Good morning. It is August 2nd. Is it hot and humid in New York City? It's hot and humid 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. Across the front of the New York Times, four columns wide in the lead spot, the story is "journalists and dissidents freed from Russia in swap of 24 inmates," with a big triumphant photo of Joe Biden and the families of some of the prisoners at the White House. "The deal, whose size and complexity has no parallel in the post -Soviet era," the Times writes, "freed 15 people imprisoned by Russia and one by its ally Belarus in return for eight held in Western countries, including a convicted assassin and several held as Russian spies." The assassin gets his own story inside the paper, which says he pedaled up on a bicycle before shooting a former Chechen separatist fighter in the head as children and their parents looked on. This was in Berlin, but the Germans were willing to let him go under the circumstances. The left -hand top of page one is the story the Times broke yesterday about how the assassination of the Hamas political leader in Tehran was carried out with a remote -control bomb. 

Below that, in other assassination news or attempted assassination news, the Times is back to hammering away at the story of how the Butler, Pennsylvania gunman got a shot at Donald Trump. Today's micro increment on the story is about how the Secret Service's approach to communications meant that it never heard the message that there was someone with a long gun on the roof of the building. All of which is just another way of knowing at the fact that the Secret Service completely failed in its protective duties. A fact which already led to resignation of the director of the Secret Service. So now that accountability isn't an issue, it's really not clear who, except aspiring presidential assassins, is supposed to care about this level of granular detail. It's just the idea of an important story lurching along on the front page, day by day, centimeter by centimeter, beating the answered question of how the gunman did it into the ground, while the question of why, despite the FBI's congressional testimony earlier this week that they think they may have found a racist and anti -immigrant social media account belonging to the shooter is sitting around mostly unexamined. 

Next to that story in other racism news is "Trump Elevates Racial Attacks to Center Stage," a piece which serves to put the racial attacks, or racist attacks, at center stage. "When former president Donald J. Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris' racial identities on Wednesday," we're back to "questioning" racial identities, "he lifted a long -standing and false line of attack," the Times writes, "from the fringes of political discourse to the very center of a presidential campaign." And then the Times proceeds to add weight to the false thing. "For years, rivals and critics have lodged accusations that Ms. Harris shifts her personal identity to her political advantage, and that she is, in fact, not who she claims to be." Sometimes, when the Times says critics are saying something, it means something is true and the Times doesn't want to just say it's true. Here it means it's false, but the Times doesn't want to ignore it. The thrust of the piece is, there's no fire here, but let's take a look at all this smoke. Donald Trump didn't just say an insanely racist thing earlier this week. He articulated some sort of existing public perspective about Harris that has to be considered in the discourse around her campaign. And what is the smoke? Which critics are saying these things? Above the jump you have Laura Loomer, identified by the Times as the right -wing agitator, which is at least in the ballpark of a more accurate descriptor like conspiracist nutjob. And Tucker Carlson, whose niche webcast the Times describes as "a popular interview show." And the rapper Lil Pump. Let's see which other things that trio believes ever make it to the front page of the Times.

On page A11, Darfur is officially in a state of famine. According to, the Times writes, "the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a research group funded by the United States government, and the Famine Review Committee, an independent group of experts." Reuters reported that it's only the third official declaration of famine since the famine monitoring system was set up 20 years ago. 

And page A5 reports on flooding in North Korea. Page A13 reports on flooding in Vermont. And the weather report on page A22 reports on flash flooding potentially coming your way if you live anywhere on the eastern seaboard between the North Carolina -South Carolina border and Bangor, Maine. "A front is expected to stall along the northeast coastal region on Sunday." The caption says, "very moist air will continue to track northward along the front and the result will be widespread showers and thunderstorms. Rainfall will be locally heavy with the potential for urban and flash flooding. Significant travel delays are expected across the corridor." Stay dry if you can everyone. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. Enjoy the dry parts of your weekend, and if all goes well, we will talk again on Monday.