Good morning. It is August 27th. It is another mild sunny morning in New York City as we stay on a run of truly excellent weather, and this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. refused yesterday to indict Sean Dunn, the man who threw a subway sandwich to hit a Customs and Border Protection officer in the chest at point-blank range, even with the entire incident fully caught on video, and with Dunn unmistakably initiating the action, the grand jurors rejected federal assault charges. The New York Times writes, “the remarkable failure by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington was the second time in recent days that it was unable to persuade grand jurors to bring an indictment in a felony assault case against a federal agent.” 

The “second time in recent days” part, links out to a story from earlier this week about how three different grand juries refused to support felony assault charges in the case of the protester named Sydney Laurie Reed. There, the Times wrote, “on July 23, Ms. Reed was accused in a criminal complaint of having forcibly assaulted, impeded, or interfered with federal agents as they sought to transfer two alleged gang members into FBI custody at the local jail in Washington the day before. At a pair of hearings last week, prosecutors said that Ms. Reed, in an apparent act of protest, video recorded the agents and sought to place herself between them and one of the people being transferred, ignoring several orders to step back. After an immigration agent pushed Ms. Reed against a wall, the prosecutor said, she struggled, kicking and flailing her arms as an FBI agent, Eugenia Bates, rushed in to help. During the scuffle, Ms. Reed forcefully pushed Agent Bates's arm against the cement wall, prosecutor said, causing lacerations on the backside of her left hand. The felony version of the statute that was initially used to charge Ms. Reed,” the Times explained, “requires prosecutors to prove that she intended to injure the FBI agent and actually made physical contact, her lawyers have said. The lawyers argued that the altercation occurred because of the agent's own actions.” 

The sandwich guy, on the other hand, was not in a position to argue that the federal agents had started anything. Nevertheless, hitting someone in their protective vest with bread and meat wrapped in paper, even flagrantly done on purpose, apparently did not impress Dunn's grand jurors as being a felonious action. 

In other news from the occupation of Washington, DC, the Trump administration announced this morning that they intend to seize control of Union Station, taking it away from Amtrak and turning it over to MTV “Real World Boston,” and “Road Rules” star Sean Duffy who in addition to being the Secretary of Transportation is the current NASA administrator. The Times reports that in an interview with Fox Business, Duffy said, “‘we're going to take it back and we're going to drive out the homelessness. We're going to drive out the crime.’” Continuing the theme established by Vice President J.D. Vance in which the presence of homeless people is treated as synonymous with crime and inherently illegal, which in some very real sense it is, but Sean Duffy is in no way promising to crack down on the people whose wrongdoing leaves large numbers of human beings living on the streets. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, all the way down at the bottom of the page is a little referral box directing the reader to page C2 to read about the news that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey are engaged to be married. If you do a search for Taylor Swift on Google, or at least when I just did one, it sets off a cascade of animated confetti and some kind of floating glyph that kind of looks like the Sacred Heart of Jesus with an animated bubble above it that is shooting off hearts and seems to be saying that something, maybe the animation itself, has 93.64 million likes.

Even as I said that, it turned into 93.65 million likes. Two very different news judgments are on display there. Personally, I wasn't super interested in reading about the Taylor Swift news. And fundamentally, it was a piece of celebrity news released by the celebrities themselves, but, page C2, not even page C1?

Up where the Times covers the things that it does consider the news, the headline in the lead spot, two columns wide, is “Trump’s Bid to Control Fed May Roil Global Economy / Experts Warn of Inflation and Bond Chaos if Effort to Fire a Governor Succeeds.” The “if” has a lowercase “i” on it, even though it's the beginning of a line, which looks like a mistake, but is actually just the intersection of a dumb and wrong Times style rule with an esoteric Times style rule. The wrong rule is that the Times treats “if” as an insignificant itty-bitty word that goes lowercase, despite the semantic weight that “if” usually carries. And the esoteric rule is that that particular headline falls in a special front page subclass, referred to in the style book as a “V-shaped bank,” in which although it takes up multiple lines, the split between the lines is not treated as a true line break, and the lower part is centered, rather than set on the left margin with a stepwise indentation. Still looks wrong. 

