Flaming Hydra (00:00)
Good morning. It's May 16th. It is gray in New York City, although eventually it should be warmish. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. First, a correction to yesterday's podcast and a moment of laziness while addressing the breaking news of the shooting of the prime minister of Slovakia. I chose not to Google up a video to find some.

actual professional broadcaster pronouncing his name. And so I said it wrong. The Slovakian surname F -I -C -O is not pronounced like the credit score, but as a more astute podcaster would have recognized as an Eastern European name is pronounced Fico. Your Indignity Morning Podcast regrets the error. The Times reports that Robert Fico is not out of a life -threatening situation.

in the words of the deputy prime minister. The suspect is still unnamed, but has been described as a lone wolf. And the Times writes as a 71 year old amateur poet. On the front of this morning's New York Times, besides an action packed yet tasteful four column photo of Vito's security officers running to and fro after having already stashed the wounded prime minister out of sight in a car, the lead story is.

that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are planning to debate in June and September, ignoring the Commission on Presidential Debates and not inviting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Times was so excited by the announcement that it did violence to a metaphor, writing that it had immediately delivered a jolt of electricity to a campaign that had settled into something of a rut. And that's why Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman are politics reporters and not tow truck operators.

the latter of which would require them to be able to tell their jumper cables from their winch. Anyway, the story says both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden believe firmly that if the American people get a look at their opponent on a debate stage, they will be less likely to vote for them. I guess that's also a sort of ambiguous pronoun placement at the end. Although it's sort of appealing to imagine Trump and Biden each daydreaming about bombing so badly on camera that they could be put out of their misery. The deal is apparently not quite a deal.

The Biden side wants a studio debate with no audience and microphones that cut out at the time limit. It remains unclear, the Times writes, whether the Trump campaign will agree to the Biden campaign's proposed rules. Down below that, Senator Bob Menendez's defense in his current corruption trial is that it was all Mrs. Menendez's fault. His lawyer declared in opening arguments, the Times reports that the gold and some of the cash that the FBI found in a search of this Senator's New Jersey home,

Items that prosecutors say were bribes were kept in a locked closet where his wife, Nadine Menendez, stored her clothing. Back above the fold, there's a story about how scammers pretend to be young women and convince boys and men to send them nude pictures, which they can then use to extort their victims. It's 2024. You might think that the victims and the New York Times might have heard about this stuff before, but every day is a new day.

when people are horny on the internet. The left column is a look at the struggles within NBC and its parent company Comcast over how to square the popular liberal or pro -democratic party leanings of MSNBC with the larger networks position as a universal mass market legacy media concern and with the sweaty desire in media company boardrooms.

to curry favor with a potential second Trump administration. One of the major case studies in this, albeit a very flawed one, is the failed hiring of Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican National Committee Chair, whose subservience to Trump and willingness to try to help him steal the election weren't enough to keep her from being ousted by even more pro -Trump forces, a situation which left her with really no constituency on any of the three sides of the internal power struggle.

And down the bottom of the page there is... boy, I just don't know. When did everything turn into a journey? Quotes on Journey. It's a front page feature about how people keep calling stuff journeys. Journey has decisively taken its place in American speech. The word holds an upbeat utility these days, signaling struggle without darkness or detail.

and expressing, in the broadest possible way, an individual's experience of travails over time. I guess it has, but I'm not sure why I should journey to page 821 to get told more about it. But all of that isn't even the weirdest writing choice in the news section. On page 812, in a piece meant to put some context on the

ambush of a prison convoy at a tollbooth in France that killed two guards and freed a criminal suspect. Roger Cohen writes, Dateline Paris, if France is a country of illusions, a beautiful and seductive land offering many of life's greatest pleasures that sits atop and conceals a crime -ridden drug -plagued world of violence, then the past week offered a rude awakening to this dual reality. If, but what if?

not. And in breaking news this morning, the Supreme Court, in a 7 -2 decision written by Clarence Thomas, rejected with extreme disdain the Fifth Circuit's contention that the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional. You can take this as a sign that the Supreme Court is not so insanely dedicated to destroying consumer protections and abolishing the administrative state.

that it would be willing to issue a decision that would also have jeopardized the constitutional status of the Federal Reserve. Or you can take it as a reminder that every day in the lower courts, people who are that insane are issuing decisions. That is the news. Thank you for sharing this morning's journey. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.