EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: It's always been a pleasure to talk to you in the mornings about what's going on and how the press is covering it. But honestly, ever since the first Tuesday of last November, getting up in the morning and immediately surveying the state of current events has been pretty discouraging. Pretty much every day, the news has been that things are bad and they just got worse. Yesterday, however, people perceived that they had the opportunity to do something about that, and they went out and did it in genuinely astonishing numbers. More than a million people in New York City voted to make Zohran Mamdani the next mayor. With 91 % of the vote tabulated, there's a chance that he could end up collecting more votes than all the candidates put together did in the previous mayoral election. And the voters did this after Donald Trump threatened to punish the city if people elected Mamdani. In his victory speech, Mamdani told Donald Trump to turn up the volume and listen, and declared, “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this, to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: [THE WASHINGTON POST] "Mr. Cheney supported tax cuts and defense spending increases, like nearly all Republicans, but he joined the rightmost wing in voting against a federal holiday honoring the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor-piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa. He likewise opposed Head Start for preschool children, the Superfund Program for Toxic Waste Cleanup, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The one exception to his otherwise blanket endorsement of hard-right culture war positions was his support, eventually, of gay marriage, apparently brought on strictly because one of his own daughters was a lesbian."
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: [THE NEW YORK TIMES] "Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview, ‘Utah will end a harmful culture of permissiveness,’ he said, ‘and guide homeless people towards human thriving.’” An accountability center. Because if there's one lesson that homeless people with drug addiction problems need drummed into them, it's that the things they do can have negative consequences. No more culture of permissiveness toward people not having a place to live.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Just doing a funny accent, gobbling up his ketchup treats, grooving to YMCA. Extremely normal things for the leader of a superpower on the world stage. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY!
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Inside the paper on page A20, the Times reports on a breakdown in solidarity fighting the shutdown. “Top Federal Workers Union breaks with Democrats over the shutdown. AFGE chief calls on Congress to open now and negotiate later. The largest union of federal workers called on Monday for Congress to pass a spending bill to immediately end the government shutdown,” the Times writes, “effectively siding with President Trump and Republicans who have opposed Democratic efforts to restore health care spending. ‘Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,’ Everett Kelly, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in the statement. He added, ‘It's time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures and no gamesmanship.’ The statement,” the Times writes, “was a remarkable shift for the Union. Before the shutdown began on October 1st, Mr. Kelly called on Republicans to negotiate with Democrats who are seeking concessions, including the extension of subsidies for plans under the Affordable Care Act that would stave off premium increases and the loss of coverage for millions of Americans. The union has also worked closely with Democratic lawmakers on efforts this year to oppose Mr. Trump's policies, particularly his wide-reaching campaign to slash the federal workforce and fire career civil servants. But,” the story continues, “amid the punishing effects of the shutdown on federal workers, Some 730,000 are working without pay and another 670,000 are furloughed entirely. Senate Democrats have blocked legislation that would pay the civil servants who have been working without pay, a move that would provide relief to the union's members but would weaken the bargaining position of democratic lawmakers. The Republicans, in turn, blocked a pair of Democratic bills that would have paid both those federal workers who are still working and those who have been furloughed.”
