Good morning. It is May 9th. It is a much better than expected morning in New York City. The gloom and showers that were in the forecast have been dialed back to a forecast of a cloudy afternoon after this sunny morning. The doves are cooing. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. And boy, was there a lot of news yesterday. To fill the space.

Left by an off day in Donald Trump's Manhattan criminal trial, Marjorie Taylor Greene decided to try to take down House Speaker Mike Johnson. But the House voted to not even consider the measure with Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries supplying the party discipline that Johnson cannot come up with on his side and getting an overwhelming majority of Democrats to shore up Johnson's fractured Republican support.

This was the deal, or the implicit deal, when Johnson helped Democrats pass a foreign aid package last month. Surely this marks the beginning of a new productive and collaborative relationship built on trust, except the part where Johnson was at a Trump election deniers conference a little while ago. Still, for the day, it left Marjorie Taylor Greene putting it in the newspaper that she's not mad.

This is exactly what the American people needed to see. She told reporters on the house steps after the vote. The Times writes, I didn't run for Congress to come up here and join the uniparty. And the uniparty was on full display today. In other transient political realignments down on the left, around mid page is a news analysis piece about the fact that the Biden administration is withholding a shipment of bombs from Israel, which Peter Baker describes as Joe Biden.

choosing a more dramatic way of making himself clear to Israeli leaders. The administration, Baker writes, was hoping the pause would send a quiet message and to not announce it publicly at first, but the Israelis leaked it. The second column story on page one is the mass displacement of people in Haiti. Amid the ongoing instability and gang violence there, the UN's International Office for Migration says that 360 ,000 people have left their homes.

and that number could go over 400 ,000. Next to that is an account of yesterday's House hearings in which the fake anti -antisemitism campaign turned from college presidents to public school administrators, only to find that public school administrators, who spend their days dealing with one actual problem after another instead of flattering donors and talking to business consultants, were already unable to defend themselves and their work.

Maybe they could loan some of that clarity to the Times for a day? The story opens, a Republican -led House committee turned its attention to three of the most politically liberal school districts in the country on Wednesday, accusing them of tolerating anti -Semitism, but the district leaders pushed back forcefully, defending their schools. The hearing was the third by House Republicans to expose what they see as a pro -Palestinian agenda gripping schools and college campuses since the start of the Israel -Hamas War.

Why did the story just pivot from tolerating anti -Semitism to having a pro -Palestinian agenda? As if everyone's on the same page that anti -Semitism and a pro -Palestinian position are synonyms. To make a neo -MacArthur movement work, one of the first things you need is for neutral arbiters to accept your definitions of things. Speaking of neutral arbiters, down at the bottom of page one,

three Columbia workers recount fearful time trapped in Hall. Some intensive minute -by -minute reporting by the New York Times has gone inside Hamilton Hall to reconstruct the friction and the scuffle between building maintenance workers and the students who occupied the Hall, culminating in a gunshot. Oh, sorry, you know, the gunshot was when the cops came in, which I hope and actually do still assume.

that the Times will get around to reconstructing also. But first they had to get the story of the bad students, the enemies of regular working folks. Inside the paper, on page A20, the number of tornadoes has not increased, but now they tend to cluster together in concentrated waves. Scientists don't know whether to blame this on global warming or not, although I know which way I bet. Meanwhile, on page A11, the Times reports that at least 100 people have been killed.

and 128 others have been reported missing in intense flooding in Brazil. On the facing page, several large -scale human -driven changes to the planet, including climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the spread of invasive species, are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals, and plants, according to a new study. The researchers found the Times writes that across the board, four of the five trends they studied, biodiversity change, the introduction of new species,

Climate change and chemical pollution tended to increase disease risk. The fifth, habitat loss, seemed to not to, possibly because urbanization means better access to sanitation, possibly because there aren't enough animals left to harbor diseases. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we'll talk again tomorrow.