Good morning. It is June 26th. It is a gray morning in New York City, but only a warm one as the heat finally eases off, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

In a stack of Supreme Court decisions released this morning, the right-wing supermajority ruled that individual plaintiffs could not sue South Carolina over its decision to cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, thereby clearing the way for other states to likewise defund the organization. The court also announced that tomorrow will be the last day it releases decisions, which means that it's going to dump a stack of them, including rulings on preventive care under the Affordable Care Act, the banning of LGBTQ books from school libraries, racist redistricting in Louisiana, and possibly, whether the court will extend its recent spree of interfering with injunctions to allow Donald Trump to do currently illegal or unconstitutional things while the litigation over those illegal or unconstitutional things goes forward, to his attempt to violate the 14th Amendment's grant of birthright citizenship. 

It's clear that all current understanding of the Constitution says he can't do it, but what if he can try it out, while the far-right legal movement attempts to invent a new meaning of the Constitution? Because that's a decision about an injunction, it’s not necessarily one that the court is obligated to deliver tomorrow, but they probably don't want to work over the summer and their recent history is all about delivering all of their most odious and indefensible decisions at once at the very end, so other people can get mad about them while they go off on their various luxury junkets paid for by their billionaire patrons. 

The question of where the effects of Donald Trump's bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities fall, on a scale between inconsequential as a classified preliminary assessment reportedly had it, and obliteration, as the administration's mandatory line had it is still being hashed out. The CIA came up with a new assessment that declared that the bombing did real damage, and this morning the New York Times writes “centrifuges at the Fordo uranium enrichment plant in Iran are no longer operational after the United States attacked the facility with bunker busting bombs Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said on French radio on Thursday. Inspectors from the watchdog,” the Times continues, “the International Atomic Energy Agency, have been unable to gain access to the nuclear sites since the strikes. Mr. Grossi told Radio France Internationale in an interview that while evaluating the damage from the strikes using satellite images alone is difficult given the power of the bombs dropped on Fordo and the technical characteristics of the plant, ‘we already know that these centrifuges are no longer operational.’”

The story goes on to say that Grossi said it would be too much to assert that the nuclear program had been wiped out, but that it had, the Times writes, “definitely suffered enormous damage.” On the front of this morning's New York Times, Zohran Mamdani's headline gets five out of six columns. “MAMDANI VOWS TO UNITE CITY’S DEMOCRATS / After Strong Result, He Sees a ‘Hunger’ for New Politics.” 

I think this packaging really finally made it click for me, that a big part of what's wrong with the New York Times' politics coverage, or at least one of the main ways that what's wrong with the Times' politics coverage manifests itself, is that it just can't write about the Democratic Party. Its tortured identification as a newspaper whose readership is overwhelmingly democratic, but which is utterly committed to rising above partisan politics, leads it to write about the Democratic Party the way elderly sports writers write about the home team, simultaneously parochially invested in it, and contemptuously dismissive of it, and unable to think about anything else. There's very little in the story about Zoran Mamdani vowing to unite the Democrats. It discusses how he talked to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and collected an endorsement from Representative Jerry Nadler. But overall, what the piece describes reads less like Mamdani doing maintenance on the Democratic Party and more like Mamdani turning to try to win the general election, which makes sense since he just won the Democratic primary. What he talks about in the piece is expanding his coalition, which the Times operationalizes in paraphrase as saying he could bring together Democrats and win, even though, further down the piece talks about how he wants to win over people who voted for Donald Trump because they had concerns about affordability and quality of life. 

Below the four-column photo of Mamdani on page one with his cheering crowd is the story we talked about yesterday about how Democratic voters turning out in large numbers to get behind a wildly popular new candidate represents trouble to the party.

The print edition headline is “A Sudden Acceleration Puts a Beleaguered Party at a Crossroads,” but if you're accelerating, you're not at the crossroads. You're just going straight through it. If you turn the wheel with your foot on the gas, you're probably going to end up in a ditch. 

