Good morning. It's October 23rd. It is warm again 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. 

Fernando Valenzuela, the barrel-shaped left-handed screwball pitcher from Mexico who overwhelmed hitters from the moment he first appeared on a Major League mound, becoming an all-time legend for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and a titan of 1980s baseball, died at the age of only 63, a reminder of how incredibly young he was when he conquered Major League Baseball. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times is full of joyful anecdotes. On June 29th, 1990, the LA Times recalls, at the tail end of his Dodger's career, Valenzuela watched his former teammate Dave Stewart throw a no-hitter on TV and the Times writes, “turned to some teammates and said, that's great, now maybe we'll see another no-hitter,” upon which he went out and no-hit the St. Louis Cardinals. The Times' write-up also features some horrifying pitch counts, 147 pitches to win game three of the 1981 World Series, 155 pitches in his last win with the Dodgers, which explained why the peak of his career was as short as it was spectacular, but it remained a delight to see him on the mound, even in his later career, including 1993, when he started 31 games for the Baltimore Orioles and finished five of those, putting up a perfectly okay record of eight and 10, despite not really being able to strike anybody out anymore. Even when it wasn't easy, he made it seem like fun. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, packaged as a moderately important lead news story, two columns wide with no front page photo, is a remarkable piece by Peter Baker, Dateline Washington. The headline is, “a scandal-plagued career nears a decisive moment. Trump has been accused of wrongdoing at scale unseen at presidential level.” Here on October 23rd, less than two weeks before election day, is when the Times has decided to pull back and try to reckon with the enormity of the fact that Donald Trump has returned to within reach of the presidency. Once again, the headline treatment runs a little soft. It's not that Trump has been accused of wrongdoing. It's that he has done wrong. Obviously, copiously, unequivocally, by any legal or journalistic standard. The piece notes right away that Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Baker then writes, “sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high octane campaign, heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America, for the first time in its history, may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to retribution.” Yes, there's plenty to quibble about in the premise that the public has never before knowingly sent a criminal to the Oval Office, both Georges Bush, for instance, had pretty clearly committed crimes by the father's election or the son's reelection. But the point that Trump occupies his very own plane of degeneracy is entirely valid. The issue, naturally enough, is how exactly it came to be that the New York Times is writing about that fact being lost in the coverage of the campaign when the New York Times has been covering the campaign. “Whether in his personal life or his public life, Baker writes, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.” That is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it would be that he has done so many wrong things across so many different areas of activity that a newspaper that had gone to the trouble of maintaining a scorecard could have incorporated his relevant misdeeds into basically any story they ever wrote about anything. Why is the fact that he dodged the draft not germane to every story where he says anything about the armed forces? Why doesn't every story about his positions on the tax code and tax enforcement clearly and explicitly bring out his lifelong record of tax fraud in the two-page spread after the jump? In the two-page spread after the jump, where Baker tries to lay out a full litany of Trump's misdeeds. One paragraph is, “He monetized the presidency for himself as his Trump International Hotel in Washington and other properties became magnets for money from people and institutions currying favor, including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and the Philippines. Critics took him to court, charging him with violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, barring the acceptance of gifts from any king, prince, or foreign state. Although the Supreme Court threw out legal challenges.” Fine. But just because the Supreme Court put the Emoluments Clause on its list of clear constitutional provisions that Donald Trump magically enjoyed immunity from doesn't mean that the New York Times couldn't have prominently referred to how much money Trump and his family have taken from foreign governments in every news story where Trump says anything about relations with or policy toward all those countries. It's institutions like the New York Times, afraid of seeming partisan and unable or unwilling to adjust their habits in response to a criminal president, that allowed this two-page litany of abuses of power and acts of corruption to recede into the background or to fade out entirely. If it was worth reminding the readers of today's paper about all these things, it would have been worth reminding them on hundreds of other occasions as well.

Elsewhere on page one, same width as the Trump story right below it, same graphics treatment, but only a single headline. “Harris, crime fighter by day, courted high society at night.” That makes her sound like Batman in reverse. What it's actually supposed to communicate, I have no idea. The story is that as San Francisco's DA, by day she developed the courtroom skills that have shaped her methodical approach as a candidate by night. The Times continues “she moved through San Francisco high society nurturing the financial and political connections that became instrumental in her national rise.” Okay, sure. In more up-to-date and newsworthy accounts of people forging social connections, below the fold, the Times paid a visit to Princess Gloria von Thorn und Taxis, the former punkish scenester, now turned reactionary Catholic and dear friend of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who showed up on the Justice's disclosure form as the supplier of concert tickets that Alito valued at $900. She told the Times, “The only thing that I care about in politics is that somebody is fighting abortion and helping reproduction rates go up,” she said in the interview. “I think that killing our own offspring and reducing our reproduction rates, eventually, we will kill our own kind.” Spoken like somebody trying to navigate the arc from defunct aristocracy to celebrity to far-right political influencer. 

Above that on page one, bad news for the princess. “Abortions rise even in states with rigid bans. Women turn to doctors online and pills by mail study finds” in which a study finds that the repeal of Roe in aggregate did not reduce the number of abortions. It did, however, increase infant and maternal mortality. So how you feel about it depends on what your actual social agenda is. 

Next to that is a dispatch from Jerusalem. “Swift attacks offer Hamas a lethal tool,” in which the Israeli military is introduced to the possibility that aerial bombardment, conventional military incursions, and the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations may be less than completely effective strategies against militants practicing guerrilla warfare. Too bad there was no way to have known that in advance.

And, down at the bottom of page one is the news that the Federal Aviation Administration has changed its requirements for airplanes so that it is no longer necessary for the no smoking sign to have an off switch. 

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 and it is sustained by the financial support of you, the listeners, through your paid subscriptions to Indignity, and the use of our handy Tip Button. Button. Button. Boy, there are just some words that you don't know, that you don't know how to say, until you say them into a microphone. Like button. The glottal stop just doesn't work. Gotta say it like it's spelled. Button. So please do click that button to help fund our ongoing pursuit of podcasting adequacy. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.