Good morning. It's May 17th. Some sun is breaking through the clouds on a warm morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Skoka, taking a look at the day and the news. And wow, the news was percolating yesterday. At least three different appalling stories broke late in the day. Not sure how I would rank them in news value, but let's start with the one that's not on the front page of the New York Times, because it was a Washington Post exclusive. The lead from the Post pretty much says it all. The Post continues kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik, and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26th with Mayor Eric Adams, D, about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia's campus. A log of chat messages shows, during the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams as well as how the chat groups members could pressure Columbia's president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters. According to chat messages summarizing the conversation. Among the many threads hanging from the piece, begging to be tugged on, is the part where they report that some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests. The chat log shows an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted.

The New York Police Department is not using and has not used private investigators to help manage protests, a spokeswoman for City Hall said. I do wish they'd given the verbatim quote there, because the paraphrase makes it sound like they might have denied something that wasn't exactly the claim at issue. Does manage cover all the activities that the New York police take toward protesters? Of course, they could also just be lying about it. The post did get some direct quotes from Deputy Mayor Fabian Levy who said, the insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar anti -Semitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print. Obviously, the Washington Post is not insinuating a darn thing. They have the chat logs of the people arranging to influence government operations behind the scenes. Anyway, we pay that guy more than a quarter of a million dollars to say stuff like that, to try to protect our corrupt and incompetent mayor from the consequences of his actions. Speaking of corrupt and shameless officials, the New York Times' exclusive that came out yesterday landed on the middle of page one. At Alito's home, a stop the steal symbol flew. After the 2020 presidential election, the Times writes, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars, and in online posts an upside down American flag. One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in Alexandria, Virginia, according to photographs and interviews with neighbors. Alito's response to having this uncovered was to blame his wife, saying she was upset about a neighbor's personally insulting yard signs. Although from the Times coverage, it sounds like what Alito is calling personally insulting was an anti -Trump sign.

Sort of puzzling why Alito is even trying to deflect the blame or make excuses, since the whole point is that he is free to be a completely brain poisoned, combative, partisan hack, because there are absolutely no consequences for doing it. What's striking about the flag thing is that it once again illustrates that having unchecked power has somehow left Alito feeling even more put upon and miserable than before. And big story number three lands down below the fold in the bottom left corner. Governor in Texas pardons man in fatal shooting of a protester. And here, quietly, the Times' habit of deferring to right -wing messages leads it to a truly deranged result. What Daniel S. Perry was convicted of in Texas, after going out, looking for Black Lives Matter protests, driving his car into one, and shooting someone dead in the confrontation he'd provoked, was murder.

A jury convicted him of murder, even without benefit of materials the judge unsealed in the sentencing phase, establishing that Perry was a valuable racist who fantasized about ways he might go out and kill protesters before he actually went and did it. But because Texas Governor Greg Abbott intervened to pardon this convicted racist murderer, the Times has downgraded the murder to a fatal shooting, in line with Abbott's message that this was an incident in which the instigator would somehow have enjoyed the protection of Texas's Stand Your Ground gun laws. The word murder, the factual legal charge of which he was convicted and for which he was pardoned does not appear anywhere in the story. Once you see the habit, it's hard to unsee it. At the top left of page one, the United Auto Workers Southern organizing campaign makes it out of the business section and onto page one.

And in honor of the occasion, the frame the Times puts on the story in the second paragraph is, conservative political leaders have portrayed the union campaign to organize Mercedes workers as an assault by outsiders on the region's economy and way of life. And then six Southern governors, including Kay Ivey, an Alabama Republican, issued a statement last month criticizing unions as special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.

You have to take the jump and get to the 14th paragraph before the Times gets around to explaining the current events that create the context for the Alabama vote, namely, the UAW is on a roll in the South after workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted in April to be presented by the Union. Also that month, the Union won significant pay raises for Daimler truck workers in North Carolina.

It's not news that southern politicians are blowing gas about how unions are outside agitators threatening their way of life. Nevertheless, that's what comes first in the story. This is already a jumbo -sized edition of the podcast, so there's barely time to talk about the headline, Protesters and Police Clash at UC Irvine Encampment, in which, of course, the clash is that riot cops came in to bust up a protest. Same old story about the same old story. And the Associated Press reports that violent storms in Houston have killed at least four people and left nearly one million homes and businesses without electricity, as another northern hemisphere springtime establishes itself on our very healthy and normal planet. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again on Monday.