Best Tom Scocca Podcasts (2025)

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Episode 570: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 570: It's always been a pleasure. 13:14

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2M ago13:14

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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 …

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Episode 569: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 569: Dick Cheney is dead. 12:26

2M ago12:26

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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-pierci…

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Episode 568: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 568: The sepia tone of afterthoughts. 16:30

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTBy TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 567: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 567: Non-cacao ingredients. 12:41

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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 …

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Episode 566: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 566: A matter of guesswork. 20:19

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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! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTBy TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 565: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 565: A machete. 12:38

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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 imm…

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Episode 564: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 564: A rounding error. 12:49

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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 pr…

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Episode 563: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 563: Sorely disappointed. 15:15

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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 …

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Episode 562: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 562: Murders. 14:48

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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 indiffe…

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Episode 561: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 561: South America produces cocaine. 14:58

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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 previous…

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Episode 560: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 560: White House demolition. 13:58

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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 t…

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Episode 559: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 559: Happy problems. 14:02

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTBy TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 558: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 558: Royal jewels. 15:07

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTBy TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 557: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 557: Secrecy and encryption. 13:08

2M ago13:08

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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, …

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Episode 556: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 556: A huge news cycle for official racism. 17:07

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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. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDI…

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Episode 555: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 555: The data itself. 15:34

2M ago15:34

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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 th…

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Episode 554: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 554: A function of access. 14:51

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTBy TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 553: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 553: Redefine criminality. 14:36

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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. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST…

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Episode 552: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 552: Watching the world burn. 16:29

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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 …

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Episode 551: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 551: Widely criticized as flimsy. 17:03

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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, …

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Episode 550: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 550: Let's do the [CURSE WORD] news. 12:55

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By TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 549: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 549: The 21st paragraph. 13:34

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By TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 548: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 548: An Eisenhower sword. 13:49

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: There is no job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning. The numbers were reportedly compiled but are not being released, due to the government shutdown. Surely this is a neutral logistical decision on the bureau's part, and the numbers would stay in a file drawer even if they were positive for the Trump admin…

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Episode 547: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 547: No matter what Congress says. 13:45

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: There we have one of the basic problems with writing about the Trump administration and what its officials said, in that pretty much every part of that paraphrase is false. The review was not in response to Donald Trump's executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. It was quite obviously in response to the govern…

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Episode 546: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 546: Ahead of a midnight deadline. 13:11

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Back on page one, at the top left of the page, the headline is, “Comey Is Stuck In Long Feud With President / A Bad Start Escalated Into an Indictment.” The bad start was James Comey as FBI director telling Donald Trump in their first meeting when Trump was president-elect that there were allegations circulating about Trump a…

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Episode 545: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 545: Fear of retribution. 14:48

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: This is how Peter Baker decided to respond to the spectacle of the complete collapse of the rule of law, by somehow simultaneously assuming the posture of a kindergarten teacher and of a child sucking its thumb on a sleepy mat. Boy, those Republicans sure wouldn't like it if someone treated them the way that they're treating …

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Episode 544: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 544: Something of a joke. 13:13

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Marjorie Taylor Green, whose entire politics is built around not being able to get along with people, is not getting along with people. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTBy TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 543: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 543: Chikungunya. 15:07

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Speaking of declining literacy, in the international news on page A6, there's the headline, “Some Poo-Poo an Italian City Tax Designed to Combat Dog Waste.” That's P-O-O hyphen P-O-O. Completely amateur attempted wordplay. The term “pooh-pooh” for disparaging something is spelled with H’s, so it's not a clever piece of wordpl…

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Episode 542: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 542: Strangers on the street. 14:13

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Below the jump for that story on page A15, the headline is “SEC dropped a civil complaint against a former client of its Trump-picked chairman. In 2018,” the Times writes, “Paul Atkins was paid $1,450 an hour to be an expert witness by Devin Archer's lawyers as they tried to undermine accusations that their client defrauded a…

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Episode 541: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 541: Going to hell. 13:08

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The great difficulty in trying to convey what happens with this president and this presidency is that Donald Trump is a profoundly addled and frivolous person who doesn't care or understand the things he says or does, but he is also the president of the United States, so that the things that he says and does are real and seri…

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Episode 540: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 540: A broad offensive. 12:00

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: In the abstract, in principle, this isn't a terrible way for a mainstream publication to express skepticism toward official claims, but to politely and firmly rebut the claims put forward yesterday, to rationalize them into a new step toward reframing autism, is to miss the entire tenor of the thing. The story then tries to d…

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Episode 539: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 539: Dark forces. 15:19

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Jeremy W. Peters' nonsense, flattering as it does the sensibilities and sensitivities of the people who run the paper, gets page one, and again, a straight news story package, whereas Adam Liptak, writing about how the actual removal of Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves, as the Trump administration threatened to use its regulato…

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Episode 538: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 538: Confusion and near chaos. 14:51

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Knowing that the Senate went ahead and jammed through Kimberly Guilfoyle's appointment to be an ambassador at the expense of longstanding procedural rules just affirms the already established situation of the Senate. Framing it as a steady erosion of John Thune's values as an institutionalist is kind of funny, but likewise no…

