Good morning. It is September 19th. It is sunny in New York City. It's supposed to be warm again as astronomical summer makes the most of its last few days, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Senate Republicans activated the much discussed nuclear option yesterday, setting aside the filibuster to push through four dozen Trump nominees on a single simple majority vote. The appointments that went through yesterday, Politico reports include Kimberly Guilfoyle to be ambassador to Greece, Callista Gingrich to be ambassador to Sweden and Liechtenstein, and Brandon Williams to be undersecretary for nuclear security at the Department of Energy. Guilfoyle, the story continues, is the ex-wife of California's Democratic governor Gavin Newsom and a former romantic partner of Donald Trump Jr. Also, though Politico doesn't mention it, a big speaker at the January 6th rally. While Gingrich, Politico writes, is married to former speaker Newt Gingrich. Williams is a former Republican House member from New York. The Senate majority's choice to embrace the drastic maneuver did not rate any coverage as an event unto itself in today's print edition of the New York Times, but was folded into a NEWS ANALYSIS piece about Majority Leader John Thune on page A17. “In polarized Senate, Leader chips away at precedent. The move,” the Times writes, “marked the third time this year that Mr. Thune had steered around Senate precedents to advance Mr. Trump's priorities. In the process, he has strayed from his reputation as an institutionalist,”— a lot of that going around— “and bowed to the rough-and-tumble politics of an increasingly polarized Congress.”

“Rough-and-tumble” doesn't seem exactly right for what's more of a policy of mass submission to the executive. Anyway, that said, “in May,” the Times continues, “Mr. Thune made an end run around the filibuster to block California's plan to phase out gas-powered vehicles, turning to a complicated procedural process to help ease some Republicans' concerns over unilaterally rewriting Senate rules. The next month, on a party-line vote, Republicans set a new precedent that upended how the costs of tax cuts are counted in federal budgeting, moving to lock in an accounting gimmick that smoothed the path for enactment of Mr. Trump's sprawling domestic policy bill. The change eroded one of the last bulwarks against unchecked deficits and dealt a blow to the filibuster, vastly expanding the scope of fiscal policy bills that can be pushed through on a simple majority vote. The latest change,” the story continues, “effectively eliminated senators' power to slow the consideration of individual nominees, by insisting they be subject to further scrutiny or a separate formal vote. The move undercut the chamber's constitutional role of vetting the president's selections.” It sure did do that. This is a drastic development that seems like it deserves more prominent coverage, but it's one more instance of the ongoing problem with covering Donald Trump and his party, which is that terrible, drastic things are also entirely expected.

Knowing that the Senate went ahead and jammed through Kimberly Guilfoyle's appointment to be an ambassador at the expense of longstanding procedural rules just affirms the already established situation of the Senate. Framing it as a steady erosion of John Thune's values as an institutionalist is kind of funny, but likewise not super revealing about what it means to be a Republican at the moment.

And on the subject of compliance with Donald Trump, ABC News reports, “President Donald Trump is expected to fire the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after investigators were unable to find incriminating evidence of mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James, according to sources. Federal prosecutors in Virginia,” the story continues, “had uncovered no clear evidence to prove that James had knowingly committed mortgage fraud when she purchased a home in the state in 2023 ABC News first reported earlier this week, but Trump officials pushed U.S. Attorney Eric Siebert to nevertheless bring criminal charges against her, according to sources. Administration officials have told Siebert of Trump's intention to fire him. Sources familiar with the matter said, Siebert's last day on the job is expected to be Friday.” That's today. The story goes on to say that this could heighten concerns about Trump's alleged use of the DOJ to target his political adversaries. At some point you don't really need to be saying concerns or alleged. And firing a prosecutor for deciding someone didn't commit a prosecutable crime seems like it would be that point. 

Online, the Times is reporting, “Draft legislation is circulating at the White House and on Capitol Hill that would hand President Trump sweeping power to wage war against drug cartels he deems to be terrorists, as well as against any nation he says has harbored or aided them, according to people familiar with the matter.” This is an attempt to retroactively grant Trump the power he already used to use the military to massacre people in unarmed boats in the Caribbean. The story does note, via the former Bush administration justice department official Jack Goldsmith, that killing boats of civilians under a military authorization remains an act of murder under international law.

This story deepens the ongoing mystery around Donald Trump's claim to reporters on Tuesday that the United States had blown up a third boat and the mystery around the coverage of that claim. After appearing in a news analysis story yesterday, the third boat has disappeared again from this one, which just refers to the president making two attacks on boats. It seems profoundly unnerving that on top of a pair of declared murders accompanied by video illustrations. The president also has this Schrödinger's murder in a complete informational black box so that the press doesn't seem to know whether or not it happened. Again, this is just a strange way to handle an ongoing crime spree. Hard to imagine if the Son of Sam killer had put out a letter saying he'd killed again, but no one knew where the body was. The press would just sit back and let the question slide. 

