Good morning. It's May 24th. It is a warm morning on the way to a hot day 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. The front page of this morning's New York Times leads with a news analysis piece. U .S. strains to aid Gaza from its peer. Looting complicates delivery of supplies. The other complication has the story makes clear is that the Israeli military has imposed starvation, ruin, and chaos on Gaza, which makes delivering food aid to the war zone inherently impossible. The whole floating pier project, that's the subject of the story, is a ridiculous workaround to appear to be doing something while avoiding doing anything to make our notional ally stop intentionally starving people. The UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA,

The Times writes, suspended food distribution in Rafa on Tuesday, citing lack of security. It added that it had not received any medical supplies for 10 days because of closures and disruptions at the Rafa and Karim Shalom border crossings. Next to the story is a picture of a bunch of people getting boxes from an aid truck in a cloud of dust, which someone at The Times unfortunately chose to caption.

Palestinians swarmed around trucks delivering aid into central Gaza on Saturday through a pier newly built by the US military. Swarmed is really not a good word choice for desperate human beings, especially when the people perpetrating their misery have been talking about them as vermin. Speaking of RAFA and the RAFA border crossing, the International Court of Justice this morning ordered Israel to open the RAFA border crossing and also ordered it to stop its military assault on Rafa. The court has no enforcement powers, the Guardian noted in reporting the breaking news. In the Times' story about Rafa, printed before today's court decisions, it wrote that according to the United Nations, 816 ,000 people have now fled the city, bound to the Times' rights, for the war -ravaged cities of Cañunas and Dío Albala farther north, and the coastal village of Al -Mawasi.

Most of those people were in Rafa because they'd fled there from other parts of Gaza that the Israeli military had destroyed. On the left -hand side of page one, there's a scrupulously neutral headline on a flagrantly non -neutral Supreme Court decision. In top court, GOP prevails on voting map. Partisanship versus racial aims in South Carolina. Adam Liptak's lead gets at it a little more straightforwardly.

The Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that a lower court had deemed an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that resulted in the bleaching of African -American voters from a district. The ruling, the story says a little lower down, was the latest in a series of closely divided decisions on elections that characterized the work of the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., including ones that have amplified the role of money in politics, made it easier to restrict voting and exempted partisan gerrymandering from review in federal court. That's a useful corrective to the coverage of John Roberts as a high -minded institutionalist, worried about protecting the court's integrity against his more rabid colleagues to the right. The Chief Justice is and has always been a Republican partisan, and specifically, his life's work has been focused on undoing the voting rights gains of the civil rights movement.

In yesterday's decision, Justice Samuel Alito, last seen flying insurrectionist flags from his houses, declared that in examining a case where legislature is accused of gerrymandering for racist purposes, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith. We do, do we? What in the world about American history or current events would lead a person to make that particular presumption?

Elsewhere on page one, there's the news of the Justice Department's suit to break up the Live Nation Ticketmaster Entertainment Industry Monopoly. There really is a version of the Biden administration that should win a 50 -state popular landslide just for having taken some coherent, identifiable measures to stop people from being constantly jerked around and ripped off. And on the front of the business section, the headline is Silicon Valley notables are shifting to the right, the illustration for which is dominated by lifelong reactionary Peter Thiel, who according to the story, even as his peers throw tantrums against the Biden administration for regulating their industry a little bit, has said, the Times writes, he's disillusioned with politics and plans to stay out of the 2024 race. Here it's worth noting that every public statement Peter Thiel makes is an instrumental lie but if you take it at face value, it sort of messes up the premise of the story. And there are a couple of strange jurisdictional decisions in the business section. Page B1 has a story about the possibility that Donald Trump would interfere with the Federal Reserve in the second term as president. Money is business, but that seems like a political question that might be of interest to general audiences, as is on page three, under the climate heading. You can use that as the Times writes.

Senate Democrats opened an investigation on Thursday into former president Donald J. Trump's meeting with oil and gas executives last month to determine whether Mr. Trump offered a policies for money transaction when he asked for $1 billion for his 2024 campaign so he could retake the White House and delete president Biden's climate regulations. Jamie Raskin had already opened an investigation in the House, but House Democrats don't have subpoena power. There is no way under our existing Supreme Court jurisprudence that telling oil executives to give you a billion dollars because you're going to do the things they want done would count as soliciting a bribe. It's just people getting together and talking about their interests and then potentially moving money around, which is just another form of talking. Nevertheless, putting it on the record is the only tool left in this country to challenge this kind of corruption. But if the Times is going to stick it inside the business section, there's not much hope for even that approach.

That is the news. Get out there in the sunshine. Enjoy your long daylight hours and your Memorial Day weekend. And if all goes well, we will talk again on Tuesday.