Good morning. It is November 3rd. The saved daylight here in Manhattan is looking kind of murky. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The United States killed yet more people at sea over the weekend, announcing its ninth strike on an unarmed boat in the Caribbean and 15th overall. According to the tracker, the New York Times is now running. The death toll of civilians killed by the US military by the Trump administration's own account is now 65. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, above the fold, below a triptych of photos of the New York City Marathon, the Times takes another look at the legal status of the murder campaign under the headline, “SHADED MEANING
FOR ‘HOSTILITIES’ / War Powers Deadline on Boat Strikes Rejected.” The occasion is that today is the 60th day since Donald Trump first informed Congress that he had started carrying out unprovoked attacks on civilian boats with no legislative authorization, which means under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, he would now be required to terminate hostilities. But, the Times writes, the legislation left the term “hostilities” vague. And so, according to the story, the Trump administration's position is that the killing of all these people at sea by the US military does not count as the kind of hostilities that are subject to congressional limitation because the people who the administration is killing can't shoot back. The Times notes that a version of this position was staked out by the Obama administration, albeit without the blessing of the Office of Legal Counsel, to justify carrying out an airstrike campaign against Libya. Of the Obama lawyers who came up with the justification for bombing Libya, the Times writes, “Their argument that the war over Libya did not amount to hostilities was based on more than the idea that there was little risk of US casualties because there were no ground troops and Libyans could not shoot back. The Obama team's argument also cited other constraining factors that are absent from Mr. Trump's boat attacks, including that the Obama-era operation was a NATO-led multilateral mission to carry out a United Nations Security Council resolution. By expanding on that precedent,” the Times writes “Mr. Trump is more deeply entrenching the idea that the 60 day limit does not apply to air wars.” Given that the 1973 law was passed and then repassed over a presidential veto, specifically in response to Richard Nixon's adventures in Southeast Asia, the claim that it doesn't cover the unauthorized bombing of defenseless civilians seems pretty hard to square with the original legislative purpose and history. As a general principle, it's probably always bad to give back presidents any powers that had originally been taken away from Nixon.

And speaking of unhinged end-stage presidencies, an interview with 60 Minutes last night, when asked about the pardon he issued last week to Changpeng Zhao, the convicted money launderer and head of the crypto exchange company Binance, whose investments helped pump billions of dollars into the Trump family's cryptocurrency enterprise, Donald Trump replied, “Are you ready? I don't know who he is,” and then followed that up by saying, “here's the thing, I know nothing about it.” Claiming that all he knew was that he'd heard this person had been targeted by a Biden administration witch hunt and that his sons, as completely independent businessmen, are interested in crypto. 

Back on the front of this morning's print edition of the New York Times, the right hand lead news column is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece whose packaging enacts a capsule drama of the Times' political coverage. “SNAP Crisis Makes Clear Trump Goals” is the headline, under which comes the subhead, “Only Selective Relief in Painful Shutdown.” 

“Selective Relief” is an extremely blurry and forgiving gloss on what Donald Trump is doing with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It's not a question of shutdown relief, selective or not, the SNAP funding would still have continued under the shutdown if he had not specifically yanked away contingency funding. “As the story itself says, as the federal shutdown stretched into its fifth week, imperiling the nation's largest anti-hunger program, Vice President J.D. Vance insisted that there was little the White House could do to help. ‘The American people are already suffering, he told reporters, and the suffering is going to get a lot worse.’ In fact,” the story continues, “the administration had billions of dollars at its disposal, more by its own admission than it needed to sustain food stamps for the roughly 42 million low-income people who depend on them.” There's just a fundamental tangle of cause and effect here that the times can't bring itself to quite cut through.

“The saga,” the story says, “has laid bare the shutdown strategy at the White House, where Mr. Trump has been willing to shield only some Americans from the harms of a fiscal standoff that he has made no effort to resolve. In what may become the longest federal stoppage in history, the president has frequently bent the rules of budgeting, primarily to reap political benefits or exact retribution. He has found new and untested ways to spare certain Americans, like the military, from the pain of the government closure, while claiming he has no power to help others, including low-income individuals who rely on benefits like SNAP. The result,” the Times writes, “is a shutdown unlike any other, one that has posed disparate and debilitating risks for those unlucky enough to depend on the many functions of government that Mr. Trump has long aspired to cut.” It's only there, at the end of the sixth paragraph, with, “has long aspired to cut,” that the story gets around to the clear goals that are supposed to be the whole point of the piece. Trump is not unevenly distributing the harms of the shutdown. He's using the shutdown to inflict the specific set of harms that he wanted to inflict all along. 

Next to that, down below the photos, the headline is, “For Prosecutors in DC Office, Turmoil Reigns.” It opens with an anecdote about a veteran prosecutor being taken aside and fired at a farewell party for other departing prosecutors. “Federal prosecutors' offices in New York, California, and Virginia,” the Times writes, “to name just a few, have felt the effects of Mr. Trump's desire to root out those he believes have been disloyal and to wield the criminal justice system against his enemies. But nowhere, perhaps, has the impact been as palpable as the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, which is deeply enmeshed in the workings of government and has long attracted Mr. Trump's vengeance for having filed criminal cases against him and his allies. The office,” the Times writes, “is in crisis, distrustful of its leadership and demoralized by waves of dismissals, demotions and resignations that have slashed its headcount by as much as a third since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. According to more than a dozen current and former employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive issues.” The piece circles back to John Hooks, the prosecutor who was fired in the lead. “The departures,” the story says, “have fallen particularly hard on the Office's Fraud, Public Corruption, and Civil Rights Unit, which has lost nearly half of its prosecutors, as well as Mr. Hooks, its former chief, and three of its former supervisors. That has damaged the Office's ability to make the big-ticket, white-collar cases it has long been known for.” As with SNAP, that is pretty much Donald Trump pursuing a coherent policy goal of his. 

