Good morning. It's May 23rd. Rain is starting to fall here in New York City as a line of heavy storms moves in. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The New York Times is reporting that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew yet another flag in addition to the upside down American flag outside his house in Virginia after the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

Wow, the rain is really coming down now. He also flew the Revolutionary War -era flag of a pine tree with the motto, An Appeal to Heaven, outside his beach house in New Jersey. Apparently, there's been a whole campaign to make that flag into a flag of Christianist reactionary insurrection. And people were waving it outside the Capitol during the January 6th attack.

It's just weird to me that The Times treats it as some profoundly obscure historic flag when I remember it as part of a standard set along with Join or Die and Don't Tread on Me that we learned about in Boy Scouts or somewhere. Nevertheless, like the Gadsden Don't Tread on Me flag,

It's definitely a symbol of being a reactionary chud now, and the most straightforward interpretation, namely that Alito is a completely brain -poisoned freak who considers himself to be an active revolutionary against the forces of liberal democracy and contemporary society, seems to be the correct reading of his choice to fly that flag, given that he also just goes around outright saying that stuff on the right -wing crank lecture circuit and, you know, writing it in his opinions from the bench of the United States Supreme Court. Yeah, it is boring out there. Anyway, that's down at the bottom of the front page. The lead news story on the right is yesterday's news about Spain, Norway, and Ireland recognizing a Palestinian state.

Next to that is a giant investigative feature taking up five columns of page one and jumping to multiple full pages on the inside in which the times went back to Afghanistan to document how our number one guy in Kandahar, Abdul Razik, was a savage mass murderer and gangster who used his position to, among other things, carry out tribal warfare against personal enemies, disappearing hundreds of people, dumping their bodies down wells or in the desert. The culture of lawlessness and impunity he created, the times rights, flew in the face of endless promises by American presidents, generals, and ambassadors to uphold human rights and build a better Afghanistan. And it helps explain why the United States lost the war in the relative peace caused by the collapse of the American Pact government and the Taliban securing control of the country. The Times writes about how it sent reporters to check up on the things that were impossible to check on while the United States was actively engaged in Afghanistan. The hundreds of relatives of the hundreds of disappeared people who they talked to about Razik, the Times writes, saw his rule as little more than a brutal campaign against civilians underwritten by the United States. His acts not only discredited the American war effort, breeding profound resentment that pushed people to support the Taliban, but embodied it in many ways as well. Across Afghanistan, the United States elevated and empowered warlords, corrupt politicians, and outright criminals to prosecute a war of military expediency in which the ends often justified the means. And that's about it, once you add in the fact that the ends didn't work either.

And the rain is still hammering down out there. Right below the fold, in surprise, Sunak calls for a UK vote on July 4th. Speaking of heavy rain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made that announcement while standing outside in a downpour. Next to that is a profile of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s running mate, Nicole Shanahan whose qualification for the vice presidency is that she got a billion dollars divorcing Google's Sergey Brin so she can afford to fund a vanity spoiler campaign. Her other affinity with Kennedy is that she's an anti -vaxxer and her personal life is so extravagantly squalid that the Times wasn't afraid to describe it, including with the backing of the Wall Street Journal's reporting and multiple witnesses going ahead and saying that she had sex with Elon Musk at a ketamine party despite the fact that both principals deny it.

It's hard to imagine how sloppy you have to be to put yourself in a position where the Times feels safe publishing that over the objections of two billionaires, one of them extremely litigious. And the death toll from the Iowa tornadoes is up to five. The Times has a front page picture of people sitting by the wreckage with a caption that refers to the event as a power storm. One word, no space a usage that's not in the dictionary and doesn't seem from Google to be widely in use. A search for Power Storm in the Times Archive pulls up 33 results, but the first couple of them that I looked at didn't actually contain the term Power Storm.

One of them was the wedding announcement of somebody who was a senior LSAT instructor at the New York subsidiary of PowerScore, an academic test preparation company in Charleston, South Carolina. Why is the New York Times archives search not matching the actual text of requests? Do they borrow their search function from somebody like Google that's busy crapping it up? Worth investigating. I'll see what I can figure out. But for now, that is the news. Thank you for  listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. Bring an umbrella if you're going out. And if all goes well, we'll talk again tomorrow.