“Provide relief to the union's members” there, then, would mean provide relief to a bit more than half of the union's members, while the others remain out of work and unpaid.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Bloomberg is reporting that Trump Media, the social media company owned by President Trump, the single person with the greatest power to personally cause events to happen in the world is going to start selling gambling contracts on prediction markets. “Trump Media and Technology Group Corp.” Bloomberg writes “plans to make prediction contracts available on its truth social network, allowing users to bet on events ranging from political elections to inflation rate changes, according to a statement on Tuesday.” Not sure that range of two different aggregates of public behavior is a real range. But with Donald Trump making drastic policy changes that affect consumer prices, while also exerting pressure on the people who report economic data, the opportunities for trading on insider information seem abundant.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: “With no end in sight to the nearly month-long federal government shutdown,” the Times writes, “funding for the nation's largest food assistance program, known as SNAP, will disappear at the start of November, according to the Department of Agriculture. On Friday, the Trump administration said in a memo that it would not tap into contingency funds to keep payments flowing to states.” The last part of that paragraph and the first part of that paragraph are sitting in pretty glaring tension with each other. Despite the Times's use of the evasive newswriter's “with,” it's true that the government shutdown is ongoing, but it is not true that it in any way necessitates cutting 42 million people off from their ability to buy food at the end of this week. The Trump administration is choosing not to spend the money to keep the assistance going.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: On the website, the Times this morning published a piece that really digs into and emphasizes the point that its reporters keep making, down inside the incremental coverage of Donald Trump's ongoing campaign of slaughter at sea. It's a NEWS ANALYSIS piece by Charlie Savage, “The peril of a White House that flaunts its indifference to the law. The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.” It's gonna take some restraint for me not to just read the whole story into the microphone. “Since he returned to office nine months ago,” Savage writes, “President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts, but his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.” That's really well-tuned. It avoids even the slight misstep of the subheadline by describing the targets of the president's attacks as people “accused” of smuggling drugs, not people “suspected,” since “suspected” is an internal state with a degree of imputed sincerity behind it that Donald Trump has absolutely not earned.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The process of tearing down the East Wing,” the story continues, “was expected to be completed as soon as this weekend, two senior administration officials said, as Mr. Trump moved rapidly to carry out a passion project that he said was necessary to host state dinners and other events. But,” the story then says, “the previously unannounced decision to demolish the East Wing was at odds with Mr. Trump's previous statements about the project.” What the Times means here is that the president just set about tearing down a huge chunk of the White House all on his own with no public consultation after having explicitly said that he was not going to do that, which is a self-evidently shocking scandal as long as you are not part of the New York Times' political coverage operation.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Donald Trump's demolition of the East Wing of the White House continued yesterday, advancing well past the facade to smash the main structure. The New York Times belatedly realized that this was, in fact, front page news, and put the picture on the front page at the top, four columns wide. But, being the Times, decided that the way to deal with the president unilaterally choosing to demolish a major section of the White House and replace it with an immense new structure designed to suit his own personal whims and taste, as if he were dispatching contractors to his own private property—though for that he would have been required to get permits—was to assign the strenuously clever Sean McCreesh to write yet another of his dispatches in which Trump's excesses and abuses of his office are archly treated as amusing expressions of his indomitable will.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Protesters showing up to wave Israeli flags outside the building does not mean that the "tension was spilling out of the synagogue." It's like when anti semitic protesters showed up on Broadway outside the fence of Columbia University, and their behavior was incorporated into the brief against the Columbia campus protesters, the people who are on the outside are on the outside for a reason, and if they were representative of the situation inside, they would probably be inside.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The headline is "Trump Weighs Transforming Refugee Policy / White People Would Be Given Preference." Here again, the bigotry is so blatant that the headline writers couldn't even sustain neutral euphemism long enough to get through the subhead.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: President Donald Trump announced that the United States had murdered six more people on the high seas yesterday, in its fifth unprovoked attack on unarmed boats in the Caribbean, "asserting," as the New York Times puts it, "without evidence that they had been transporting drugs." Along with the social media post announcing the killing, the Times writes, "the President also posted a 33 second aerial surveillance video showing a small boat floating and then being struck by a missile and exploding. Unlike some previous announcements, the President did not identify the nationality of the people who were killed, or name a specific drug cartel or criminal gang with which they were supposedly associated." The Times goes on to once again run through the ways in which these killings are entirely illegal and unjustified under every legal analysis, and how the Trump administration has produced no substantive arguments otherwise, and how Congress has not identifiably authorized any such use of military force.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: There's not much point in quibbling about a prize that already went to Henry Kissinger, but US-backed regime change and peace don't usually end up on the same side of the ledger.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The final story above the fold has the headline “Far Outside the U.S., Kirk’s Memory Has Become a Political Tool / Public Tribute in Peru by a Mayor Seeking Trump’s Help.” The story pretty heavily contradicts the headline, in that it documents that in Lima there really isn't any such thing as the memory of Charlie Kirk. Even more so than in the United States, people have little to no idea of who the guy was, or why politicians would make a fuss over him.
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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The Times’s designated campus scold Anemona Hartocollis has a new headline to scandalize the readers. “Harvard Finds Skipping Class Part of Culture. Harvard University is one of the most difficult schools to gain admission to” she writes, “with the school turning away some 97% of applicants every year. But, once they get in, many of its students skip class and fail to do the reading. According to the classroom social compact committee, a group of seven faculty members that produced a report on Harvard's classroom culture that has been fueling debate since it was released in January.”
January.
It was released in January. It is now October.
Here are some stories that are not on page A1 today, while the Times was staking out A1 for news of a 10 month old report on campus culture at Harvard.
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