Good morning. is July 17th. It's hot again in New York City. Not as hot as yesterday, but with thunderstorms supposed to arrive around dinnertime. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The big news on the right hand side of this morning's New York Times, two columns. “Menendez guilty in scheme to sell political favors.” Senator Robert Menendez after skating out of trouble over and over again through the years, got rung up by a federal jury in Manhattan for trading official favors for gold bars and other gifts. Menendez still hasn't resigned from his seat in the Democrat’s 50 seat plus the vice president Senate majority. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for him to resign. The Times reports that eight of the counts on which he was convicted carry potential 20 year sentences, but given that the Supreme Court has straight out legalized bribery at every other opportunity it's gotten, maybe he’ll just hang on anyway. Below that, just above the fold, Biden's own circle is shrinking as anxiety in the party expands. The Times is still trying to get Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. There's four bylines on this one. The story begins, “Washington. In the nearly three weeks since President Biden took the debate stage in Atlanta, and plunged his reelection campaign into chaos. His closest consultations have been not with his White House chief of staff, his top communication strategist, or even with the leader of his campaign. Instead, he is relying on members of his family, a tight -knit clan that includes his son Hunter and the First Lady, Jill Biden, along with a tiny group of loyalists to steer him through a...” including his son Hunter and the First Lady, Jill Biden? Like, you have four reporters beating this dead horse. And the big news that you break off is that Joe Biden's innermost circle is his wife and his son. What are you even doing? Exclusive: Every morning as the calls for him to step aside grow louder and louder, President Biden puts on pants. “Mr. Biden,” the Times writes, “has not consulted directly with the pollsters on his 500 -person campaign team about the state of the race against Donald J. Trump, but has instead relied on Mike Donilon, a longtime friend, former pollster and Biden campaign messaging guru, to summarize the numbers with regular memos and numerous daily phone calls.” Okay, so instead of talking to the pollsters, he's having someone talk to the pollsters and relay the numbers to him, as one might when dealing with a 500 -person organization. Again, all these -highly loaded insider tidbits are coming from the self -same reporting staff that had no idea the debate disaster was coming. And they're not exactly inspiring any confidence that now they've tapped into the real story. At the top of the front page, there's a diptych of tippy costumes at the Republican National Convention. Below that, three reporters were turned loose on Milwaukee to gather conventioneers' thoughts under the headline “Bullets graze seen as sign of God's protection.” I guess it's too bad that God didn't love the volunteer fireman who caught a bullet in the head. And speaking of the shooting, there's another front page non -informational story. “Contradictions cloud inquiry into shooting.” Three reporters are on the job of illuminating the fact that the Secret Service and local law enforcement disagree about exactly where officers were stationed in or around the easily accessible building from which the shooter got his shots off. The answers to these questions will probably add up to something worth putting on the front page once people actually know what the screw -ups were and who screwed them up. But the incremental notebook dumps just read like busywork. Inside the paper, page A6, the Israelis killed more than 20 people in the Gaza Strip. On Tuesday, the Times reports, including at a United Nations school -turned -shelter. 

Page A7 brings “In Bangladesh, protests over jobs quotas kill five,” and “man suspected of killing 42 women in Kenya is arrested, and six killed in an unusual attack on Shiite worshippers in Oman.” On page A9, “Torrential rainfall and floods have killed more than 200 people and displaced millions across South Asia, the result of more frequent extreme weather and rapid urbanization that has pushed people into flood -prone areas. In recent days, more than 100 people were killed in India alone. and nearly 40 died in Afghanistan. Flooding and landslides have killed more than 100 people in Nepal in recent weeks. In Bangladesh, more than 2 million people were affected when dangerous flooding after heavy rains caused major rivers to overflow.” Also on page 9, in news about how things go when you deal with Donald Trump, of two senior North Korean diplomats who negotiated with the Trump administration and helped set up Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un, one has been executed and the other sentenced to a penal colony.

The Times writes, citing a North Korean defector. And there's a lot of stuff about JD Vance. Page A16 has the Biden news that he's planning to call for term limits and enforceable ethics rules for the Supreme Court and actual substantive political development that gets about a quarter page facing the page wide jump about the vibes surrounding the Biden campaign with a little inset box explaining how the democratic nomination works if Biden stays in, if Biden drops out now, or if Biden drops out after the convention. And speaking of full page treatments, page A5 of the Times is entirely taken over by an ad thanking people who read unpirated manga. The Authorized Books of Japan Organization tells the copyright honoring readership, “the future of manga in your country will keep on expanding because of individuals like you.”

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.