Good morning. It is October 2nd. It is another cool, pleasant morning in New York City. Plenty of sun shining out there, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The federal government is still shut down and there are no particular indications that anything's going to make that change anytime soon. The Trump administration has apparently commandeered employees out of office email messages across the federal government, so they spit out automated talking points, blaming the shutdown on the radical left or on Democrats. 

Despite those efforts, or maybe in a reflection of the underlying reality that informs those efforts, the Washington Post reports that it did a flash poll, which the Post writes, “finds that 47 % of Americans blame President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress for the partial government shutdown, compared with 30 % who blame Democrats in Congress. A significant 23 % said they were not sure.” That not sure category is interesting, especially a subset of it. The Post goes on to write, “the poll is full of fascinating findings, including that political independents are more than twice as likely to blame Trump and Republicans than Democrats.” That's badly written, but it doesn't mean that independents are assigning twice as much blame to Trump and Republicans as Democrats are assigning to Trump and Republicans. 

The rate at which Democrats blame Republicans comes up in the next sentence. “Meanwhile,” the Post writes “Democrats are more likely to blame Republicans at 87 percent than Republicans are to blame Democrats, 67 percent.” All that's just the summation from the Post's morning newsletter. The poll story itself has lots more information. Surveying past blame assignment. Although it's strangely bad at establishing the context of which parties were in control of the White House and of Congress when the blame was being assigned this way or that in history. It's not easy to blame a shutdown on the other political party when your party has a trifecta. Senate Republicans could nuke the filibuster and reopen the government themselves this afternoon, if it were a high priority for them, and the specifics of the poll findings seem even less encouraging to the Republicans, than the Post's summary of them, where the newsletter says that independents are assigning blame to the Republicans at more than twice the rate they're assigning it to the Democrats, the bar graph in the poll story says that the actual numbers are 50 % of the blame going to the Republicans and only 22 % going to the Democrats.

The other number that jumps out is that while 11 % of Democrats say they're not sure who to blame, 25 % of Republicans say they're not sure, and 8 % of Republicans outright blame the Republicans, as opposed to 2 % of Democrats blaming Democrats, in a hyper-polarized electorate where Republicans have long since learned to just agree to any proposition in the poll that would indicate they support Donald Trump.

The fact that a full third of Republicans are choosing some other option makes it look like Trump is off to a weak start in the shutdown, as does the fact that the administration sent out JD Vance to talk to the press about it yesterday in the grand tradition of dumping losing subjects on the vice president's plate. Despite the op-ed the New York Times gave Newt Gingrich earlier in the week in which a politician who wants the Democrats to fail and whose spouse enjoys a European ambassadorship under the current administration, declared that a shutdown would not advance the Democrats' interests. Gingrich wrote that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, unlike Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in 1995, lack broader goals that the American people support. “By many accounts,” Gingrich wrote, “Democrats are poised to shut down the government in order to look like they're willing to do something, anything to thwart Mr. Trump, that might be with their base wants but it's not how you go about trying to win back the house majority.” But what if thwarting Donald Trump is the broader goal that the American public is behind? Stopping Donald Trump and his policy certainly seems a lot more popular than what Gingrich is pushing, which is the notion that Americans wanted to see Republicans reject the idea of what he calls “larding on billions for Medicaid spending” and what other people might call “funding people's health coverage.” It's certainly true that Jeffries and Schumer do not have the kind of aggressive messaging that Newt Gingrich had in 1995, but that just points to one advantage that they may have created for themselves this time around through their own fecklessness and incoherence, which is that nobody sees Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries as having the kind of determination and force of will that could win them the credit or blame for the shutdown. 

The Republicans, after entirely organizing themselves around a strongman politics, are now left in the position of trying to argue that their strongman just can't keep the government open because these guys are stopping him. 

The shutdown dominates the front of this morning's New York Times. There's a big picture of a darkened Capitol Rotunda. Next to a two-column wide right-hand news slot. “Trump Uses Shutdown To Punish Blue States As Layoffs Grow Near.” On the right, “An Apparent Effort to Inflict Pain as a Fight Intensifies.” On the left, “NEWS ANALYSIS / A Gamble Each Side Is Willing to Take.”  The right-hand news story begins “The Trump administration took steps on Wednesday to maximize the pain of the government shutdown, halting billions of dollars in funds for democratic-led states, while readying a plan to lay off potentially droves of civil servants imminently. The moves by the White House appeared both unprecedented and punitive, underscoring the risks of a fiscal stalemate that had no end in sight. It also evinced how President Trump might try to leverage the government-wide closure to achieve his agenda, slash the budget, and exact revenge on his political enemies.”

