Good morning. It's October 9th, another exemplary fall morning here in Manhattan. And this is your Indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Hurricane Milton, currently blowing as a category four storm, continues to very slowly, very directly, bear down on Tampa Bay and the rest of central Florida. The storm is due to make landfall sometime overnight, with forecasters expecting tropical storm-force winds to arrive by this afternoon. The storm surge is expected to reach catastrophic levels, 12 or 15 feet, somewhere, but the Tampa Bay Times reports, it's still gravely uncertain as to where. As the storm comes essentially perpendicularly into the coast, a difference of about 12 miles in where the eye hits, would be the difference between the counterclockwise winds sucking water out of Tampa Bay, if the eye arrives south of the bay's mouth, and those same rotating winds pushing the maximum storm surge directly into the bay and inundating all the heavily populated areas beyond, if the eye arrives just to the north. Even within 12 hours, the Tampa Bay Times writes, “the hurricane center forecast isn't perfect. Two-thirds of the time, a storm's eye at that point is within 30 miles of the projection.” The hurricane scientist Jeff Masters tells the paper, “we need to have a 10 mile resolution in our ability to forecast the track in order to know what's going to happen to Tampa Bay. And we don't have that.” 

On the top of this morning's New York Times is a four column photograph of people in fatigues, presumably National Guard, walking through a field of wreckage under palm trees in Pinellas County, Florida. The headline below is “Battered by Helene and now bracing for Milton.”

The lead news column belongs to yet another Time-CNN poll. “New poll gives Harris an edge against Trump,” the Times says. “First lead since July. Voters are more likely to see her as a break in the status quo.” The lead under discussion is 49 to 46 percent. The margin of error in the poll is 2.4 points in every direction. “Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris were even at 47 percent each in a mid-September Time-CNN poll,” the Times writes, but the Times does not write, because it needs front page presidential race news, is that they are even in this poll too. 

Down low after the jump, the Times also writes, “in a sign of how sharply the country's presidential battlegrounds have realigned in recent years, Times/Siena polls also found Mr. Trump leading by 13 percentage points in Florida, a state that only recently was considered competitive for Democratic presidential candidates, and leading by six percentage points in Texas, a state that Democrats have long hoped to turn blue.” If the Times' past coverage of its polling operation is any guide, they will probably blow up that Florida results to page one. Already yesterday, the Times' polling expert, Nate Cohn, was online writing something or other about the important structural factors that are illuminated by this large swing toward Donald Trump in Florida, an analysis only slightly undermined by the need for him to explain the fact, that absolutely no other poll has found anything like that. Times/Siena is the same polling shop that conjured a 10-point swing from Harris to Trump in Arizona, a finding that defied every other poll, and basic common sense about what's happening in the presidential race. But clearly we're going to have to wait till November before the Times reckons with the question of whether it's all the other pollsters who are blindfolded and throwing darts. 

Next to the poll on page one, is a really good Times headline, a headline much better than the story it goes with. “Anti-trans ads become focus for the GOP, painting Democrats as being out of touch.” The news here is that the Trump campaign, being entirely out of issues, is trying to prop itself up for the stretch run by expanding its hate and fear campaign from immigrants to trans people. The way the lead of Shane Goldmacher's story describes this is, “With just four weeks until the election, Donald J. Trump and Republican candidates nationwide are putting transgender issues at the center of their campaigns, tapping into fears about transgender women and girls in sports and about taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons.” 

In an outright astonishing section of analysis, the Times writes, “Most of the Republican ads do not criticize the transgender community in general. Instead, they zero in on specific wedge cases, such as transgender women and girls in sports, transgender women's sharing of locker rooms, the use of taxpayer funds for gender affirming surgery for people in prison, and access to transition services for minors such as puberty blockers.” The desperate claim that there exist trans issues as a matter of policy concern, separate somehow from the political movement to demonize trans people and turn the force of law against them, is a factually untenable but emotionally necessary belief deeply embedded in the operations of the Times, to spare the people who run it from confronting their own role as good, earnest liberals who just think the trans stuff has gone little too far in hastening and encouraging the persecution of trans people. That claim that Republican ads are not targeting the trans community in general appears in the story after the news that, as The Times writes, “Mr. Trump's most aired ad about Vice President Kamala Harris in recent weeks ends with the tagline, Kamala is for they them, President Trump is for you.”

The leader of the Republican Party is running commercials directly attacking trans people for being trans. But the Times, by God, still insists there must be some valid issues and some meaningful public concerns behind it. Likewise, the story contains the line “Republicans acknowledge that there are relatively few instances in which transgender athletes compete in youth sports.” The word “relatively” there is a piece of newswriting jargon designed to create a judicious and thoughtful tone at the expense of the facts. There aren't “relatively” few trans kids competing in youth sports. There are absolutely few. Sometimes there may be none. Republican legislators are passing laws that effectively are targeting individual children in their states. The issue is on a scale where it amounts to no issue at all. 

Moving from headline versus story to headline versus headline, on the left-hand side of the page, the headline is “Can Israel dent nuclear assets buried in Iran?” While the inside headline on the jump is, “U.S. worries about odds of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites.” The question in play is not whether Israel can achieve its near-term tactical goals by committing an act of open war against Iran. The question is whether anyone can stop them before they do this very stupid and destructive thing. 

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 power tools outside are not going to stop grinding while I finish this. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.