Good morning. It is February 26th. It is sunny in New York City. Another mild day that's going to be impossible to dress for, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Associated Press reports that one person has now died in the West Texas measles outbreak. There are now 124 cases in Texas, the AP reports, plus nine across the state line in New Mexico. The AP writes that the outbreak is largely spreading in the Mennonite community. The AP's breaking news write-up is a little confusing on the subject of the age of the person who died. The story is illustrated with a photograph of a children's hospital, but the news of the death is attributed to a spokesperson for Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. And the story says that the children's hospital didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jeff Bezos just announced that the Washington Post opinion section will henceforth write only about the subjects of free markets and personal liberty. Opinion editor David Shipley is leaving the paper in response. Free markets and free people is already the slogan of the Wall Street Journal opinion section. A collection of hacks, ideologues and liars who are a constant embarrassment to their own paper's news section and to the journalism industry as a whole. Now maybe there'll be two of them. 

House Republicans last night suspended their vote on a budget bill and then hastily unsuspended it. Everyone rushed back to the House and two of the three Republicans who'd been objecting to it flipped, allowing it to pass by a two-vote margin, that is by the difference in one person's vote. 

Over in the Senate, NBC reports that Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the Republican chair of the Appropriations Committee, said he and his Democratic counterparts in budget negotiations disagree on the question of trying to limit presidential powers. “I don't think you're likely to see a Republican House and Republican Senate try to limit a Republican president,” was what he said. Given that the powers in question are the unconstitutional ones where Trump and Elon Musk are choosing on their own which spending they're going to allow to happen and which spending they're going to block, that's a pretty significant sticking point, since the Republicans are really asking that the budget be effectively fictitious with federal spending controlled instead by presidential fiat. 

But what are the overall spending plans that they want to hand over to Donald Trump to interpret? The front page of the print edition of this morning's New York Times, which had to go to press before the vote, puts it in the lead news column with a strong headline. “MILLIONS AT RISK OF MEDICAID LOSS IF G.O.P. WINS CUTS / TARGETING EXPANSION / A Plan to Pay for Trump Tax Breaks May Shift Burden to States.”

“House Republicans,” the Times writes, “hunting for ways to pay for President Trump's tax cuts, have called for cutting the federal government's share of Medicaid spending, including a proposal that would effectively gut the Affordable Care Act's 2014 expansion of the program.” That's direct enough that the Times can be forgiven for not bothering to rewrite the online news story, so that my morning newspaper informs me through a wrinkle in the space-time continuum that this is a budget bill that House Republicans may bring to a vote on Tuesday. 

Next to that, The Times tries to cram newspegged profile writing into the single column second from the right. “Justice Official Battles District Where He Rose / Ties in New York Fray in Feud Over Mayor,” and its profile of Emil Bove, Donald Trump's former personal lawyer turned acting deputy attorney general, whose efforts to cut a deal to block Mayor Eric Adams's prosecution on his corruption charges caused mass resignations among courier prosecutors. Two of those prosecutors were Bove’s former colleagues from when he was a federal prosecutor with the Southern District of New York, an office with which the Times says he had a fraught relationship, which seems to mean he kept getting in trouble for being a jerk. Things went sour for him in the Times' account.

In 2016, when, the Times writes, “during a corruption investigation into Mayor Bill de Blasio's 2013 campaign fundraising, an FBI agent surprised Mr. Bove’s wife, a policy adviser to the mayor, with a request that she turn over records of her communications, according to people with knowledge of the situation. There was no allegation of wrongdoing by Mr. Bove’s wife, the Times continues, and Mr. de Blasio was never charged. Mr. Bove believed that approach, while not technically improper, was too aggressive and needlessly traumatized his family. He made it clear that he had only wanted a heads up and would never have tipped off his wife beforehand,” which would have protected his family from being traumatized how exactly? His wife would have still been blindsided, but in this scenario, her husband would have been personally responsible for blindsiding her. Anyway, he got mad about it and threatened to quit. But also, lest too much be read into that particular villain origin story, the Times also reports that federal public defenders lodged complaints against Bove. One lawyer described Mr. Bove as vindictive, someone who abused his power and was impossible to deal with. Another lawyer called Mr. Bove completely reckless and out of control. A couple years after that, the Times writes, “the Southern District leaders had decided to demote Mr. Bove after an internal investigation prompted by complaints about his management style that had caused morale in his unit to plummet, according to three people familiar with the matter.” But that demotion was deferred because a team of prosecutors who had worked for Bove were being investigated for mishandling exculpatory evidence. And his bosses wanted, the Times writes “to avoid the appearance that anyone, including Mr. Bove, had done anything intentionally wrong.” Anyway, that's the guy. Who knows how that would compare to a dive into any other federal prosecutor's temperament and activities. But in the end, the Times concludes that “Mr. Bovet has shown he shares Mr. Trump's maximalist approach to conflict.”

That is certainly a way of putting it. 

Down at the bottom of the map. There's a story about the German election trying to explicate the fact that the map of victories by the Alternative for Deutschland Right wing extremist party corresponds almost exactly to the map of the former East Germany. “The divide analysts say reflects not only a failure to fully integrate the East, but also its unique problems and culture shaped by decades of communist rule during the Cold War and close alignment with Moscow and the former Soviet Bloc.” 

Elsewhere on the page, there's a story about North Korean workers doing forced labor on the high seas on Chinese tuna-fishing ships and the discovery, after years of searching, of the lost manuscript of a novel by the Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade. 

Inside the paper, on page A8, Donald Trump seems to have managed to extort some kind of mineral deal from Ukraine. “The final terms of the deal were unknown,” the Times writes, “and it was not immediately clear what, if anything, Ukraine would receive in the end after days of difficult, sometimes tense negotiations. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had repeatedly pressed for security guarantees for his country in exchange for mineral rights as Russia's war has entered its fourth year. Previous draft agreements,” the Times continues, “reviewed by the New York Times, included no such security commitment. Mr. Trump had insisted he wanted payback for past military aid to Kiev, shifting America's alliance with Ukraine to a nakedly mercantile footing. Toward the end,” the story says, “the White House has argued that even without specific security guarantees, the mere presence of American economic interests in Ukraine would deter future Russian aggression.” 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Apologies for the wobbly voice. Gotta keep doing the laryngeal calisthenics. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Socca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those if you can. And nothing too unexpected gets in the way. And the voice box gets it together. We'll talk again tomorrow.