BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

I had hoped, and cautiously believed, that I might be writing a different Steady today. Instead, I see today’s newsletter as a catharsis for all of us … as I try to wrap my head around our new collective reality.

First, take care of yourself, and check in on your friends and loved ones. Last night’s result was a shock, and many people are reeling. Wanting …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

The Traveling Wilburys made great, old-fashioned, toe-tapping music. Their rollicking songs are guaranteed to leave you beaming, which is why they are this week’s reason to smile.

The Americana super-group composed of superstars George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne made only two albums, but my goodness, they are masterpieces.

They chose the band’s name, according to Petty, because they “didn’t want it to sound …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

In the down-is-up, grievance-fueled, gaslighting world that is Donald Trump, a new idea has been trotted out that is beyond bananas. His latest Hail Mary has the potential to risk the health of every citizen … and all for a few votes.

Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help him “straighten out our health” and “go wild on health” in his second term. Yes, the …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

Perhaps it was appropriate. It was certainly on-brand. The culmination of Donald Trump’s campaign for president was a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, billed as his homecoming, the capstone of his political comeback.

But that’s not what happened in Manhattan last night. Instead, it was a vulgar hate-fest with possible political ramifications.

Before Trump took the stage, speaker after speaker filled the storied venue …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Carole King and James Taylor in 2010 (credit: Getty Images)

You may remember that James Taylor was bumped from performing at the Democratic National Convention in August. The show had gone long. A big supporter of Democratic politics, Taylor seemed not to take it personally. He performed at a Harris-Walz rally in North Carolina last Thursday, where he sang “You’ve Got a Friend.”

That song got me thinking about …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

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With less than two weeks until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is honing her closing arguments. She is moving away from the joyful warrior we saw early in her campaign and toward a candidate with a blunt message: Donald Trump is unfit, unhinged, and too dangerous to return to the White House.

And she’s not the only one who shares this feeling. She is joined …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Donald Trump and his cheerleader Elon Musk (credit: Getty Images)

We are here today to commemorate, or perhaps more appropriately, decry, an anniversary. It was 20 years ago when the first social network gained a global reach. MySpace is the granddaddy of social media platforms and the precursor to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. MySpace begat a society of screen-watchers, straining our eyes, arching our necks, and cooking …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

With a little more than two weeks until the most important presidential election of our lives, we wanted to inspire the Steady community to get out and vote! To do so we are turning to one of Kamala Harris’s favorite artists as our reason to smile.

Harris has said she grew up in a house where music was always playing, and Aretha Franklin was among the …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

It is no secret to anyone who has been paying attention that Donald Trump is declining. He gives increasingly incoherent non-answers. He struggles to string words together to make a sentence. He regurgitates paranoid fantasies. He often appears to be downright unhinged.

Any regular reader of this newsletter knows we have been calling attention to this issue for months. Now other media outlets that previously disregarded …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

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I started Steady almost four years ago to try to cut through the chatter and inject some sanity into an increasingly chaotic world. Boy, do we need that today. I am not suggesting we all dust off our rose-colored glasses. But we do need to take a very deep, collective breath and remind ourselves of several things.

First, reporting and polling are showing momentum has slowed …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

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Choose your overused cliche: It’s pedal to the metal time, put it all on the line, all hands on deck. I abhor a cliche, but here, it’s a necessary evil (cliche intended). Many Americans are saying they’ll do whatever it takes to help defeat Donald Trump, so long as it’s legal. We are less than four weeks from Election Day.

As Trump and his MAGA followers …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

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What’s happening right now in the warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico is extremely dangerous. The disinformation and outright lies about it — and about Hurricane Helene before it — are a disgrace.

I’ve witnessed a lot of hurricanes form in my lifetime, but never have I seen one grow from a tropical storm to a Category 5 monster in a single day. Warm waters …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

Almost four years on, Americans may have forgotten the details of that horrific day in January 2021. Perhaps they remember watching the riots on TV, the Congress held hostage, the chaos and confusion, the desecration of the U.S. Capitol.

Some high-ranking Republicans, including the vice presidential nominee, would like to have you forget what happened and “focus on the future.” Then there’s Donald Trump, who from …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

With our democracy being tested in unimagined ways, we are just over a month away from one of the most important presidential elections in U.S. history. The only chance for voters to see the vice presidential candidates together is tomorrow night in a “debate” being hosted by CBS News.

