Good morning. It is July 19th and it is a pleasant and mild morning in New York City for once. The humidity is low and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. First, I just wanted to say I got a nice note from faithful listener Matt yesterday saying he enjoyed yesterday's episode and that was nice to hear. If you enjoy the Indignity Morning Podcast, go ahead and say so. Tell a friend. Hit that paid subscription button. We do the talking and the uploading because you're out there doing the listening and the downloading. 

Anyway, global info tech apparently crashed overnight as the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike pushed out a defective update that caused Windows machines everywhere to crash. The outage swept the globe. The Wall Street Journal writes, knocking out operations for banks, media companies, and emergency services, and forcing airlines to ground flights. “Many affected machines,” the journal writes, “were unable to restart, instead showing a blue error screen, sometimes called the blue screen of death.” People have been posting about having medical appointments canceled because of hospital systems being down, and the MTA bus tracker had a big service warning, although it seems to be working okay now. On the front page of the morning edition of the print New York Times, there is nothing about Donald Trump's speech to the Republican National Convention last night because the former president rambled on and on and on, long past print deadlines in a speech I would describe as unlistenable, except that out of professional obligation, I did somehow sit through it. Now and then he would actually read the teleprompter and deliver some really vile verbiage, presumably from Stephen Miller, about undocumented migrants, and the sick, sick crimes that Trump and his people love to think about them committing. After sending out prepared remarks, talking soberly about unity for the more gullible media outlets to pre -write into stories about his new tone, and after an opening segment telling the story of how he got shot in the ear over the weekend, the former president went back to ranting about crazy Nancy Pelosi, warning that he will never permit another result like the 2020 election, in which he lost the balloting and was unsuccessful in stealing it, to happen again, and basically carried on being a decrepit, more low -energy version of the exact same person he always has been and always will be. It went on for more than 90 minutes, dethroning Bill Clinton promoting himself, at Michael Dukakis's expense in 1988, as the most boring, unendurable convention speech that I've heard in my life.

As we discussed yesterday, the mummified corpse of Hulk Hogan was one of the warm -up acts. So was Kid Rock. So was one of Trump's golf club managers. The weird shabby production included more than 20 minutes of the band vamping to fill time in the prime 9 o 'clock hour. More or less what you might expect from a party whose operating funds had been looted to pay for the nominees' criminal defense expenses. 

Anyway,  the lead story on the Times is how Trump stifled GOP and remade its platform, reporting that when the delegates arrived, their cell phones were confiscated and placed in magnetically sealed pouches. And then they were given a platform document prepared by the Trump team. This is something that ultimately you'll pass, Mr. Trump told the delegates by phone and made audible to the room. The Times writes, according to a person who was there and who was not authorized to speak publicly, you'll pass it quickly. He was right. The Times continues, within hours, the platform committee had endorsed a document that Mr. Trump had personally dictated parts of, according to two people with direct knowledge of the events, and it all happened before the delegates got their phones back. That may help explain the palpable sense from the convention hall that these people don't want to win. But speaking of not wanting to win, next to that above the fold is “Biden is said to soften on ending his campaign.” Three bylines on a non -development. “One of the people close to him warned that the president had not yet made up his mind to leave the race.” They write. Well, OK. Nevertheless, here we are on page one. Right alongside news analysis, “Pelosi presses Biden on odds. She doubts he'll win and fears toll on party. The former Speaker of the House,” the Times writes, “has let it be known in the days since his disastrous debate performance that she is skeptical that the president can win and his loss, she fears could cost the party its chance to win back the House, potentially its only firewall against a second Donald J. Trump presidency.” This seems to be the message that the Remove Biden movement has settled on now, that his intransigence in staying in the race, despite having lost the ability to speak fluently in public, is going to drag the whole party down in defeat. This more or less contradicts the strongest evidence against Biden's candidacy, which is that he's visibly polling far behind the party's House and Senate candidates. It's also just all around loser brain to talk from a party that's running against a guy who just got up on TV and showed how comprehensively unappealing he is. 

Also on page one, filling some space, “potential second lady shows a new kind of image making” as a critics notebook column examines the fact that Usha Vance, the wife of new vice presidential nominee JD Vance, stands out from all the other women in the Trump circle by not going around dressed up in drag, or what Vanessa Friedman tries to more tactfully call “the very specific mold of femininity that has become the norm in the world of Trump and a defining gender trope in its own political reality show.” Welcome to the life you've chosen, Usha Vance. The only genuinely entertaining moment in all of last night's program was when the camera happened to find her just as Kid Rock launched into the opening of “American Badass” in front of her and she briefly lost the ability to maintain a cheerful neutral expression. Turns out that winning at this game asks more of you than to enjoy a tasting menu with Peter Thiel. You wanted success? Welcome to success. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. Get out and enjoy the weekend before the filthy heat comes back. And if all goes well, we will talk again on Monday.