Good morning. It is September 19th. It is another cloudy morning 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. 

There are new polls out this morning. The New York Times website says “Harris had stronger debate, polls find, but the race remains deadlocked. Kamala Harris holds an edge over Donald Trump in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. But new surveys found that the race remains a toss up nationally.”

Meanwhile, over on the Washington Post homepage, it's, “Harris and Trump essentially tied in Pennsylvania, Post poll finds.” There is your up-to-the-minute polling news. Each paper has written an article or two digging into the meaning of its share of the mutually incompatible poll results, if anyone wants to read them and come away knowing less about the election than they did before. 

On the front of the paper, New York Times, Israel's two-day mass bombing campaign against Hezbollah takes up the two lead news columns. On the right, “new explosions rock Hezbollah, leaving 20 dead. Walkie-talkies erupt. Beirut buildings burn in second coordinated attack in two days.” And next to that, “news analysis. For militants, toll is mental and physical. Blasts puncture image as powerful as Israeli foe.” In that latter piece, you have to go through an expert calling the attacks “a kind of sword stabbed deep into the organization's body.” Before very late, you arrive at “There is nothing in Hezbollah's history or ideology that suggests that the attacks will cause it to seek an accommodation with Israel.” 

Above that on the Jump page is another news analysis piece. “A tactical success for Israel with no clear strategic effect. Israelis are divided over whether the attack was born of short-term opportunism or long-term forethought. Some believe that Israeli commanders feared that their Hezbollah counterparts had recently discovered Israel’s ability to sabotage the pagers, prompting Israeli commanders to immediately blow them up or risk losing the capability forever. Others,” the Times continue, “say that Israel had a specific strategic intent. It may have hoped that the attacks brazenness and sophistication would ultimately make Hezbollah more amenable to a ceasefire in the coming weeks, if not immediately.” What is there to even say about the logic of that latter proposition? By what mechanism does a terror bombing operation against a militant group on their home territory reduce the chance of future hostilities? What does Israel think a winning strategy would look like? 

Next to all that is a one -column full -length story under the headline, “Pager Firm in Taiwan, Distancing from Attack.” That really deepens the mystery of what the Times chooses to stick into the print edition and why. The piece is essentially an incremental memo toward the scoop that a bunch of different Times reporters got and put up on the web yesterday. Where this morning's paper has the pager manufacturer Gold Apollo in Taiwan saying the pagers were actually made by another company, which the Times reports Gold Apollo identified as BAC Consulting, a firm it described as having an address in Budapest. Yesterday's online coverage confirmed that the pagers had been manufactured by BAC under contract with Gold Apollo and that BAC was a front company wrapped in shell companies run by Israeli intelligence. An effort that went so far as to build ordinary pagers and ship them to ordinary customers.

Back on page one, above the fold in the middle, “Trump's post -election threats unnerve officials.” The story about how Donald Trump on the campaign trail and on social media is promising to crack down on what he calls corrupt election officials, saying they will be “sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels unfortunately never seen before in our country.” On its base, the Times writes “the statements or promises to enforce the law, but coming from Mr. Trump, a politician who has repeatedly claimed to see corruption and fraud where there is no evidence of either, and who as president pressured law enforcement officials to act on his complaints, the words raise the prospect that government officials could be investigated and prosecuted for conducting a fair election.” 

Take the jump on that story and above it, in another truly inscrutable decision, The Times has gotten Lisa Lehrer writing a news analysis piece that's the credulous version of Peter Baker's front page piece from two days ago about Trump and violence. The headline is, “Trump flips the script on being labeled a danger to democracy.” As Lehrer builds the whole piece around Trump's complaints that by criticizing him as a threat to democracy, Democrats are actually endangering him. An argument again, so wildly disingenuous that Peter Baker saw through it and dispensed with it in a few lines. 

Back on page one, on the left, just above the fold, “Big Fed rate cut shows optimism, turning from inflation to protecting jobs.” about the Federal Reserve's decision to cut the interest rate by half a percentage point, which the Times calls, “a clear signal that central bankers think they are winning their war against inflation and are turning their attention to protecting the job market. So far,” the Times writes lower down, “Fed officials have managed to slow inflation notably without causing major economic problems. The unemployment rate has crept up, but it hasn't jumped painfully. Hiring persists, though it has slowed. Consumer spending remains strong. Overall growth is still robust.”

What a great upbeat page one story about how successfully our federal bankers are doing their jobs. If you take the jump to page A18 and go down to the bottom of the page there, some other characters in the drama appear under the headline, “Rate cut caps winning streak for Biden and Harris on prices. But will it matter?” Dateline Washington, “after more than a year of waiting, hoping and assuring Americans that the economy could pull off a so -called soft landing, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris appear to be on the brink of seeing that happen. Inflation has cooled, economic growth remains strong, though job gains are slowing, mortgage costs are falling, and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a percentage point on Wednesday. And yet,” the Times continues, “it is unclear whether those developments will significantly alter voters' predominantly negative perceptions of the economy ahead of the presidential election. 

If only there were some institution that could help the public understand how the White House's stewardship of the economy has gone, by discussing good economic news for the administration as being good economic news for the administration, on page one, rather than putting it on page A18 with undermining spin about how it doesn't matter. 

Inside the paper on page A12, the president of Rutgers, Jonathan Holloway, announced that he will be stepping down as president before the end of his five-year contract. Journalistic Disclosure, the host of the Indignity Morning Podcast is married to someone who works at Rutgers. The notable part of the story comes in the next to the last column, where the Times writes, “of the seven college leaders who testified about anti -Semitism on campus before the House Committee on Education in the Workforce since the October 7th attack on Israel, only two, Presidents Michael Schill of Northwestern and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, have not announced their resignations.” That's a pretty efficient right-wing purge of higher education, especially with the right-wingers ostensibly only controlling one house of Congress.

And, as for their control of that House of Congress, on page A16, still stubbornly nowhere near the front page, “House defeats Johnson's spending proposal with shutdown looming, House Speaker Mike Johnson's effort to hold federal spending hostage, to promote a voter-suppressing proof of citizenship requirement, and to amplify Donald Trump's claims that Democrats are trying to steal the election from him by arranging for huge numbers of non-citizens to vote, fell apart under bipartisan opposition, with the deadline for funding the federal government less than two weeks away.” Is this a relevant story that might influence what American voters decide to do at the polls in November? Apparently it's not relevant enough yet. 

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. Our work is sustained by your paid subscriptions to Indignity along with your tips and donations, so please click the relevant buttons. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.