The jump on that story shares a page with a piece under the headline, “Mamdani's strong showing shakes up New York's Democrats,” which is just basically this straight news story about the election result. “Zohran Mamdani,” the Times writes, “little-known state lawmaker whose progressive platform and campaign trail charisma electrified younger voters stunned former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City late Tuesday night, building a lead so commanding that Mr. Cuomo conceded.” Blah, blah, blah, his joyful campaign. Blah, blah, Mr. Cuomo's ominous characterizations of the city. Then the Times goes into what it takes to be safe prognostication mode. “The outcome was not official, and even assuming Mr. Mamdani gains the nomination, he faces an unusually competitive general election in November.” Does he? That depends maybe on what competitive means. It does seem likely that there will be more competitors in the race than the standard two. Although Cuomo, having set himself up for an independent run in the event he lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani, had not planned on such a defeat being quite the stomping that he got and is currently vacillating while his Islamophobic and reactionary big money backers scramble to find some alternative candidate who would block Mamdani, maybe swinging back to disgraced incumbent mayor Eric Adams, whose alleged criminal entanglements and political entanglements arising from Donald Trump intervening to save him from prosecution for those criminal entanglements, led him to bail out of the Democratic primary and set himself up for an independent run. So that would be a competitor for Mamdani, just a competitor that record numbers of voters in the city disapprove of and say they believe should have resigned. Plus there'll be Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, the vigilante, fabulist, and cat hoarder who now does Talk Radio. 

For reference, Mamdani got more votes in this week's primary than Sliwa got in the 2021 general election for mayor. 

The last column on the top of the front page at the left is an intermediate step in the assessment, reassessment, and re-reassessment of the Iran bombing, sourced to Marco Rubio, and rendered even more pointless by subsequent events than the fact that it's sourced to Marco Rubio, would already suggest.

Below the fold, there's a curtain raiser on Jeff Bezos's big Venice wedding. 

And to the left of that, “Kennedy Stops Vaccine Money To World Group,” a very nicely straightforward write-up in which the Times demonstrates that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to sicken and kill as many people as possible from his seat as secretary of health and human services has pushed him beyond the boundaries of journalistic deference. 

The story begins, “the US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has moved to undermine public immunization programs in the United States, took his efforts global on Wednesday, accusing the leading international vaccine organization of having ‘ignored the science’ in immunizing children around the world. No “critics say,” no equivocations by Kennedy-friendly sources, just a straight-up account that this man is out to destroy vaccination and is taking steps to make it happen. 

On the opposite side of the page, the headline is “Global Deals, Cash and Pressure Help Trump Offload Deportees,” describing how much money and effort the Trump administration is putting into what it pretends is the practical measure of finding unattractive third countries to dump immigrants into where they can face imprisonment, torture, and possibly death. “American diplomats,” the Times writes, “are reaching out to countries in every corner of the globe, even some shattered by war or known for human rights abuses. U.S. officials have approached Angola, Mongolia, and embattled Ukraine. Kosovo has agreed to accept up to 50 people. Costa Rica is holding dozens. The U.S. government,” the Times continues, “paid Rwanda $100,000 to take an Iraqi man and is discussing sending more deportees there. Peru has said no so far, despite having been pressed repeatedly.” $100,000 to remove a person who had fled a country that we directly wrecked and dump him on a completely different continent than his original home. 

That investment of government money fits together all too clearly with the story on page A10, “Decades long dream of victory over HIV is victim of US cuts.” Dateline “Mbabane, Eswatini. This was,” the Times writes, “supposed to be a breakthrough year in the 44 year long struggle against HIV. Decades of research and investment produced new approaches to vaccines that were going into their first significant clinical trials. The hunt for a cure was homing in on key mechanisms to block the virus, which can lurk dormant and near untraceable in the body for years. Most critically, a breakthrough preventive drug, lenacapavir, a twice yearly injection that offers total protection from HIV, was to be rapidly rolled out across Eastern and Southern Africa. The main target, young women. About 300,000 of them were newly infected with the virus last year, half of all new infections worldwide. Every one of those plans,” the Times writes, “has been derailed by the Trump administration's slashing of foreign assistance.” 

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. Continue sending those along if you are able and pending some questions about how best to handle a suddenly very full work schedule. We should talk again next week.