Good morning. It's August 29th. It is cloudy and cooling off after the peak of the heat wave here in New York. The voice is having one of its bad days. But vocal cord experts are finally on the case. And the next few months should be a journey of discovery and perhaps recovery. And so in the meantime, and nevertheless, this remains your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca. Using unreliable muscles to compensate for the structural shortcomings of the vocal apparatus as the program takes a look at the day and the news. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead story two columns wide is “Israel escalates raids on West Bank targets as Third Front grows.” Israeli forces went into Jenin yesterday. The Times writes, “at least 10 Palestinians were killed, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, in what Israeli officials described as an ongoing operation targeting militants and concentrated in Jenin and Tulkarm to West Bank cities that an Israeli military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, said had become militant strongholds. The Israeli military said it had killed nine militants.”

 That is a lot of Israeli military sourcing about what the Israeli military is doing and why. The Israeli military gets to have motives and tactical aims here. The Palestinians just get a body count, which exceeds the number of deaths that the Israelis say were militants by at least one, and in the next paragraph, “a Palestinian armed group based in Jenin said it had fired on Israeli forces in two villages on the city's outskirts, and Palestinian residents in both cities described hearing intermittent gunfire.” So there's some Palestinian sourcing, albeit not about any particularly controversia-sounding claims. The rest of the story turns into a sort of grab bag roundup of various other developments in the war, any of which could have come ahead of any of the others of which, or been spun out into their own stories.

Israeli forces attacked Khan Yunis again, killing 58 Palestinians there, according to the Gazan health authorities. The Israelis said they recovered one dead hostage and rescued one live hostage the day before. Just before the jump comes the incident where the Israeli forces opened fire on a United Nations vehicle, hitting it with 10 bullets but not hurting anyone, and causing the World Food Program, whose vehicle it was, to stop its operations in Gaza, since, as the UN told the Times, the Israeli forces were shooting at a convoy that they had been notified of, and that was supposed to have clearance. 

On the other side of page one, “blue states at unlikely heart of fight for House, Democrats struggle for voters in New York and California,” in which a handful of newsworthy congressional races on opposite sides of the country are jammed together into some largely unconvincing overarching rubric.

The story raises one interesting potential unifying structural argument about how voters in securely democratic states may not be as motivated as voters elsewhere to respond to Republican attacks on abortion rights on the grounds that they see no immediate danger in their own states. But that's offset by highly particular reporting about the way that individual candidates are positioning themselves in their specific California districts and by some but nowhere near enough references to the singular dysfunctions of the New York State Democratic Party, best captured by a paragraph that starts off trying to sell a general theme about vibes, only to collapse into awkward facts. “Democrats insist they have learned lessons from the midterm trouncing. Their candidates in several critical races have moved to flip the script on issues like immigration, crime, and the economy. In New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul was blamed for 2022 losses, the state party has set out to build a formidable turnout operation for the first time.” The word “redistricting,” a process where the state party largely squandered its tactical advantages, is only mentioned once, and that's in the context of them weakening one Republican seat. There's no mention of the other seats they left on the table. But, turnout, trying to get people to come out and vote, a novel initiative for the organized New York State Democratic Party, in the year 2024. 

Next to that on page one, “Telegram users at crux of case against CEO.” I can't bring myself to pay attention to the Telegram CEO case, but there is an “at crux right” next to “at heart.” Maybe the headlines would be more differentiated from each other if the Times used verbs in them. 

Down at the bottom is a piece about the sour politics of Germany, especially the former East Germany. “Grievances push many Germans to the extremes.” Not a headline one likes to see. What grievances? “Too many people exist on this planet and everyone wants to come to us, says 69 -year -old Anna Wenske.” That is really, really not what you want to hear from a German. 

Inside the paper, there's two stories about equine encephalitis, which killed a 41 -year -old in New Hampshire and has various New England governments advising people to stay home from sundown to sunup to avoid mosquitoes. “Some residents of high -risk areas,” the Times writes, “have bristled at government advice to avoid outdoor activities at night, saying they were uncomfortably reminiscent of government lockdowns and mask rules during the coronavirus pandemic.” Wonderful where we've advanced to the stage that even telling people what they can voluntarily do to avoid disease is tyranny. 

And the story about Donald Trump's campaign staff fighting with a worker at Arlington National Cemetery finally made the paper on page A16. The Trump campaign is denouncing the unnamed cemetery official that staffers allegedly shoved around. “Cemetery officials,” the Times writes, “did not provide their own account of the encounter, saying instead that there was an incident and a report was filed.” Presumably the cemetery wants to keep itself off the list of institutions that get on the wrong side of Trump and come under vigilante chud attack. 

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 Max Scocca-Ho, and it is all supported by your subscription dollars. Please send along some money to keep us going if you haven’t, and for podcast editing and publishing purposes, the long holiday weekend begins tomorrow. Enjoy your Labor Day. And if all goes well, we will talk again on Tuesday.