Good morning. It is May 7th. It is a sunny and beautiful morning in New York City. Things are drying out and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

At least a dozen people were reportedly killed in the Indian side of the disputed territory of Kashmir by shelling from Pakistan. That was in retaliation for Indian airstrikes yesterday against Pakistan, and Pakistan's share of Kashmir, which India claims killed at least 70 terrorists, and which Pakistan says killed at least 26 civilians, and those airstrikes, in return, were supposed to be retaliation for the killing of 26 tourists, 25 from India, and one from Nepal by anti-Indian militants in Kashmir.

Somewhere between two and five Indian warplanes, depending on who's reporting, were apparently downed in the course of the airstrikes. Both countries have nuclear weapons. 

In other news about lost military aircraft, an F-18 Super Hornet trying to land on the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, in the Red Sea, fell off the deck and was lost. It was the second one of the $60 million fighter jets to fall off the Harry S. Truman, in the course of US operations against the Houthis in Yemen. 

India's airstrikes are on the left-hand column of the front page of this morning's New York Times, which was delivered, safely inside a bag, on the stoop. The story on the dangerous and highly volatile situation includes some commentary from the commander in chief of the US military. “At the White House,” the Times writes “President Trump called the escalation between India and Pakistan ‘a shame. We just heard about it,’ He said of India's strikes, ‘they've been fighting for a long time. I just hope it ends very quickly.’” 

In the lead news column on the right hand side, the story is “JUSTICES ALLOW PRESIDENT’S BAN ON TRANS TROOPS.”

“Allow” is slightly imprecise. Sub headline “CHALLENGES CONTINUE / Policy Had Been Blocked by Lower Courts Over Equal Protection.” This was not a Supreme Court decision affirming the rightness of the trans ban, but an unsigned ruling from the shadow docket with three recorded dissents. Sonia Sotomayor, Elana Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, against a majority of unknown size, which lifted a nationwide injunction against the trans ban put in place by a district court judge in Tacoma, Washington, in the case of a naval aviator and six other plaintiffs. “That judge,” the Times writes, “had written that the government had failed to show that the ban was substantially related to achieving unit cohesion, good order, or discipline.” Functionally, what this means is that the majority of the Supreme Court doesn't think there's a problem with allowing trans service members to have their careers ruined and be forced out, while the courts work their way toward an eventual decision about whether the Constitution really permits the government to do that or not.

On the jump page for that story, page A14, the story at the top of the page is, “Spy agencies do not think Venezuela controls gang. Memo shows.” 

“A newly declassified memo released on Monday,” the Times writes, “confirms that US intelligence agencies rejected a key claim President Trump put forth to justify invoking a wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador. The memo, dovetailing with intelligence findings, first reported by the New York Times in March, states that spy agencies do not believe that the administration of Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, controls a criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. That determination contradicts what Mr. Trump asserted when he invoked the deportation law, the Alien Enemies Act.” 

The idea that gang members or accused gang members were in any way covered by a law about what to do with enemy combatants, was always obviously false, but, now it's documented that the administration was lying, even about the set of factual claims that it was trying to cobble together into some vaguely justification-shaped argument for doing it. 

The middle of the top of the page is taken up by a big photograph of an extremely low-end used car dealer in Lawton, Oklahoma. Above the headline, “Squeeze of Tariffs Crosses Globe to a Dusty Used-Car Lot.” It's an up-close  Eli Saslow feature, spending time with Antonio Austin, an automobile retailer of last resort, as he juggles busted cars and broke customers. The tariffs are sort of incidental to the larger picture. 

The story first lays out the parlous state of this business to begin with, and then says, “now the administration's new tariffs had begun to disrupt his supply chain, as the 25 % tariff on imported new cars drove more buyers to the used market. Antonio's dealership was spending a few hundred more to buy each wholesale car at auction, and then spending more again to repair those cars because of rising prices on foreign-made parts, many of which came from China.” 

But while the story documents that the price of a radiator has gone up 40 bucks, it's mostly about how brutally unforgiving life already was for the person who needs the radiator, in a place where everyone needs a car to get anywhere, and lots of them don't make enough money to afford one that works. One customer shows up looking for a car, and, the story writes, “said he'd been without a car for several months while he and his wife saved for a down payment, which had made life miserable in a part of Oklahoma with minimal public transportation. They had both been relying on Uber to get to work, $25 a day to ferry him to the construction site, $20 more to get her to the Salvation Army, another $15 if they wanted to take their two daughters, ages four and one, to play at the park. To save money, they had been walking their girls to and from daycare each day, pushing a double stroller along the shoulder of a commercial road for almost two miles. It was getting harder now that his wife was pregnant with their third.” 

