cut from the final video without explanation, stoking questions about whether Mr. Adams might eventually endorse Mr. Cuomo.” It's almost as if Eric Adams is an entirely transactional politician who doesn't really believe in anything at all.

And on the subject of chief executives and what they believe, on Saturday, Donald Trump announced that he intends to send military forces to what he described as “war ravaged” Portland, Oregon. Pentagon officials reportedly said they hadn't gotten any such orders. People in Portland expressed bafflement, or as the Times put it, “bewilderment and frustration, and more than a little sarcasm.” In that story, though, the most important passage comes fairly low down, after the Times writes that the current governor and mayor, both Democrats, have avoided picking a fight with the president. The story then says, “that strategy unraveled in just a few weeks. A Fox News report in September that intermingled images of the small nightly protests at an ICE facility in Portland over the summer with video from the much larger 2020 protests prompted the president to say he ‘didn't know that was still going on’ and to threaten to send in troops.”

Then in a moment that's getting a lot more attention on social media than it is through regular media, the NBC affiliate in Portland reported that in an interview with NBC News, President Trump said, “Am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening?” Well, yeah, it seems like you are. 

And in other developments in the president's mind traffic, he went on social media this morning to revive the idea he'd posted about in May with no follow up at the time of imposing a 100 % tariff on foreign films. 

The president also went on social this morning, pretty inspired by the Eric Adams news to write “self-proclaimed New York City communist Zohran Mamdani,” set off incorrectly in commas, “who is running for mayor will prove to be one of the best things to ever happen to our great Republican Party. He is going to have problems with Washington like no Mayor in the history of our once great City. Remember, he needs the money from me, as President, in order to fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises. He won’t be getting any of it, so what’s the point of voting for him? This ideology has failed, always, for thousands of years. It will fail again, and that’s guaranteed!  President DJT.”

Elsewhere in collateral damage, the top-left story on the front of the Times is “FEDERAL AGENCIES MAY FACE LAYOFFS IN A SHUTDOWN / ANXIETY FOR WORKERS / Few Contingency Plans About How Services Would Operate.” That second subhead seems like the newsiest thing about the impending threat of a government shutdown, since the overall idea of mass disruptions to government employment and government functioning has pretty much lost its shock value. As the story notes, “in the federal government, around 300,000 employees are set to be off the payroll by the end of the year.” Presumably those ongoing purges and the hollowing out of the whole system is why, as the story says, “agencies have not been putting out contingency plans for what they will or won't be able to do under a shutdown.” 

An official from the Biden administration's Office of Management and Budget is quoted as saying, “to not have any plans at all has created even more uncertainty, and really conveys, I think, a sense of like, ‘We don’t care how the public feels about this.” 

The Times also has inside the paper on page A12 and A13 portraits and capsule profiles of an assortment of now former federal employees, U.S. Geological Survey, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of Homeland Security, and on and on. 

On page A14, there's a more pointed story of a federal worker losing a job. “Trump fires U.S. Attorney after she cautions official of Border Patrol on raids.” It's about Michelle Beckwith, the acting U.S. Attorney in Sacramento, who was fired in July after a conflict with Gregory Bovino of the Border Patrol. “Documents reviewed by The New York Times, the story says, show that the July 15th firing of Ms. Beckwith occurred less than six hours after she told Mr. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in charge of Southern California raids, that a court order prevented him from arresting people without probable cause in a vast expanse that stretches from the Oregon border to Bakersfield. She was removed not only from her post as acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California, but from the office altogether.” 

The middle of the top of page one is devoted to a feature story about a mass murder in South Carolina. The main headline is “A Family Finds a Path to Forgive a Stranger’s Unfathomable Act,” the sub-ed establishes that the Times is in fact out to fathom it. “‘C.T.E. Is the Villain,’ a Mother Says of a 2021 Massacre.” Despite a long, long, feature-y lead in which the crime goes unmentioned in anything but the most abstract emotional terms until after the jump, the piece is, at bottom, one more installment of the Times's ongoing effort to connect head trauma with violent crime. The killer was the former NFL player, Philip Adams. And when his brain went off to the lab, as it does in these Times stories, the results came back positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. 

Down below the fold, there's a profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Greene, Straying From Trump, Reflects Emerging MAGA Split.” It describes a two-step transformation in Greene's political profile and role. “After arriving in Congress in 2021,” the Times writes, “as something of a joke and a pariah in her own party, known for making bigoted remarks and amplifying QAnon conspiracy theories, Ms. Green evolved into a team player. She still sometimes spouted groundless claims and racist remarks, but also wielded some measure of influence by aligning herself closely with former representative Kevin McCarthy, then Speaker of the House, who in turn reigned in her more extreme impulses. But those days are all now behind her. Green is no longer a team player for Republicans in Congress, and she is no longer seen as a joke. She is now operating,” the Times continues, “as a powerful free agent with considerable self-regard and a big chip on her shoulder. She appears to feel no obligation to anyone in Washington, certainly not to Speaker Mike Johnson, whom she tried to oust last year for allowing a vote on continued U.S. aid to Ukraine, and increasingly not even to Mr. Trump. On a variety of topics,” the Times writes, “the release of documents related to the case against the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the war in Gaza, artificial intelligence and America's involvement in Iran and Ukraine. Ms. Green has broken sharply with the man she still calls ‘my favorite president.’” 

This all sounds like a journey from point A to point A. Marjorie Taylor Green, whose entire politics is built around not being able to get along with people, is not getting along with people. In an attempt to make this into something bigger. The Times writes, “Ms. Green's stance on the Epstein files— She is one of just three Republicans who have signed on to the petition to force a floor vote on the issue— and other issues like the war in Gaza have earned her a strange new respect from Democrats who have been somewhat horrified to find themselves agreeing with Ms. Green on, well, anything.” 

Who are these Democrats? “‘Marjorie Taylor Greene is winning my respect,’ Zaid Jilani, a progressive writer who has worked for left-leaning political action committees and think tanks, wrote in a recent opinion essay for the Washington Post.” 

Well, if a maladjusted freak who's been carrying water for the right wing while brandishing purported progressive credentials since the first Trump administration is willing to speak kindly of Marjorie Taylor Greene, well then everybody in this situation is playing exactly the role that they were playing all along.

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're able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we'll talk again tomorrow.