Good morning. It's September 5th. It is another fine sunny morning here on the first day of school 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. French president Emmanuel Macron today named Michel Barnier, the country's new prime minister, in a final rejection of the left's contribution to the center left coalition that kept the far right national rally from winning and saved Macron's own party from annihilation in the snap election Macron called earlier this year. “In an extraordinary turnabout,” the Times writes, “Mr. Macron, having rejected the national rally as a party alien to the democratic arc of the Republic, a force to be kept outside the gates of power at any cost, found himself negotiating daily with Marine Le Pen, the head of the national rally, in the hope of securing her party's acceptance of a center-right candidate. In effect, she has had what appeared to amount to a veto over the process in the past several days.” Facing the possibility of sharing power with the left in an anti-Nazi coalition, Macron just decided to retool it into a pro-Nazi coalition. As Dennis Green would have put it, Macron is who they thought he was. 

On the front of today's home delivery paper, yesterday's school massacre only rates the left-hand column a little bit above the fold, “at least four killed in school attack.”

The lead news story is about President Joe Biden intending to block Nippon Steel's purchase of U.S. steel in the name of national security, which also happens to coincide with the campaign messaging of anyone who's trying to win Pennsylvania. 

Next to that, the second news column is “U .S. responds to interference by the Kremlin sanctions target effort to sway fall election.” Here we get the opposite of yesterday's delicious salted Nanjing duck coverage, as the Times dutifully marches through the sanctions and the indictment of two Russian employees of RT, the state-owned broadcaster who used a company in Tennessee to spread content, but waits until well after the jump to very cautiously circle back to that Tennessee company. “Justice Department officials, the Times writes, declined to identify the firm, but the one in the indictment uses the same slogan as Tenant Media, a company registered in Tennessee that publishes videos and other content broadly supportive of Mr. Trump. the company, and its most prominent commentators did not immediately respond to requests for comment.” And thereby it seems, kept their names out of the newspaper despite their having been tweeting about it yesterday. The people involved, blameless victims who just happened to take huge sums of money to broadcast their own personal opinions, which happened to match Russian propaganda points, included Tim Poole and the eternally upward failing Benny Johnson, known long ago as BuzzFeed Benny, who appears to correspond to the figure the indictment says was getting paid $400 ,000 a month to post four videos a month. It's almost as if the entire right-wing media ecosystem is built on fraud and propped up with heavy subsidies. 

Down on the bottom of page one, “partisan races can often lack opponent, usually a Democrat.” It begins by talking about how in rural Perry County, Missouri, the 17 down -ballot contests have only 17 candidates running, and all of them are Republicans. “Amid the feverish handicapping of an election often called crucial to the future of American democracy,” the Times writes, “Missouri tells a different story, repeated time and again across a deeply polarized country, where it can feel futile to run as a Democrat or Republican in the stronghold of the other party. In half of all races for partisan offices, candidates are elected, often multiple times, without opposition.” How is that a different story? From the story that “the future of American democracy hangs in the balance?” After the jump, the Times writes, “political scholars say politicians elected without opposition cast fewer votes and introduce less legislation, and that no-contest elections depress voter turnout. One-sided elections also lead to one-sided policies untempered by political opposition, said Keel Hunt, one-time aide to the former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, a Republican. ‘You see extremist gerrymanders,’ he said, ‘You see all these rules affecting how people live, from the schoolhouse and banning books to the hospital and abortion laws. You get this kind of extremism that only reinforces itself if there's never any competition.’” And though further down that column on the inside, the word gerrymander comes back. “While the electorate splits roughly equally between the two parties,” the Times writes, “Democrats contest far fewer offices. One reason is that Republicans control more state houses that have gerrymandered Democrats out of contention for legislative seats. But, the Times continues, misusing the word “but,” Much of the disparity exists because voters have left the Democratic Party in many rural counties that are sparsely populated, but have as many elective posts as larger ones.” That is, Republicans have been exploiting these structural imbalances in the system to create even more grave structural imbalances, including the Democrats' effective wipeout in Missouri. “There is no shortage of opinions, the Times writes, on the reason for that collapse, but Pam Munch, a 67-year-old real estate entrepreneur who was elected last month to the Perry County Republican Central Committee, said it comes down to one word, values. ‘Republicans are mainly Christians,’ she said, stressing the party's opposition to abortion. ‘They're business owners and they don't want high crime. Look at the big cities that are run by Democrats and how they look. So run down.’” What is the point of bringing this particular person's perspective into the story? Why should experienced political analysts be supplemented by someone whose credential is not just ignorance, but a highly motivated partisan ignorance? Because that's how the Times does political reporting. 

And on page A13, under three bylines, is a look ahead to Donald Trump's scheduled criminal sentencing on September 18th, and whether it's really going to happen then. A law professor who specializes in judicial conduct and ethics tells the Times that Justice Juan Merchan is “in an impossible situation.” Is he really, though? The story goes on. “While Mr. Trump has already been deemed a felon, If Justice Merchan postpones his sentencing until after the November 5th election, the American people will vote without knowing whether Mr. Trump will spend time behind bars. A delay would also reward the stalling tactics Mr. Trump has deployed throughout the case and feed the very impression the judge has labored to dispel that the former president is above the law. Yet, if Justice Merchan, a moderate Democrat who was once a registered Republican, imposes a sentence just seven weeks before election day, Mr. Trump will no doubt accuse him of trying to tip the campaign in favor of Kamala Harris.” That third point is almost too inane to address. If Donald Trump crying about something being unfair to Donald Trump was a reason not to do something, then no one could do anything but make him present by acclamation. But the first point, this sort of clenched up civic-mindedness, is also wrong-headed and inane. The point of sentencing Trump is not to send a message to the American voters in the name of the public interest, it’s that he committed a bunch of crimes, he was found guilty of them, and it's time for the next step of the process, where he gets punished. Once you've determined that the answer to the question, “is Donald Trump a normal person, subject to the law,” is yes, the supposed impossibilities go away. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song was composed and performed by Max Scocca-Ho, and the show depends for support on you, the listeners. Click the button for a paid subscription to Indignity and keep us going, and if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.