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Episode 537: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 537: Silenced by social platforms. 11:55

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Before we get to the larger news, we're going to start with something very small, or at least something petty, that turns out astonishingly and yet obviously, to be of world historic import. It's in a passage by Ben Smith writing for Semafor. “The Trump administration,” Smith writes, “from the president down to the middle lev…

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Episode 536: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 536: Acute malnutrition. 10:50

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Hamstringing the FBI's ability to investigate financial fraud doesn't seem like things backfiring for the Trump administration exactly. Seems more like one of their more successful integrated policy initiatives. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST…

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Episode 535: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 535: Business as usual. 11:48

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The administration may have accused Venezuelan cartels of bringing fentanyl into the United States, but the New York Times has reported that Venezuela plays essentially no role in the fentanyl trade. The story does return to the fact that there is no legal basis for these killings, but it mostly slides past the fact that the …

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Episode 534: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 534: Business first. 13:38

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: It's one thing to ruin the lives of civil servants, it's quite another to inconvenience Bayer. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTBy TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 533: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 533: You have no idea. 9:44

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The Times writes, “Mr. Kirk would arrive at colleges ready for rhetorical combat, willing to engage on the thorniest topics from abortion rights to race. the topic of race.” Ah, that “topic” of race. Right. His opinion on the "topic" of race was that black people were inherently mentally inferior to white people and only owed…

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Episode 532: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 532: An interesting claim. 13:00

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Shooting a retreating unarmed vessel and then making sure to massacre any survivors, would be absolutely illegal in a war, which again, is not what this was. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY! https://www.indignity.net/ Support INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTBy TOM SCOCCA

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Episode 531: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 531: Reply All. 12:35

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Donald Trump's participation in Jeffrey Epstein's sleazy birthday book makes its way onto the front page in a NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “Epstein Revelations Hindering Trump’s Attempts to Turn Page.” It's illustrated with an infographic, “Signature With a Characteristic Flourish. The president has denied signing a birthday message …

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Episode 530: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 530: Drawing for Epstein. 14:42

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Way inside the paper, on page A16, down at the bottom, the headline is “Drawing for Epstein, apparently signed by Trump, is released.” “Key congressional committee on Monday,” the Times writes, “obtained a note and sexually suggestive drawing, apparently signed by Donald J. Trump, and included in a book for the disgraced fina…

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Episode 529: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 529: Drawing logical conclusions. 13:42

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: “In the three weeks since President Trump flooded the streets of Washington with hundreds of troops and federal agents,” the Times writes, ”there have been only a few scattered protests and scarcely a word from Congress, which has quietly gone along with the deployment.” Actually, the AP reports there were thousands of people…

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Episode 528: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 528: Making stuff up. 13:44

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Maybe even more than the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, as Secretary of Defense, the Kennedy confirmation certified that there was absolutely no limit on Republicans readiness to roll over for Donald Trump, no matter what principles were involved or what obvious damage would be the result. And, RFK Jr.'s behavior has amply ill…

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Episode 527: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 527: It was unclear. 14:26

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Again, this big win for Harvard is on page A19, as opposed to page A1, which is where in June, the Times ran, “Harvard is said to be open to spending up to $500 million to resolve Trump dispute.” And where in July, the Times ran, “Behind closed doors, Harvard officials debate a risky truce with Trump.” Surely New York Times s…

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Episode 526: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 526: Donald Trump likes killing people. 11:16

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The Times goes on to say he said the strike “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in international waters transporting illegal narcotics heading to the United States.” Before any external information has come in about exactly who was on the boat in the black and white snuff video of the airstrike that Trump put out, the …

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Episode 525: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 525: Destroyed by bootleggers. 14:35

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: "In the past several weeks, the rioters and their lawyers have pushed the Trump administration to pay them restitution for what they believe were unfair prosecutions.” And once they get that, they will demand something else because what they've learned in the past four years and eight months is that nobody is going to stop th…

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Episode 524: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 524: Growing alertness. 14:14

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: It's a big week for traitors. Donald Trump's Air Force yesterday announced that it would reverse the Biden administration's decision and offer a military funeral to Ashley Babbitt, who was shot dead by a police officer defending members of Congress as she tried to lead an attack through a broken window of the locked door to t…

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Episode 523: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 523: The miraculous promise of technology. 11:20

4M ago11:20

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The Times writes, “four other high profile CDC officials quit en masse, apparently in frustration over vaccine policy and Mr. Kennedy's leadership.” The word “apparently” is not really necessary there, given that at least one of them specifically said so. Daskalakis posted his resignation letter to x.com. In it, he wrote that…

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Episode 522: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 522: Remarkable failure. 13:15

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: On the front of this morning's New York Times, all the way down at the bottom of the page is a little referral box directing the reader to page C2 to read about the news that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey are engaged to be married. If you do a search for Taylor Swift on Google, or at least when I just did one, it sets off a …

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Episode 521: Indignity Morning Podcast No. 521: Absolutely forbidden. 10:49

4M ago10:49

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The New York Times did not think that the mayor, in the midst of his reelection campaign, having his people hand out cash bribes in public, was anything that its readership might need to know in a timely manner. They got scooped on the news simply because the bribery was so widespread and so blatant that another outlet, one t…