Good morning. It is August 26th. It is a sunny morning in New York City after a freak rainstorm. The cat is sleeping on the microphone and occasionally stirring, and this is the return of your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

And the front page of the New York Times today is pretty bleak to welcome the podcast back. What passes for good news in the two lead news columns is that although the right-hand news story has the headline, “Israel exchanges heavy airstrikes with Hezbollah,” the news analysis story next to it says, “warring sides quickly talk containment. After the barrage yesterday,” the Times writes, “Hezbollah announced that it had completed the first stage of its attack to avenge the assassination of the senior commander, Fuad Shukr, and appeared to be calling it a day, at least for now.” Israel, meanwhile, said that it had discussed the importance of avoiding regional escalation with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. So for now, the wider regional war continues only happening in bits and pieces.

Speaking of bits and pieces, the audio environment of your podcast is going to include renovations in the apartment upstairs for the next few weeks. Apologies for whatever thumping and grinding may come in. 

On the left -hand side of page one, “how jailed migrant was freed and charged with rape again.” The story of a violent offender in New York City who got out of Rikers on a plea deal and proceeded to allegedly offend again in New York City rather than being deported to commit offenses in another country, and how various parties, certainly never including the New York Times, are using this as an occasion to undermine New York's sanctuary city policy. You have to take the jump to get to the paragraph saying, “to what extent sanctuary laws enabled his release remains unclear. They are meant to protect immigrants from deportation if they are convicted of low-level crimes, but not serious offenses, including the assault charge to which he pleaded guilty.” Nevertheless, Donald Trump, Eric Adams, and NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell have all taken the occasion to argue for what they always wanted to argue for. And so the crimes go on the front page. 

Also on page one, there's a gotcha story about Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. “Harris is calling Oakland home. Berkeley can understand why.” The story opens by talking about how Harris's presentation at the Democratic National Convention avoided mentioning the name of Ms. Harris's actual hometown, Berkeley, California, but fails to produce any quote from Harris's convention remarks in which she claimed to be from Oakland, the city of her hospital birth, noting that instead she was presented accurately, but less specifically, as coming from the East Bay. Later on, in discussing Harris's distancing of herself from the name of Berkeley, it says, “today, she often describes herself with the somewhat vague label, daughter of Oakland, a phrase that ties her to a working class city with less stigma and counters Donald J. Trump's preferred branding, San Francisco Liberal.” The idea here is that Berkeley is a shorthand in American political discourse for eggheads and hippies, but the story says that where Harris lived was in the flatlands. If I remember rightly, she did specify the neighborhood in her speech. “Then a working class part of the city with a large population of Black families. Ms. Harris's mother, it adds, was steeped in the social activism vibrant in both Berkeley and Oakland. Ms. Harris attended Berkeley public schools and was bussed to Thousand Oaks Elementary School in a more upscale neighborhood in the hills of North Berkeley as part of a voluntary program to integrate schools.”

The upshot is that there's a fact check here that's grinding up against a caricature check, and the paper can't find anyone in Berkeley or Oakland to take offense at the way that Harris is finessing the stereotypes surrounding the racial and cultural significance of her native terrain. 

Above that, on the jump page, the story is, “on immigration, Harris is taking a harder line. The overall message on immigration from the Democratic Party in the past week,” the Times writes, “as it has been since Ms. Harris announced her candidacy last month, has been decidedly more hardline than it has been in decades. The shift reflects just how much of a political vulnerability the issue remains for Ms. Harris and down ballot Democratic candidates in November, as many voters have come to see the challenges at the southern border as a top concern and a small but growing minority of Republicans and independents want to curb pathways into the country.”

 Two pages later on page A -15, there's another story about democratic immigration policy. “New policy reducing asylum seekers at border. In the months since President Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum at the U .S. Mexico border, the policy appears to be working exactly as he hoped and his critics feared. The number of people asking for haven in the United States has dropped by 50 % since June, according to new figures from the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents are operating more efficiently, administration officials say, and many of the hot spots along the border, like Eagle Pass, Texas, have calmed.” Setting aside the question of our abandonment of fundamental principles of international law to which our country allegedly subscribes, just what is the Times doing here politically exactly? The story goes on to say, “the numbers could provide a counter narrative to what has been one of the Biden administration's biggest political vulnerabilities, particularly as Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, tries to fend off Republican attacks.” Again, this story about how the administration's policies are doing exactly what the border alarmists claim to want to do is on page A -15. It is illustrated with a four -column photograph of migrants crossing the Rio Grande, rather than the subject of the story, which is migrants not crossing the Rio Grande. And the story that the paper chose to feature most prominently in today's edition is a scare story seeking to tie Democrats to migrant crime. There is nothing that a democratic administration can do, no matter how illegal or sadistic, that will ever provide a counter -narrative to the story of uncontrolled and dangerous migrant hordes, as long as the New York Times has anything to say about it. 

Finally, really quickly, the front of the national section on page A9 is “heat kills, but it's hard to say how many. Lack of precise data leads to fatalities that are preventable, experts say.” Turn the page from that story about heat deaths, and you get a full page with maps telling you California's wildfires grow ever more vast. And on the page after that, “hiker is swept away near Grand Canyon as flash flooding forces evacuations.” 

Stay hydrated, watch the skies, and abolish fossil fuels by any means necessary. 

The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is by Mac Scocca-Ho. And the funding comes from you, the patient and dedicated listeners. So please click the subscribe button and send us some money if you haven't already. Thank you for listening. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.