Good morning. It is September 24th. It's a cloudy morning 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. 

We're going to duck inside this morning's New York Times to start with on page A19. “Missouri Supreme Court rejects bid to block execution for 1998 murder.” Headlines are a tough format, but the word “for” in here sticks out pretty grievously. You can only be executed “for” something if you did it, and the local prosecutor's office now says that they don't think he did. None of the physical evidence from the scene connected to him and his conviction depended on jailhouse testimony from two witnesses who were bargaining to get their own sentences reduced. On top of that, Williams is black, the murder victim was white, and the old prosecutors used apparently race -based juror challenges to create a jury with 11 white members and one black one. If the self-identified pro-life majority of the Supreme Court holds to its usual pattern of not intervening, then he'll be executed tonight, not for the murder, but for the sake of demonstrating that nothing is allowed to get in the way of the death penalty. 

And speaking of apparently unstoppable courses of action, and the headline writing decisions that go with them, the two lead news columns on the front of the Times read, “Hundreds are killed in Lebanon in attacks by Israel on Hezbollah.” You might think that after nearly a year of indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Gaza in the name of attacking Hamas, the news desk might want to hold back before granting that the all-out bombardment of Lebanon was really an attack on Hezbollah. The jump headline, with less space to fill, sticks to the observable facts. “Hundreds of people are killed in Lebanon in Israeli attacks.” That's really all you can say the day after. Although even there, if you read far enough, the Times reports that Lebanon's health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said that thousands of Lebanese families had been displaced by the Israeli offensive and that some of the strikes had hit medical centers, ambulances, and fire trucks, as well as people who were attempting to drive to safety. The accompanying news analysis piece, “Clock Ticking, Biden Strains for a Deal,” describes the attack as Israel's “most violent exchange with the Lebanese militant group since 2006.” Not sure “exchange” is the word there. Checking back in the news story, “On Hezbollah's side, it says, 165 rockets and other munitions crossed the border, according to the Israeli military. Most of the projectiles were intercepted by Israel's anti-missile defense system, and there were no immediate reports of deaths or serious casualties.” Whereas on Lebanon's side of the border, the health ministry, the Times reports, “said the bombardment had killed at least 356 people, including 24 children, and injured more than 1,200.” The ministry did not say how many of the dead were Hezbollah fighters, presumably none of the 24 children, though. The single-day death toll, the Times continues, was about a third of the total toll in Lebanon in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, which lasted 34 days. What is the point of all this? The news story says Israeli officials “had hoped that by scaling up their attacks over the past week, they would unnerve Hezbollah and persuade it to pull farther from the border, allowing roughly 60 ,000 Israelis displaced by Hezbollah fire to return home. More than 100,000 Lebanese have also been forced from their homes. But for now,” the Times continues, “the opposite has happened. Hezbollah leaders have said they will continue their attacks until Israel ends its military campaign against Hamas and Gaza. A retired Israeli military intelligence officer then told the Times that it was “far from clear” whether the latest escalation would serve Israel's goal of forcing Hezbollah to stop firing at the north. 

That theme is picked up in a news analysis piece at the bottom of the page. “Israel gambles that Hezbollah will back down, but opposite may occur.” May occur? When in the recorded history of warfare has anything but the opposite ever occurred? You don't attack a country if you're trying to stop a war. But the whole discussion takes place in some weird space of unreality. The attacks, Patrick Kingsley writes, “showed Israel's determination to break the resolve of Hezbollah and force the militia, which controls scores of villages across southern Lebanon, to stop its cross-border attacks on Israel. The moves also reflected how far Israel is from achieving that goal and how close both sides are to an all-out war.” Close to all-out war? Again, according to the front page story, the Israeli attacks yesterday killed 10 days worth of people by the pace of the prior Israel Hezbollah war. They've chosen war. They're having a war. The clock is not running out on Joe Biden's efforts to secure peace. Benjamin Netanyahu has made it absolutely clear that there was never any clock.

Across the page in other constructs it's not worth talking about. The headline is “Trump ahead in three key states across Sunbelt. Poll reports an edge in areas lost in 2020.” This is a writeup of the latest time CNN poll, and the only part of it anyone needs to read is where the Times says that “Arizona, which Joe Biden won by just over 10,400 votes in 2020, now presents a challenge for the Harris campaign. Mr. Trump is ahead 50 % to 45 % the poll found. A Times-Siena poll there in August found Ms. Harris leading by five percentage points.” The paragraph goes on to say something about Latino voters moving away from Harris, but there's no use even reading it. If your poll tells you that the state of Arizona swung 10 points away from Kamala Harris toward Donald Trump after the presidential debate, the only news you have to offer is that your poll is busted. Even pointing out the facial absurdity of Donald Trump touching 50 % in a swing state grants the poll too much credit. In a presidential race where the stasis is so profound that even the Democrats swapping candidates barely budgeted, there is absolutely no way that 10 % of voters in a swing state broke in any direction from one month to the next. Nothing like that is happening anywhere in the country in any other poll.

It's honestly a little shocking to see the Times humping an embarrassing result like that as if it's in possession of news. Today, online, they've got a straightfaced story about how Democrats in Arizona are clearly splitting their votes because the party is doing so much better in the Senate polling than in the presidential race. It may well be that Ruben Gallego does better in his race against the completely melted-down Kari Lake than Harris will do against Trump. But pegging that analysis to an obviously broken poll is just bonkers.

Also on page one, the Eric Adams prosecution leaks just keep on leaking without ever squeezing out an indictment. The latest increment, as the Times writes, is “federal prosecutors investigating whether Mayor Eric Adams, conspired with the Turkish government to funnel illegal foreign donations into his campaign, have recently sought information about interactions with five other countries. People with knowledge of the matter said. The demand for information related to the other countries, Israel, China, Qatar, South Korea, and Uzbekistan was made in expansive grand jury subpoenas issued in July to City Hall, the mayor and his campaign, the people said,” I had to read that sentence three times to get it right because the Times refuses to use serial commas. Anyway, Uzbekistan, maybe those people with knowledge are just too busy to boil it all down to a set of charges. A federal jury found that the 2020 attempt by Donald Trump supporters to run a Biden Harris campaign bus off the interstate rendered one of the participants liable for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Or as the Times puts it, “a federal jury in Texas clears most defendants in the Trump train case.” Spare a thought for all the people whose embrace of political violence on Donald Trump's behalf did not meet the standard of Reconstruction-era terrorism. 

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. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.