Good morning. It is October 17th. It's another bright and clear morning in New York City with an appropriate, seasonable chill in the air. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Kamala Harris went on Fox News last night and got badgered by her interviewer. Donald Trump went to a Univision town hall where people seemed deeply skeptical about his message.

Shohei Otani hit a three-run homer as the Dodgers thumped the Mets 8-0 to move ahead two games to one in the National League Championship Series, and Sabrina Ionescu of the New York Liberty buried a deep three-pointer in the final seconds of Game 3 of the WNBA Finals to give the Liberty a comeback win and a two games to one lead over the Minnesota Lynx. 

On the front of the Morning New York Times, today's lead story is “Politics shades security threat against Trump.” It's about how Trump, after being clipped by one gunshot and having another would-be shooter intercepted in the bushes of his golf course and facing an intelligence assessment that Iran is trying to kill him as well, is feuding with the federal agencies in charge of protecting him and investigating the threats. Suggesting without evidence, the Times writes, “that the situation is at least partly the fault of the Biden-Harris administration for being unwilling to provide him the protection he needs to travel the country freely and meet voters on his terms.” Here, the Trumpist habit of treating things as simultaneously real and fake seems to be turning the job of protection into a giant headache. The Times writes, “American officials said the intelligence agencies were finding themselves in an impossible position with Mr. Trump. They have a responsibility to view the threats clearly, but when they appear to minimize a particular threat, they risk enraging the Trump campaign or the candidate himself. And when they emphasize the dangers, they can be accused of trying to curb his campaigning or provide fodder he may use for his political gain, including to find a scapegoat for an election day loss.” 

The next story over on page one is a news analysis piece under a real masterpiece of the Times's anti-informative headline writing., “War of words in campaign gets darker,” it says. Now, by and large, a war is something that happens between two sets of combatants. What's happening here is, as the sub-headline says, “Trump hints at using military against rivals.” That there is the story. “With three weeks left before election day,” the Times writes, “former president Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat, that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.” Why put a headline on this that's a nonpartisan meditation about the overall tone of the campaign? The problem is not that the campaign is getting darker. It's that Donald Trump, personally, specifically, is saying menacing things. Just put the news in the newspaper headline. If he wins, it's not like he's going to treat you any nicer, just because you thought it was polite to muffle the facts about him. 

Next to that, speaking of things a little too lopsided to really call a war, “In just a week, a million people in Lebanon have been displaced,” the headline says. The story describes the spread of shelters and encampments in Tripoli and Beirut as Israel continues bombing its northern neighbor. 

Inside the paper, facing the jump from that story, the headline is, “Israeli strike hits Lebanese municipal building. The bombing kills at least 16 people, including a southern city's mayor. Lebanon's caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati,” the Times writes, “said in a statement that the attack on the southern city of Nabatieh had intentionally targeted a local government meeting.” Along with the mayor, the Times reports, the attack also killed several members of a local relief team that the United Nations had worked with for more than a year. “The Israeli military,” the Times writes, “said it had struck dozens of Hezbollah terrorist targets in the area.” 

Down at the bottom of the page, a dispatch from Ephrata, Pennsylvania, looks at Democrats' efforts to win voters in the small towns in the urbanizing and diversifying southeast corner of this year's canonical swing state, in case at this point anyone needs to read about the fact that Pennsylvania's up for grabs. Inside the paper, there's a full page dispatch from Baraboo, Wisconsin, a place where, according to the headline, “divisions on race cloud election.” Seems like they cloud more than the election. The Times writes that “the county has been roiled by its own racial skirmishes in recent years.” Once again, a skirmish, like a war, is a combat between two sides. Whereas the list of racial skirmishes here is “this summer, a county board meeting turned hostile over worries that refugees might someday settle nearby. In May, at a high school graduation ceremony, a white parent rushed the stage to shove aside a black school superintendent. And a few years earlier, a photo circulated of local boys standing on the courthouse steps, making gestures tied to the white power movement.” Seems more like racist incidents than racial skirmishes. The reporter found some white people to say that they think it's partly true that Haitians are eating dogs, or that liberals just use race as an insult to shut you up. And then you get a real classic of the Times' temperature taking around the country, in which a guy named Jerry Helmer tells the Times that “what voters in Sauk County are worried about is the economy, and they think democratic elites such as Ms. Harris do not care about the middle class. I hear more and more that nobody knows what her policies are, said Mr. Helmer, who lives outside Baraboo in Prairie du Sac and is a candidate for the state legislature, she comes off like a ditz.” Specifically, Helmer was introduced in the story not only as a political candidate, but as the chairman of the county Republican party. It's hard to think of anything less useful you could put in the newspaper than a Republican party official reciting his party's line about what voters are concerned about and calling the Democratic nominee a ditz. Why spend the travel budget to send a reporter to Wisconsin to collect the information that a highly committed partisan has highly partisan things to say, and to pass that off as some kind of useful information about the mood of the country. If the county Republican Party chair were backing Kamala Harris, that would be news. This is just like pasting a campaign bumper sticker onto the page. 

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.