Good morning. It's September 17th. It's a gloomy, humid morning here in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Reuters is reporting that people's pagers exploded all over Lebanon today, wounding more than a thousand people, Reuters writes, including Hezbollah fighters and medics. An Iranian news agency said that among the injured was Iran's ambassador to Lebanon. The pagers that detonated Reuters writes, "were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources said. Israeli officials declined to comment." 

Federal agents arrested the musician and entrepreneur Sean Combs yesterday in Manhattan, and today prosecutors in the Southern District of New York unsealed their indictment against Combs, aka Puff Daddy, the document says, aka P Diddy, aka Diddy, aka P.D., aka Love, charging him with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion, and transportation to engage in prostitution based on what prosecutors described as a long -standing arrangement to force women into marathon sex and drug sessions called "freak -offs" with sex workers. "Members and associates of the Combs Enterprise," the prosecutor's write in the indictment, "including high -ranking supervisors, security staff, household staff, personal assistants, and other Combs business employees facilitated the freak -offs by, among other things, booking hotel rooms for the freak -offs, stocking the hotel rooms in advance with the required freak -off supplies, including controlled substances, baby oil, lubricant, extra linens, and lighting, cleaning the hotel rooms after the freak -offs to try to mitigate room damage, arranging for travel for victims, commercial sex workers, and Combs to and from freak -offs, resupplying Combs with requested supplies, delivering large sums of cash to homes to pay the commercial sex workers, and scheduling the delivery of IV fluids." His lawyer, according to NBC4 New York, said in a statement after the arrest that his client is "an imperfect person, but is not criminal." 

ProPublica reported today that the Republican supermajority in the Ohio State Legislature, now that the state has created a full -scale voucher program to divert funds from public education, to send children to private schools, is now addressing the surge in demand for private school capacity by sending millions of dollars directly to religious schools for construction projects. The Ohio Constitution ProPublica Notes says that "the General Assembly will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state, no religious or other sect or sects shall ever have any exclusive right to or control of any part of the school funds of this state." 

This morning's New York Times doesn't really have much in the way of active news on the front of it. The lead space, two columns wide, goes not to news, but news analysis. And not so much news analysis as Peter Baker writing a book report on the news. "The anger that defines and threatens Trump" is the headline. "Outrage dominates political landscape." For the Times, it does a remarkably non -even -handed job of connecting the violence or attempted violence directed at Donald Trump with Trump's endless appeals to violent rhetoric and imagery.

"Even as Trump complained that the Democrats had made him a target by calling him a threat to democracy," Baker writes after the jump, "he repeated his own assertion that these are people that want to destroy our country and called them the enemy from within. Certainly language no less provocative than that used about him. Indeed, within hours," the story continues, "his campaign emailed a list of quotes from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and other Democrats attacking Mr. Trump with phrases like a 'threat to our democracy' and a 'threat to this nation,' without noting that just last week during the debate, the former president said, 'they're the threat to democracy.'" Why, that's context applied in an evaluative manner in a campaign analysis story, by Peter Baker. Not enough context to bring in the ongoing civil trial about Trump supporters surrounding a Biden Harris campaign bus in 2020 and trying to drive it off the highway, but some context nevertheless. The piece also touches on Elon Musk's decision to put out a tweet pondering why no one is trying to assassinate Biden and Harris. "Mr. Musk later deleted the post and called it a joke," the Times writes. At this stage in Musk's long spiral, if he actually took the post down, it seems like it would have to be because the feds showed up and talked to him about it, which would be a rare, if not unprecedented case of Musk encountering a single one of the consequences that ordinary people face for the things he routinely gets away with. 

And the next slot over on page one is "Walz sees if Minnesota Nice plays in Sunbelt, aiming for moderates skeptical of a ticket's lean to the left." Despite the critical framing, the story seems to document that Walz is doing just fine on the campaign trail in the Sunbelt and does not even produce any evidence that the skeptical moderates of the subhead, who need to be convinced that Walz is not too liberal for them, even exist. Instead, it just delivers hostile self -interested quotes from people whose jobs or political identities require them to oppose Walls. "'He's unelectable to voters from the Midwest to the Sun Belt and beyond,' Rachel Reisner, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement." What earthly purpose does publishing that piece of paid wishcasting serve? The informational value to the reader is zero. The campaign that's running against Tim Walz is against Tim Walz. But that's the best the Times could do for a note of dissent. They also misused "Minnesota Nice" in the headline. Bless their hearts for trying.

And on the rest of the front page, life goes on in war -torn Ukraine. The alleged Chinese influence buying case in New York resembles other alleged Chinese influence buying cases. And there's a big story about sickle cell treatment, but it's by Gina Kolata. And there's no point to ever reading a Gina Colada story, because she just gets stuff wrong. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod.

theme songs composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Please get a paid subscription to Indignity if you don't already have one to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.