Good morning. It's July 24th. It's cloudy again 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. And there is some real news on the front of the morning New York Times. Two columns wide in the lead slot, “leader of Secret Service resigns, citing failures to stop Trump shooting.” There it is. That's a new thing that happened yesterday. Kimberly Cheadle, the head of the Secret Service, resigned, as an agency head should, after that agency publicly and unquestionably botches its best -known mission. Maybe she was a real whiz at fighting counterfeiting, but when someone gets a clear enough shot at a presidential candidate to draw blood, it's pretty clearly time for somebody else to do a better job of basic security. The sub -headline is a “rapid downfall for an agency veteran,” just to inject a little bit of ponderous historical-sounding narrative there. Now that she's no longer with the Secret Service, the question is, would Major and Commander Biden bite her? I’m picturing a sort of personnel oracle thing, where they send aspiring Secret Service leaders to Delaware, and whichever one the German shepherds most want to chomp down on, would be the pick. Or were the dogs merely misunderstood for trying to send a warning about an agency that was slipping badly? 

On the left -hand side of the page, above the fold, more news. “Menendez plans to quit Senate, bowing to party pressure after a conviction.” Look at that. No vamping or abstraction anywhere in the headline package. Just something that happened, followed by a background fact about why it happened. Anyway, Senator Bob Menendez said that now that he's been convicted of taking bribes and acting as an unregistered foreign agent, he will leave the Senate, although being Bob Menendez, he's not going to do it right away. But we'll drag it out to late August. Also, being Bob Menendez, the Times notes, he didn't rule out the possibility of trying to get onto the ballot as an independent, to win his seat back.

Between those two news stories, there's speculative coverage of presidential politics. “For new rival, Trump's gibes may coarsen,” is the one story, which is to say, no one thinks Donald Trump can contain himself from making sexist and racist remarks now that he's running against Vice President Kamala Harris. The story still contains an obligatory feint toward the message that Mr. Trump has been trying to soften some of his harshest rhetoric about seeking vengeance on his rivals ahead of the general election. That's an extremely narrow point of softness to look for. He can call Nancy Pelosi “crazy Nancy Pelosi” in his convention speech, I guess, as long as he doesn't say he wants vengeance on her. But overall, the piece is about how Trump is a raging bigot and no one thinks he's going to be able to control himself. 

Next to it, a vibes piece. “Eager for a first female president, but wary of same old hurdles.” Returning to the question of whether this country just hates women too much to ever elect one president. You can go around the country and talk to people about it, but nobody knows. That's where we're at politically. Anybody who's going to make a generalization less than a week after Harris took over as the presumptive nominee is just guessing. Do they need to be guessing on page one? I would guess not. 

I might have gone instead with the story at the bottom of page 8. “Twin Ethiopia landslides kill at least 229, including many rescuers. “The village hit by the landslides,” the Times reports, “lies in a region that is increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including long droughts followed by strong storms and more frequent and intense rainfall, experts said.” Maybe package that with the news from the Washington Post yesterday that Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. A little something for people to think about on their way to the ballot box. 

Or if you want to destroy pegged politics, they could also have put the dispatch from Harris's Wisconsin rally that ended up on page 815. “Ms. Harris,” the Times writes, “vowed to defeat Mr. Trump by attacking him, as a prosecutor pursuing a scoundrel, a tribune of the middle class fighting against a willing tool of billionaires, and as a champion of abortion rights against a man who would deny all Americans the right to the procedure if given the chance.” The story writes that Biden's withdrawal from the race and his replacement with Harris have nearly overnight transformed what for months had been a desultory, almost perfunctory campaign into a bastion of enthusiasm. And the Times reports that a survey by Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC, found that among Democratic-leaning voters in battleground states who are between the ages of 18 and 34, “the percentage of voters who said they would definitely vote increased by five percentage points in the 24 hours after Mr. Biden's withdrawal.” Seems like a pretty relevant vibe story if you want to put a vibe story out front. 

Also, weirdly, there's nothing about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving an address to Congress today, except as a little bit of table setting in a piece under the headline, “Harris's views on Israel now enter the spotlight.” I would think having a major war criminal (and regular criminal) giving a speech on US soil about one of the most divisive issues of the moment would be worth a little preview, but apparently not. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.