Good morning. It is March 18th. It is a sparkling morning in New York City heading toward a mild afternoon. The doves are calling outside and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Israel returned to full scale bombardment of Gaza yesterday, killing more than 400 people, including children as happens in the indiscriminate bombing of urban areas. The New York Times headline writers went with “Israel's deadly strikes in Gaza raise prospect of return to all-out war.” The Washington Post, rather more straightforwardly, went with “More than 400 killed as Israel strikes Gaza, breaking ceasefire with Hamas.” 

Donald Trump went on social media to demand the impeachment of the judge who is currently working toward possibly holding the administration to some kind of account for violating a direct judicial order to halt the administration's flights dumping abducted Venezuelan migrants in a Salvadoran prison labor camp. 

The Washington Post and the Miami Herald are both reporting meanwhile that family members of some of the missing Venezuelans after recognizing them in the celebratory videos put out by the Salvadoran government and promoted by the Trump administration, showing prisoners being forcibly processed say that their relatives have no criminal records and no gang affiliations, but just happened to get tattoos. A court filing by an immigration and customs enforcement officer in support of the abductions argues that the lack of a criminal record is all the more reason to deport someone. “The lack of specific information about each individual,” writes Robert L. Serna, the acting field office director of ICE in Harlingen, Texas, “actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.” 

The Miami Herald, meanwhile, reports that when Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about the lack of evidence that the people the administration was sending to a foreign labor camp are really gang members, he responded, the Herald writes, “‘if one of them turns out not to be, then they're just illegally in our country, and the Salvadorans can then deport them from to Venezuela, but they weren't supposed to be in our country to begin with.’” 

The astronauts who have been stranded on the International Space Station since June, thanks to their faulty Boeing spacecraft, are now on a descent back toward Earth in a SpaceX capsule, along with other crew members, leaving the ISS on a regular rotation. Their splashdown is scheduled for just before 6 p.m. 

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are having a conversation this morning on the phone about how to carve up Ukraine. Ukraine is not a party to the discussion. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story is about Elon Musk's demolition of the National Nuclear Security Administration, “EXODUS DEPLETES NUCLEAR AGENCY UNDER MUSK PUSH / FIRINGS AND BUYOUTS / Critics Fear a Shortage of Scientists and Others Vital to Security.” 

The piece does not get into the underlying question of to what extent Elon Musk's anti-government strike force understood what it was doing when it took an axe to this particular agency, but, it does cover some of what's gone, for people who handled the secure transport of nuclear material, “a half dozen staff members from a unit,” the Times writes, “that builds reactors for nuclear submarines,” and “someone who had just been hired as head of the team that enforces safety and environmental standards at a Texas plant that assembles nuclear warheads.” The agency, the Times reports, “was already understaffed and trying to build out for jobs that require extensive training and which require workers who are also attractive to other employers. The department,” the Times writes, “has said that most of the fired employees handled administrative and clerical tasks that were not critical to the agency's operation, but an analysis of internal documents by the Times, coupled with interviews with 18 current and former agency officials, shows that is not true for the bulk of people who took the buyout. Many who left,” the Times writes, “held a top-secret security clearance, called Q, that gave them access to information about how nuclear weapons are designed, produced, and used, officials said.”

Next to that, on page one, is yesterday's installment of the Trump administration's showdown over the judge trying to stop its deportation flights. “Trump Lawyer Defies a Judge Over Migrants / Stonewalling on Order to Halt Deportations.” 

“The Trump administration on Monday,” the Times writes, “repeatedly stonewalled a federal judge seeking answers about whether the government had violated his order, barring the deportation of more than 200 non-citizens without due process, escalating a conflict that threatened to become a constitutional crisis.” 

As usual the thing that is happening is described as the thing that might be around the corner/ Later on the story notes how border czar Tom Homan went on Fox News and said “we're not stopping I don't care what the judges think.” That right there is not threatening to become a constitutional crisis. That is the definition of a constitutional crisis, the question at hand is whether the administration is going to try to deescalate this particular episode of the crisis. 

Back to the top of the story, “at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, a Justice Department lawyer refused to answer any detailed questions about the deportation flights to El Salvador that took place over the weekend, arguing that President Trump had brought authority to remove the immigrants from the United States under an obscure wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act. The judge directed a Justice Department lawyer to inform him by noon on Tuesday, exactly what time the government believes his order stopping the deportation flights went into effect, a piece of information that will be crucial as the judge seeks to determine whether the Trump administration had flouted his authority.” 

On the left-hand side of the page, there's a piece about how Bill Gates is cozying up to Narendra Modi, not letting the Indian leaders program of Hindu fascism get in the way of his desire to help carry out large-scale charitable work in India, or to cooperate with Modi on the country's pursuit of growth in the tech sector. 

Down below the fold, “Executives Get Tariff Warning: Better Strap In.” A story about how the big three automakers got on the phone with the president to try to talk him out of tariffs, only to discover that they couldn't. “For corporate America,” the Times writes, “including some major donors, the shock of Mr. Trump's second term is that it turns out he really does believe the thing he's been saying publicly for 40 years. Foreign companies are ripping America off and tariffs are a silver bullet for America's problems. The slumping stock market doesn't really bother him.” In The Times reporting, for a truly perverse reason, “one of Mr. Trump's advisors,” The Times writes, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, said the Biden presidency proved to Mr. Trump that the stock market is not a foolproof barometer of the economy's future, nor a useful indicator of voter sentiment. If it were, Mr. Biden, who presided over a booming stock market, would surely be the president, the advisor said, explaining Mr. Trump's thinking.” 

That's not exactly the assessment of the Biden economy that Trump supplied on the campaign trail or that the press ran with. So apparently Trump thinks he can repeat the same trick in reverse. 

Inside the paper, page A17 is devoted to the Trump administration's war against Columbia University. Up top is an update on Mahmoud Khalil's case, working on the dispiriting angle of where his case will be heard. Since in as much as the country has any laws at all, it certainly no longer has a unified set. And by moving Khalil to Louisiana, the government was apparently trying to move his case under the Fifth Circuit, the Trumpiest and most anti-constitutional of the federal circuits.

Below that, the headline is “Trump tactics on Colombia may be illegal, experts say.” A discussion of how many lawyers, but for some reason, not yet any lawyers working for Colombia, hold that the Trump administration's effort to take $400 million in funding away from the university is blatantly unlawful and a violation of due process.

“‘It is puzzling that they have not filed a lawsuit that they would be extremely likely to prevail in,’  said Leah Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.”

And yet they haven't. Maybe this time, if they don't make any trouble for the administration, the administration against all of its previous precedent might stop making trouble for them. 

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. 

You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those in if you can. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again tomorrow.