But the more pressing problem with the headline is that it is one more instance of the people who set up the front page flinching away from the straightforward upsetting content of the news, to try to frame the story around abstractions and implications. The news from yesterday is not that the markets could be roiled, it’s that the president is illegally trying to fire a member of the fed and seize control of it. Very little of the story deals with the the global economic implications after the lead describes Trump's power grab as “the step that advisors warned could royal financial markets and upend a pillar of the global economy,” there's not another peep about the big picture economics until after the jump. what the experts at the top of the story are talking about instead is, as Janet Yellen, the former Fed chair and Joe Biden's Treasury secretary described it “an all-out assault on the Federal Reserve and an attempt by President Trump to really gain control over decision-making at the Fed,” and what unspecified legal experts call a strong case that the lawyer for Lisa Cook, the Fed board member who Trump is claiming the authority to fire, is correct in calling it an illegal action. The other thing about the headline writer's insistence on taking the ponderous long view, is that for the moment it's wrong. The markets are continuing their serene indifference to, or defensive hedging against the reversal or just normalization of, Trump's coup attempt at the Fed. 

Besides a headshot of Lisa Cook, the other photos on the front page, point to stories inside the paper. Above the fold is a picture of a pregnant Ukrainian soldier in fatigues. “Expectant mothers in the Ukrainian military such as Nadia, above, say they are fighting for their country and their children, Page A4,” and below the fold under the headline “’DEAR DAUGHTER,’” a photo of a mass of North Koreans in elaborate uniforms, rendered in black and white, around a white-framed inner box of the same photograph in color showing Kim Jong-un, seated, in a double-breasted overcoat, with a young looking girl standing beside him. The caption is, “In North Korea, increasing state media coverage signals the rising status of Kim Jong Un's daughter. Experts say that perhaps she is being groomed to one day take the reins of the isolated nuclear armed regime.” The status has not risen so far that the New York Times deigns to mention the name of this person who may someday lead a nuclear armed power, when you jump to page A10, the layout is so fractured and whack that it's a bit of a scavenger hunt to get her name. There's a headline, “How North Korea promotes Kim's “dear daughter” as a worthy heir” with byline beneath it. And then what seems like the lead of the story. “She holds no known official title in North Korea. The outside world has never heard her voice. The North's state media has not even named her, referring to her only as the ‘most beloved respected’ or ‘dear daughter’ of its leader, but intelligence officials and analysts in South Korea are paying close attention to the young woman whom they consider to be her father's most likely successor. She is believed to be just 12. The New York Times analyzed hundreds of images and videos of Ju Ae’s public appearances since her debut three years ago, to trace her transformation from a shy girl by her father's side to a poised public figure who shares center stage with him.” 

So there's a name, Ju Ae, but it's not presented as a full name, the way it would be on first reference. On the upper left of the page, placed higher than the headline vertically, on the gray background of a photo of a missile, are three paragraphs that look like they're in a slightly larger typeface, written up like an alternate lead. “Kim Jong-un introduced his daughter to the world in November 2022 with a show of affection and menace, holding her hand in front of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Since then, state media has shown Kim Ju Ae, more more prominently next to her father, the leader of North Korea. Now she's being hailed as a great person of guidance. A sign experts say that she is perhaps being groomed to take the reins of the isolated nuclear arms regime one day.” Apparently then that would have to be the actual lead of the story, because that's where you get her full name, and where the Times informs you that Kim Jong-un is the leader of North Korea. Basically, what a quick look at the New York Times and the web confirms happened here, is the paper published a very complicated online interactive package where photos fade in and out as you scroll and with boxes appearing around key people as the background gets tuned down and they tried to turn it into a static two-page spread in the newspaper with chaotic and borderline-incomprehensible results. For instance, that picture of a missile that I mentioned earlier is actually a picture of father and daughter walking in front of the missile, but they did the same black and white background color focus trick that they did on the front page. And this time around, I just read the colored part of the image as if it had been a separate photo from the event inset on the other one, just visually baffling. 

And in other cult of personality news back on the bottom of page one, the headline is “D.C. Residents Join in Jeering Federal Agents.” That's where it describes how agents and guardsmen have been met with spirited dissent. “Senior administration officials have been booed and heckled. Federal agents have been dogged by camera-wielding Washingtonians who have put encounter after encounter on social media. Protesters,” the story continues, “have chanted at the White House, banged on pots and pans, and serenaded agents and National Guard troops posted outside Union Station with the Imperial March from Star Wars. Also known,” the Times adds, helpfully, “as the theme song for Darth Vader and his stormtroopers. Opponents,” the story continues, have tried to break up arrests in one neighborhood, Columbia Heights, where Central American immigrants have long lived. A former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal agent has become a folk hero, his image lighting up the cityscape.” 

And that brings us back to the top of the podcast. Although it's worth noting that he wasn't a former federal employee when he threw the sandwich. It was throwing the sandwich that made him a former federal employee. The Trump administration may not have been able to get a grand jury to stick a felony on him, but they could do that.

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 with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.