Next to that on the front page is a spacefiller story to occupy the gap between the end of early voting yesterday and actual election day tomorrow in New York City. Heated Mayor’s Race Shakes New York’s Balance / National Tensions Are
Backdrop for City’s Identity Crisis.” The identity crisis would appear to consist of the Democratic nominee in a heavily Democratic city heading into election day as the overwhelming front runner. But that would make for a very boring first draft, of the first draft of history. So instead, the Times writes, “New York has always been, in its own imagination and the country’s, a city of self-regarding and often contradictory superlatives —the biggest, brightest, richest, harshest, give-us-your-tiredest, little-too-wired-est spot on the American map, which might as well render those other cities in the sepia tone of afterthoughts, anyway.” 

“Sepia-toned afterthoughts,” okay. “So it can feel especially disorienting for a place so confident of its position in the general pecking order to find New York edging toward a moment of such spectacular uncertainty about what it is, whom it's for, what happens next. Answers are coming, whether the city likes it or not.” The story goes on, “a volatile mayoral election this Tuesday appears poised to reshuffle and reconstitute the longstanding power structures of a city that so often sets the political, cultural, and financial course well beyond its boroughs. The New Yorkers, who run much of Washington, are heckling one another during an interminable federal shutdown, with accelerating consequences for America's largest city. And a collision of local and national forces, escalating deportation campaigns, searing mutual political disdain and disillusion, economic angst across income strata, seems primed to scramble New York's very sense of itself, compelling it to confront some of the surface paradoxes that are core to its identity.” 

“Surface paradoxes” being at the core, guess would be a meta paradox about the paradoxical role of paradox. Anyway, blah, blah, blah. Who cares? The mayoral election has not been volatile. All the polling has showed it remarkably steady and that steadiness is accompanied by a mayoral campaign from Zoran Mamdani that is basically the opposite of what the Times professes is going on as the public appears to be responding to a campaign that is all about certainty, about what New York is and whom it's for, and what happens next. Mamdani is running on the notion that New York is a gathering place for people of every ethnic, national, religious, cultural and socioeconomic background and that who it's for is, by natural extension, everybody. And that what happens next is maybe all those people get a better bus system to carry them around, and more childcare, and maybe even slower rising rents. 

Inside the paper on pages A12 and page A13, the time spends one more full spread going after Mamdani. On page A12, two columns wide all the way down is “Question of readiness persists for Mamdani,” in which the Times tries once again to advance the Cuomo campaign's argument that Zoran Mamdani, at the age of 34, with only a few years in the state assembly under his belt, is troublingly unprepared to run New York City, but can only muster an extremely mixed bag of quotes in support of its argument. Of the first three people the story quotes, apparently responding to inquiries about whether they were worried about Mamdani's relative lack of experience. Two of them said, OK, sure, but they had already voted for Mamdani. And the third said she voted for Cuomo, which tracks with the polling and suggests that the issue is not really much of an issue. Can a question really be said to persist if the answer to the question doesn't seem to be governing how people are going to vote? 

And next to that, sprawling across the rest of the spread, is a graphics-heavy explainer-y package. “Can faster buses really be free? A Times analysis of a congested route illuminates the possible promise and fundamental tension in one of Mamdani's top proposals for New York.” The goal here is to question whether buses can be made both fast and free. “Critics and even some transit supporters,” the Times writes, “warn that his two goals are in tension. Spend such vast sums subsidizing the bus, and there won't be much left over to improve it, especially when the federal government is undercutting support for transit and the economy is shaky. Under any reasonable estimate, the annual cost to the city of making buses free would be more than transit officials expect to raise this year from congestion pricing, the Manhattan tolling program in the middle of its own political fight. Whether fast buses and free ones can really go together depends on many questions, some beyond a mayor's control, including whether Governor Kathy Hochul would cooperate on higher taxes to raise revenue. Even if Mr. Mamdani were able to eliminate fares, what effect would it really have? And would it be enough to change the slog of riding a bus in the city?” Eventually, after the charts and diagrams, down in the bottom right hand corner, the info package gets around to acknowledging that info analysis is not really the point of this at all. The final module of the layout notes that “A recent New York Times Siena polling experiment of two groups of likely voters showed 56 % supported making the buses free, even as 57 % said the city should not do this. To voters,” the Times writes, “the value of Mr. Mamdani's promise may largely be in the signal it sends, that he sees New Yorkers struggling on the bus and wants to make things better with big ideas.” The story then says Brad Lander, the city controller and a Mamdani ally who ran in the primary, suggested “‘fast and free has a logic to it that's not necessarily literal. Yes, you need resources to make the buses faster,’ he allowed, ‘but you also need political will. And Mr. Mamdani is building it in a way that might not have worked had he promised fast buses alone.” And that is pretty much exactly it, except for the part even about big ideas. The thing about improving bus service is that a lot of what it takes is fairly low-hanging fruit, although the story dwells on the idea of major street redesigns. You can get a whole lot of what you need to make buses work better with paint and traffic cops to keep cars out of the buses way. Unlike increasing the housing supply or getting expanded childcare up and running, the mayor can improve the bus system using materials the city already has in hand.

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. Don't let the shortened sundown catch you unawares. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.