Good morning. is March 12th. It is a bright but cool 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. 

Where to begin? Genuinely, where? There doesn't seem to be any mention of it at all in the A section of this morning's New York Times that I can find. But the president of the United States stood up outside the White House and delivered a straight sales pitch for Tesla brand automobiles. A gambit which, despite the encouraging signs at the time we recorded yesterday's podcast, did seem to stabilize and slightly boost Tesla's previously nosediving share price, thereby protecting the financial interests of the richest man in the world who has given the president hundreds of millions of dollars in political support and been rewarded with an apparently unlimited license to order people fired from the federal government by the thousands and to retaliate against the agencies that regulate his companies, and this genuinely unprecedented level of tawdry corruption didn't stand out from the rest of the news enough to even make the paper. 

The question of whether the government's operations will shut down entirely or whether Republicans will simply carry on with their program of shutting them down piece by piece makes page A21 in the Times. “House GOP passes bill to prevent shutdown. Now it's up to Senate.” With Trump having beaten his narrow House minority entirely into line, the measure passed on what was almost a straight party line vote with the craven Democratic opportunist, Jared Golden of Maine crossing over to the Republicans and the one intransigent Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky going to the Democrats.

The Times writes, “GOP lawmakers supporting it and Democrats opposing it gave the same reason. They argued that the stopgap bill gave Mr. Trump latitude to continue his campaign to dismantle and defund major pieces of the federal government through Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The bill also essentially obliterates home rule in Washington, D.C., defunding the city's ongoing municipal operations by stripping more than a billion dollars from its already approved budget. 

Below that, on page A21, is another story that would have been an immense administration-shaking scandal under any other presidency. “Aid agencies employees are ordered to shred or burn sensitive documents. A senior official at the main USAID agency,” the Times writes, “which is being dismantled by the Trump administration, told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning, according to an email sent to the staff. The email, sent by Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary, told employees of the US Agency for International Development to empty out the classified safes and personnel document files on Tuesday. Shred as many documents first and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break, Ms. Carr wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by the New York Times. It is unclear,” the Times writes, “if Ms. Carr or any other official at USAID got permission from the National Archives and Records Administration to destroy the documents. The Federal Records Act of 1950 requires U.S. government officials to ask the Records Administration for approval before destroying documents. The documents ordered to be destroyed, the story goes on, could have relevance to multiple court cases that have been filed against the Trump administration and the aid agency over the mass firing and sudden relocation of employees, the rapid dismantlement of the agency, and a freeze on almost all foreign aid money. 

On page A16, again, nowhere near the front page. “Education department planning to fire 1,300 workers, effectively gutting its staff. A workforce now half the size than before Trump took office,” reads the slightly grammatically damaged subhead. The story says “Linda McMahon, the education secretary”—and accused sex trafficker, though that's not in the story—“described the layoffs as part of an effort to deliver services more efficiently and said the changes would not affect student loans, Pell grants, funding for special needs students or competitive grant making.” 

Not only is that facially untrue, but McMahon also shares Trump's announced goal of trying to shut the department down entirely, which unquestionably will affect all the things that the department does. The story does note that the department is created by an act of Congress and that it would be illegal to shut it down without congressional approval. 

On page A14, there's the latest expansion of the McCarthyite campaign against colleges across the country as an administration staffed by Nazis maintains it's in the business of purging anti-Semitism. 

Below that is a story pegged to a report by the reactionaries at the Heterodox Academy about how universities are abandoning public advocacy in favor of viewpoint neutrality. 

On page A15, the McCarthyite theme continues with a full page of the Times bumbling around the Mahmoud Khalil story. At the bottom is, “after arrest by ICE, a quandary for Jews. The arrest of a former Columbia University graduate student who gained prominence amid that campus' pro-Palestinian demonstrations has divided the American Jewish community, which finds itself trying to reconcile a long-standing focus on Jewish safety and support for Israel with a historical commitment to civil liberties.” The story doesn't get any more sophisticated or insightful from there. 

Above that, “Activists hearing may pivot on the Constitution.” Yeah, the arrest, detention, and would-be deportation of a legal permanent resident who has not been accused of any crimes does have certain constitutional implications. It's true. 

And then, “Much unclear on case of Columbia graduate” is the final piece of the package. It's another one of those explainers that looks like it must have been online transplanted to the paper with such helpful self-interrogatory questions as “who is the Columbia graduate?” Here the vapidness of the explainer format produces an essential falsehood. Very little is unclear in the case, in fact. As the explainer explainers, “what is the arrest's legal basis? The Trump administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest but, two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners. The provision says that any alien whose presence or activities in the United States, the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” So that's not so much a matter of lack of clarity as it is the government mounting a deeply unpersuasive argument on the tenuous legal footing. Next question. “What is mr. Khalil accused of? That is not very clear.” This harkens back to that other story about USAID being ordered to shred documents where the Times said it was unclear if the administrator had been granted permission to do something in clear violation of the Federal Records Act? It's not unclear what Khalil is being accused of, it's quite clear that they have not accused him of anything. Mr. Rubio, the Times writes, “reposted a Homeland Security Department statement that accused Mr. Khalil of having led activities aligned to Hamas. But officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it. Rather, the administration's rationale is that the protests that Mr. Khalil played a key part in were anti-Semitic and created a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Rubio's argument, they said, is that the United States' foreign policy includes combating anti-Semitism across the globe and that Mr. Khalil's residency in the nation undermines that policy objective.” Again, being multiple degrees of removal away from any sort of personal responsibility for identifiable misdeeds is not in any way unclear. It's just bogus. But it's rude to say that. 

That's all certainly a lot of news. But what is on the front page? The lead news column is another spasmodic reversal of what the news had been in the trade war. “TRUMP BACKS OFF PLANS TO DOUBLE CANADA METAL FEE / ONTARIO ALSO RELENTS / After Vow of 50% Tariff, Province Pauses Levy on Power to U.S..”

Next to that is the Mel Gibson gun story that we talked about yesterday. 

Below that is the arrest of Rodrigo Duterte. Yesterday morning's breaking news there too. 

Top left is “U.S. to Resume Aid to Ukraine After Meetings / Kyiv Vows to Support a 30-Day Cease-Fire.” Dateline Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “Ukraine said it would support a Trump administration proposal for a 30-day ceasefire with Russia, an announcement that followed hours of meetings on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia, where the United States agreed to immediately lift a pause on intelligence sharing with Kiev and resume military assistance. The announcements on Tuesday in a joint statement came hours after Russian officials said Ukrainian drones had targeted Moscow in the largest attack of the war on the Russian capital. In the statement, the United States and Ukraine acknowledged that the terms of any ceasefire would be subject to Russia's approval. There was no immediate comment on the ceasefire discussion from Moscow, which had no officials at the talks.” 

And in middle of the page is a warmly lit four-column photo of genetically modified piglets, which are, the accompanying story says, “engineered to have kidneys, hearts, and livers more compatible with the human body.” I guess it's a follow-up to the story the other day about the corruption and dysfunction of the human-to-human organ transplant system. 

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 with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we'll talk again tomorrow.