Right, the trouble here is that the president is already doing those things and the threat that he may increase the scale of them under a government shutdown doesn't account for the fact that he's already been increasing the scale of them. So in the NEWS ANALYSIS column, after the Times notes that the ideological makeup of the Democrats has shifted to the left since the days back in 2018 when they caved and immediately tried to get out of the shutdown. The Times writes “the Democrats shrugged off Mr. Trump's threat to engage in the wholesale firing of federal workers, saying he would do so regardless of the status of government funding.” And the story continues, “Democrats do not see much benefit in providing the votes for a temporary spending extension, since Mr. Trump and his budget czar, Russell T. Vought, have already demonstrated that they are willing to spend federal dollars or not spend them, as the case may be, however they want, no matter what Congress says.”

And the next column over from that, a little bit above the fold, dwells into one particular aspect of votes machinations. “Trump Freezes Tunnel Money For New York. The Trump administration announced on Wednesday,” the Times writes “that it would withhold $18 billion in federal funds previously awarded to New York City for two of the largest infrastructure projects in the country. The two projects, the expansion of the Second Avenue subway line, and new commuter train tunnels under the Hudson River are aimed at improving travel for millions of travelers and daily commuters and are both underway. In fact, construction has already begun on the tunnels, a $16 billion project known as Gateway, that sits at the center of the busy Northeast corridor.” Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary and MTV real world veteran, said, the Times writes, that “funds for the two projects would not be distributed while the transportation department reviewed what it described as New York State's discriminatory unconstitutional contracting processes. The review,” the Times writes, “was in response to President Trump's executive orders earlier this year targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, Mr. Duffy said, and following a rule issued by the department on Tuesday that forbids recipients of federal transit funds to mandate race- and sex-based contracting requirements.” 

There we have one of the basic problems with writing about the Trump administration and what its officials said, in that pretty much every part of that paraphrase is false. The review was not in response to Donald Trump's executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. It was quite obviously in response to the government shutdown. Likewise, the specific transportation department rule that Duffy was citing was hastily issued to create a pretextual mechanism for taking away the funds. Duffy announced that the funding had been put under review, and that that review was unfortunately on hold because the lawyers who would do it were unavailable under the shutdown, in a single integrated action. 

The story also does not mention that the particular contracting requirements the Duffy claims may violate the rule that he just issued are congressionally mandated and longstanding contracting rules. 

And next to that above the fold is an obituary for Jane Goodall who died yesterday at the age of 91. The lead calls her “one of the world's most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa, primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances, and engaged in organized warfare.” Here on the far side of nearly seven decades of reevaluating how special human beings are relative to the rest of the animal kingdom, it's still amazing to realize that science only knows about what seemed like super basic facts, like chimpanzees fishing for termites with blades of grass, because this person went out and looked and saw them. Goodall's work made it as impossible to over-sentimentalize our hairy cousins as it did to regard them as witless brutes. One nice detail in the obituary is that after she had her child, whom she nicknamed Grub, when she returned to the field, she kept Grub in a protective cage while she was in the forest with him. She feared that he might be killed and eaten by the chimps. 

And in a news story that ran yesterday in Chicago, but is only really starting to make its way around the internet at large today, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the latest evolution of the harmless Kavanaugh stop to investigate potential immigration violations. “Dan Jones,” the paper writes, “was jolted awake around 1 a.m. Tuesday to the sound of federal agents trying to break through his apartment door. They couldn't get past his double lock, so he went back to bed. But when he woke up hours later for work, he walked out and found broken doors littering the hallway and his neighbors missing. Jones, 27, is among the residents left at 7500 South South Shore Drive who are trying to pierce together what remains after an early morning high powered federal immigration raid led to the arrests of dozens of their neighbors at their South Shore apartment building. Armed federal agents and military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours. When he got home from work, Jones said he entered his unit to find all of his electronics and furniture missing and all of his clothes and shoes thrown on the floor. Jones said he had no idea who took his belongings and hadn't received answers from the Chicago police.” 

The feds, the paper writes, “claimed the South Shore neighborhood was a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates, but DHS gave no evidence to support the assertion and authorities did not confirm that any of the people arrested were members of the Venezuelan gang.” The paper says it's found little evidence tying the gang to violence in Chicago. Paper then talked to a 67-year-old U.S. citizen, who said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties. 

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. Keep sending those along if you're able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.