Also online, presumably destined for a nice prominent placement in some future print edition. The Times takes a look at what Elon Musk has been doing for the past few months. “Since leaving Washington,” the headline is, “Elon Musk has been all in on his AI company. Mr. Musk spent the summer at his artificial intelligence startup XAI, trying to match the runaway success of OpenAI. The result was chaos. In a rare company-wide meeting on Wednesday,” the Times writes, “Elon Musk laid out his vision for X.A.I., his two-year-old startup that is chasing its competitors in the race to build artificial intelligence. Using the lofty language that has typified Mr. Musk's A.I. dreams for more than a decade, he told employees that he wanted to build systems that were maximally truth-seeking while previewing plans to build a Microsoft competitor called MacroHard.” The language wasn't exclusively lofty, It seems. “‘We are the only company where the mission is truth,’ Mr. Musk told his workers as part of an hour and a half presentation that was listened to by the New York Times. ‘If you force the AI to lie or believe things that are not true, you're at great risk of creating a dystopian future.’” The story goes on to say somewhat delicately “over the summer Mr. Musk spent most of his time at ex AI offices in Palo Alto, California, working in frantic all-day spurts that sometimes stretched into the next day, according to three people with knowledge of the company's operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Occasionally, as he has with his other companies over the years, he has slept at the office.” How that work schedule and the rhetoric may connect with the prior reporting on Musk's copious ingestion of drugs is left as an exercise to the reader. The story describes Musk forcing out the premier AI researchers at the company and precipitating the AI chatbot Grok’s notorious white genocide and Mecha Hitler episodes by demanding that the bot be less woke, which was what led it to start shoehorning references to white genocide conspiracies into its answers, and more viral, which led it to rename itself Mecha Hitler.

The story ends by talking about how Musk wants to get Tesla to invest in XAI, as the artificial intelligence company already supposedly provides the brains for Tesla's mostly vaporware Optimus robot project. The story quotes Musk, “My prediction is, Optimus will be more productive than the entire global economy, that the output of goods and services from Optimus will far exceed the global economy of everyone on earth.” In general, the Times' strategy of coyly letting material speak for itself is annoying and inadequate. But that quote, yeah, on top of those overnight work binges, that quote is pretty clear. 

On the front of the print edition of the Times, the lead story is a MEDIA MEMO, a rare occurrence of that rubric on page one, let alone at the top of the page. “Trump Hits the Media With Everything He Has / Kimmel’s Fall Part of Wider Crackdown.” It's a roundup of how the president is silencing and extorting the major news media and their leadership is meekly going along. 

Next to that, under a picture of more Palestinians trying to get away from the attack on Gaza City, there's a NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “Netanyahu’s Split With Generals Grows / Risky Actions Opposed by Israel’s Military. Top military and security officials,” the Times writes, “have been at odds with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently over three critical policies, his decisions to take over Gaza City, the enclave's main urban center, and to strike at senior Hamas officials in Qatar, and his approach to negotiations on ending the war.” The story goes on to detail how the Israeli military's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, opposed the assault on Gaza City, “but, the story says, in Israel's democratic system, by law, military and security chiefs must ultimately comply with government decisions or resign. General Zamir has chosen to stay on so far.” 

And the final story above the fold on the left-hand side is a real doozy of Times headline writing. “Northeast Bloc Aims to Rebuke U.S. on Health.” The story begins, “New York and several other northeastern states are forging a regional public health coalition to issue vaccine recommendations and coordinate public health efforts in a rebuke to the Trump administration's shifts on health policy.” Right, so that headline, the states are not aiming to “rebuke” anybody. They're aiming to immunize people against communicable disease. And by “U.S.,” the headline means “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” 

A story inside the paper on page A16 says, “in a meeting that devolved into confusion and near chaos, federal advisors on Thursday voted eight to three against vaccinating children under four years old with a combination shot that protects against measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox. The meeting ended without a planned vote on whether newborns should receive the vaccine against hepatitis B, a highly infectious disease that damages the liver, as is currently the standard. That vote was postponed until Friday. In a sign of how hastily the committee was put together, the advisors, about half of whom were only appointed to the panel by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this week, needed explanations of the usual protocol for these meetings, the design of scientific studies, and critical flaws in the data they suggested including. The panelists also seemed unsure about the purpose of the Vaccines for Children program, which provides free shots to roughly half of all American children. Approving which vaccines the program should cover is a key function of the committee.”

Story goes on, “the decision to rescind the MMRV recommendation is unlikely to have widespread consequences. The recommendations for other vaccines given separately to protect against those diseases, the more common practice, remain unchanged. In a bizarre twist,” the story continues, “the members also voted 8 to 1 to have vaccines for children continue to cover the MMRV vaccine for children under 4. It was unclear whether the members all understood what they were voting for.” It's true in a philosophical and moral sense that this collection of cranks and idiots convened by RFK Jr., a paranoid and literally brain damaged grifter who was pushed into nationwide power and influence on the strength of a presidential campaign astroturfed by a dilettante billionaire divorcee, does represent the fruit of our existing national political system, but it seems unfair to this newly formed Northeast public health collaborative and its efforts to bring into being a different and less toxic state of affairs to make the entire United States a metonym for What RFK jr. Is up to.

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