These are people forced to live in a country that has been built up to refuse them basic elements of life. The customer who needs the radiator loses her job while the car is in the shop, Sasla writes, “she sat in the office while the mechanics finished installing a radiator, thinking about the ways she could piece her life back together. She had worked a dozen other jobs in Oklahoma, training horses, running the cash register at Tractor Supply, cleaning houses, and she would start looking for another. She could line up interviews and mow lawns and find other odd jobs to keep up with her bills. But doing any of that required a car, which required making payments that she could no longer afford.” 

After the end of the story, you turn the page, to page A20, and the headline is, “Why 35 House Democrats Crossed the Aisle to Kill a Big Climate Plan.” It's about how Democrats joined Republicans to help Donald Trump block the California state requirement that would have stopped internal combustion cars from being sold there by 2035. Orange County Democrat Lou Correa, who voted with the Republicans, talked to the Times. “‘I don't like giving Trump a win,’ Mr. Correa said in an interview after the vote, but electric vehicles remain expensive and impractical in his heavily blue collar district, he said, ‘we just finished an election where every poll I'm seeing, everybody I talked to says you guys need to listen to the working class, the middle class people,’ Mr. Correa said, ‘I’m listening to my constituents who are saying don't kill us.’” 

It's quite an assertion to read after the Oklahoma story about working class people being captive to the complexity and unreliability of internal combustion technology. The story does cite a former EPA emissions regulator, noting that electric vehicles are cheaper to operate and maintain over the long run than gas-powered cars. But, on the other hand, a Chevy dealer in Correa’s district told him, “Lou, this is going to force me to raise prices on top of the tariffs. It's going to be a perfect storm for us.” So who are you going to believe? Some bureaucrat, or a new car dealer, traditional champion of the working class. 

Back on the front, down on the fold, the headline is “Canada Sends Trump a Signal: It’s Not for Sale,” it's not really so much a signal. What the story quotes the new prime minister, Mark Carney, as saying, in his meeting with Donald Trump, is “as you know from real estate, there are some places that are not for sale. It's not for sale. It won't be for sale ever.”

“‘Never say never,’ Mr. Trump replied. But,” the Times adds, the moment's potency had been defused and Mr. Trump clearly was not interested in having a fight with Mr. Carney, whom he praised for his stunning electoral victory just a few days ago.” 

Next to that is the story of Friedrich Merz becoming the new chancellor of Germany, in two rounds of parliamentary voting yesterday, after somehow failing to bring it off in the first round. The Times described that first round failure as “A historic stumble that could complicate his efforts to revive the nation's slumping economy, tighten its borders and rebuild its military at a time when an isolated Europe is hungry for strong German leadership.” And then calls his initial failure by six votes “a defeat without precedent in modern Germany's history.” Then the paper pauses to briefly stuff a mute made of facts into the trumpets on which it's trying to play a historic fanfare. “The votes,” the Times writes, “were conducted on secret ballots, leaving the reasons for the failure murky. The parties in the new governing coalition held more than enough seats to elect him, but some lawmakers speculated that a series of individual protest votes had, possibly by accident, added up to an embarrassing setback.” 

Nevertheless, despite not knowing what really happened, it definitely must have been of great consequence. “Political observers,” the Times writes, “said the brief setback could make it more difficult than expected for the new chancellor to project strength on the world stage and to pass critical legislation to advance his agenda.” Okay, sure. Or he'll just set about chancelloring, and events will overtake it, and he'll do whatever he does, and we'll all see how it goes. 

And, down at the bottom of page one, the story is “Even the Richest Man in the World Cannot Escape His Neighbors / Musk's Texas mansion provokes a feud.” That makes it sound like busybody neighbors are creating a problem for Elon Musk. What the story actually documents is that in his efforts to convert part of a residential neighborhood into one sector of his planned baby-breeding compound, Elon Musk has run into people who don't see why he should be able to ignore any laws or regulations that he finds personally inconvenient. The story tries to describe him as mired in a maze of local regulations and red tape, but the matters at hand seem pretty straightforward. “Musk and his employees,” the story says, “did not obtain permits for a metal gate and the fence built around the property, making the chain link structure 10 feet taller than was allowed, local records showed.” That's a 16-foot fence instead of a six-foot fence, which doesn't exactly sound like hassling somebody over whether their front grass is a quarter inch too long. “In total, the story says the construction violated six city ordinances. After some neighbors protested, Mr. Musk's team tried to gain retroactive permission for the projects. But, Jim Pledger, one of the six commissioners on the Westlake Hills Zoning and Planning Commission, said he and his colleagues voted unanimously last month against recommending that the homeowner— he was careful not to name Mr. Musk— be granted variances for the projects. ‘If an exception was made,’ Mr. Pledger said, ‘we'd incentivize people to break the rules.’” If Jim Pledger of the Westlake Hills Zoning and Planning Commission had been in charge of the FAA, or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or the Securities and Exchange Commission, or NASA, or security clearances in the Department of Defense, over the past few years, we would live in a very different country than the one we're in at the moment. 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 through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep those coming if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we'll talk again tomorrow.