Good morning. It is August 7th. It's a gray and soggy morning in New York City as the heat has finally broken and along with it the weather itself seems to be broken, as we're approaching our daytime low of a forecast 68 degrees in mid -morning. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host Tom Scocca taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Chicago White Sox failed to lose their 22nd game in a row last night, beating the Las Vegas -bound Oakland A's 5 -1 in front of a crowd of not quite 6 ,000 fans. This left the White Sox tied with the 1988 Baltimore Orioles for the longest losing streak in American League history at 21 games. The Orioles, as some of us lived through at the time, did theirs to open the season, so the White Sox couldn't even make themselves the most distinguished losers in League history. 

The Washington Post has text messages between Republican vice presidential nominee J .T. Vance and the Holocaust denying far -right troll Charles Johnson, supplied by Johnson, who is trying to reinvent himself as some kind of whistleblower. In the texts, Vance expresses contempt for entities spanning a political spectrum from the Ukrainian Armed Forces to the late casino mogul and Republican mega -donor Sheldon Adelson.

He also, in telling Johnson that he was not influenced by his mentor and publishing industry connection Amy Chua, the old tiger mom, informed Johnson, “I am pretty sure I don’t even know another Chinese-American.” Pretty remarkable claim for someone who went to Yale Law. All around, this story documents not only that JD Vance is the kind of wannabe edgelord who would trade texts with a creepy bigot like Charles Johnson, but also that JD Vance is dumb enough to trade texts with a reckless and treacherous publicity hound like Charles Johnson. Just really, really basic bad judgment there. 

In other news on the vice presidential race, this morning's New York Times devotes two columns worth of headline and three columns worth of photo to Kamala Harris's selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. The Times says it's pronounced “Walls.” The photo features the two of them walking out, both laughing. Harris in an immaculate suit. and Walz in a rumpled one, with a rally crowd cheering behind them. Mr. Walz, the Times writes, leapfrogged better known contenders, in part because Ms. Harris viewed him as an everyman figure from Minnesota, whose Midwestern dad vibe balanced out her Bay Area background, according to three people familiar with the Vice President's thinking. 

Inside the paper, to strike a sour note, Jonathan Weissman continues his role at the Times as a toddler playing with the loaded gun of race and ethnicity in politics, while also mistaking the fantasy sports draft coverage by political nerds of the vice presidential selection process for something of substance by writing a piece about how by not choosing Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Harris missed the chance to choose the most aggressively anti -Palestinian available candidate and avoided picking a fight with democratic opponents of the slaughter in Gaza. The headline is “Walz instead of Shapiro excites left, but may alienate Jewish voters.” The story is basically just a chance to let leaders of the Orthodox Union call the anti -war movement anti -Semitic, including one saying, “our greater worry right now is that anti -Semitism on the left seems to be far more influential on a major party than the anti -Semitism on the right.” Again, we were just talking about the Republican vice presidential candidate texting with a Holocaust denier. Nevertheless, the piece doesn't seem to talk to any actual Jewish voters, but someone at the Times thought it was worth doing anyway. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.