Good morning. It's October 30th. It's a bright morning in New York on the way up to legitimately unseasonable temperatures, at least under the pre-apocalyptic standard of seasonability. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

In a more direct manifestation of the climate apocalypse, at least 72 people are dead in Valencia after the Spanish province received more than a foot of rain yesterday causing widespread flash flooding. The six Republican justices of the Supreme Court issued an order this morning allowing Virginia's governor, Glenn Youngkin, to resume carrying out a last minute purge of voter rolls the two lower courts had found to be illegal. The order, delivered with no explanation, apparently accepts Virginia's argument that the real outcome of kicking eligible voters off the rolls within the time window protected by election law is outweighed by the hypothetical risk that a non-citizen might cast a vote. Unlike in 2020, when the effort to steal the election was disorganized, the federal and state efforts by Republicans to throw the election to Donald Trump appear to be working in harmony so far. 

Apologies for the background noise. It sounds like they're sawing pipes somewhere in the heating system to get it ready for the winter. And the whole thing is just reverberating. Hellgate's morning news roundup brings word that jaywalking is now legal, or at least decriminalized, in New York City. That means if you step off in mid-block, the cops can't give you a ticket, though you still don't have the right of way. But it's a start. The New York Yankees avoided being swept in the World Series by scavenging a game 4 win, 11 to 4, over the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers still lead the series three games to one. The game was punctuated by a pair of Yankee fans mugging Mookie Betts of the Dodgers as he reached into the stands to catch a ball. One of the Yankee fans wrenched his glove around until the ball popped out. The umpires called an out on fan interference. The wrist strength that makes Betts a world-class amateur bowler apparently protected him from injury. And because the Yankees fan base is a bunch of degenerates, protected and encouraged by a degenerate national sports press, the fans are doing a triumphant media tour, bragging about how they defend the ballpark instead of sitting in Rikers. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead story is “Trump portends ethics concerns larger than ’16.” Doesn't seem like “portends” is the right verb there at all, but the subhead brings a little clarity. “No promises of limits. Recent deals make him more entangled with foreign interests.” Another case where they're doing this in the final moments before election day when they could have blown out the front page for it months ago. The story being that Donald Trump has spent the last four years making financial arrangements, including business deals with foreign governments, that would make it categorically impossible for him to carry out his duties as president without enriching himself, and that he has rejected the idea of reinstating even the mostly symbolic and widely breached ethical limits that were supposed to be in place for his original term. “This year alone,” the Times writes, “the Trump Organization struck real estate deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, countries that are central to American foreign policy interests. Mr. Trump,” the Times continues, “also turned his social media platform into a publicly traded company whose shares could be bought by foreigners. And he recently unveiled a cryptocurrency venture that might face oversight from federal regulators who are appointed by the president.” All that is obviously bad, but not so obviously that any existing mechanisms in our system will stop him from doing it. Even while all these conflicts have proliferated, the Times notes that “if Mr. Trump was to win, there would be little ability to curb them. Legal and ethics experts said. A landmark Supreme Court ruling in July, for instance, granted presidents broad immunity for official acts taken in office — a sweeping protection that could prevent prosecutors from bringing future charges against Mr. Trump.” Doing favors for foreign governments does seem like a core function of the presidency. Setting the regulations that govern his own cryptocurrency ventures likewise is a basic matter of executive authority. There is, the story notes, still the emoluments clause in the Constitution. But no one knows how that would apply to Trump because despite the fact that he started taking bags of money at his Washington DC hotel from foreign governments immediately on becoming president, the litigation around whether there is any way to hold him accountable for that dragged out for the full four years until he left office and the Supreme Court declared it moot. 

The rest of the top of page one, a four-column photograph and the left-hand news column, is taken over by another killing spree by the Israeli military. “Dozens killed as Israelis hit northern Gaza is the headline.” The subhead, incredibly, after more than a year of this stuff, is “another effort to quell Hamas in the area.” Here by effort to “quell Hamas,” the headline writer is referring to what the story describes as striking a residential building and killing dozens of people. “The Palestinian Civil Defense, a Gazan emergency service,” the Times writes, “said at least 55 people had been killed. Gaza's health ministry put the toll higher, saying that at least 93 people had been killed, including 25 children.” The Times continues, “the Israeli military, which asserts it is fighting a regrouped Hamas presence in northern Gaza, said that it was aware of reports that civilians were harmed and was looking into the details.” There are a lot of details for the Israelis to look into, given that, according to the story, this was the third strike on a residential block in Beit Lahia since October 20th, each of the other two strikes also having killed the grimly indeterminate dozens of people, according to the Times, including the Times' writes, “Palestinian officials, and emergency workers.”

Lower down on the page, the story is “Why Florida is no longer up for grabs.” The answer being a Republican party that did everything it could to turn narrow victories into crushing single party control of the state and a feckless state Democratic party that withered up and blew away under the strain. The story in classic Times fashion, is almost entirely focused on the latter. Somehow nowhere in the story as it recounts how Democrats fell behind Republicans by a margin of about one million active registered voters. Does the Times mention that the first thing that Governor Ron DeSantis did on narrowly winning office was to team up with the Republican state legislature to nullify a ballot measure that the citizens of Florida had just passed that was supposed to have enfranchised something like a million people who had been convicted of felonies? Seems like a pretty germane plot point. But yes, also the Democrats decentralized their voter registration activities and younger Latino voters turned out more conservative than expected. So there are lots of different stories you can choose to tell. 

Inside the paper, the national section leads off with “From Propriety to Profanity, GOP's potty mouths get a green light, in which the times counted how much Donald Trump and his fellow speakers have been cussing. “The computer analysis,” the Times writes, “showed that Mr. Trump's use of curses has been on the rise, particularly in the last few months as the campaign heated up. But Mr. Trump, now 78, did not resort to such language nearly as much during the final months of the 2020 campaign, according to the analysis, and some experts point to his increased profanity as an example of disinhibition, a trait often found with aging as people become less restrained in what they say.”

Below that is more fallout from the “Island of Garbage” comment reported on the Puerto Rican side. The entirety of page A-15 is dedicated to the overall political damage, including a sidebar under the headline, “Misogynistic, bigoted and crude rally remarks Trump hasn't disavowed.” I would not have predicted Trump getting in actual trouble for racism would be a big part of the end game, but somehow here we are. 

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. The podcast is supported by your subscription dollars to Indignity. Please subscribe if you haven't already. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.