There are few guarantees in life, but odds are that more than one lie will be told …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

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We need to be talking more, not less, about the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy. The former president and his understudy, JD Vance, have been trying to convince voters, with no evidence and a head-spinning level of hypocrisy, that violence against the former president was caused by rhetoric from Democrats.

Trump has upended the political script, saying, “[The Democrats’] rhetoric is causing me to …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

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On the list of “issues that matter to most,” climate change doesn’t usually rate as highly as it should. But issues significantly affected by climate change are certainly in the top 10: inflation, escalating food prices, rising utility and health care costs, and the lack of affordable housing.

Let’s talk about why climate change doesn’t move the needle for most voters. One reason is that “climate …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

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Donald Trump doesn’t want you to focus on the economy, because the news is very good. Instead he is talking about anything else, including bald-faced lies, to keep the focus on him and his faux outrage. Filed under you-can’t-make-it-up, Republicans are blaming “Democratic rhetoric” for the latest apparent assassination attempt on Trump. All the while Trump and JD Vance are making up stories out of whole …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

JD Vance could be a heartbeat away from the presidency. It’s a thought you may want to seriously consider, because at the top of the Republican ticket is a 78-year-old obese man showing signs of mental decline.

Vance is getting lots of headlines, mostly bad, and there was even talk early on that Donald Trump might drop him. We need to understand — quickly — who …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

Add another check to the things-I’ve-never-seen-in-a-presidential-election column. Normally, presidential debates are no more than live, relatively uninteresting interviews with the candidates. But this cycle, the first debate caused a sitting president to withdraw from the race, and the second reminded 67 million viewers that a certain Republican is simply not fit to hold the office.

Will Trump’s (under) performance be enough to send his poll numbers …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

What a difference two months makes.

From the moment Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stepped on the debate stage last night, you knew it was going to be different from any presidential debate in recent memory.

The two candidates had never formally met. Harris took charge immediately, walking over to Trump to shake his hand, giving him no option.

It turned out to be the first …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

Waking up to The New York Times headline: “State of the Race: A Dead Heat With 8 Weeks to Go” is at the very least sobering, but by no means conclusive. It may even be a good thing.

To my Steady friends, the name of our newsletter says it all. We need to stay steady. The 2024 presidential election was always going to be tick-tight. The …

Andrew Mitrovica

This is clear: Much of America has voted for a fascist.

If that short, blunt opening offends your delicate sensibilities, then you, dear reader, best dispense finally with the saccharine-drenched myths about a divided, discordant nation that has elected a fascist as president – again.

This remains unclear: America’s fate.

An urgent task faces enlightened Americans who have made plain their admirable opposition to and rejection of every obscene aspect of a grinning …

By Kristin Urban

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Truth Coming Out Of Her Well To Shame Mankind, 1896, Musée Anne de Beaujeu, Moulins, France.

What’s Going On?
Truth Coming Out Of Her Well To Shame Mankind by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904) made its debut in the Paris Salon of 1896. Just as the painting itself is full of a sense of alluring ambiguity, so is the context and meaning behind it. We know that Gérôme took inspiration …

If you want to win, everyone just vote. It is important that the winner has a huge margin, to make irrelevant all of the legal argument being aired in the following article from the New York times.

As you can see in the article, there are a lot of lies and baseless claims included in the lawsuits. When there is a large margin of victory, there can be much less confusion post election.

VOTE your …

While mothers pick up their kids from schools that have closed early from Air Conditioning failures during extreme heat, cars are idling in long lines outside as they wait for their children.

It’s time to wake up and realize that we need a complete stoppage of the manufacturing of fossil fuel cars in America. China is already well upon the way to doing this. Why is America so far behind?

Because it would be a …

By AFP - Agence France Presse

Electric cars outnumber petrol cars in Norway for the first time ever, an industry organisation said on Tuesday.

Of the 2.8 million private cars registered in the Scandinavian country, 754,303 are all-electric, compared to 753,905 that run on petrol, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said in a statement.

Diesel models remain most numerous at just under one million, but their sales are falling rapidly.

"This is historic. A milestone …

Inspired by the visual language of old
Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks,
Justin Metz created this illustration, which
may be the first cover without a headline
in the Atlantic’s 167 year history

Our new president has made many promises. We can see now what that means for our great country. Will prices rise or fall? Will inflation rise or fall? Will our allies live on and survive? Our elected president has voiced many methods for confronting our conditions. Now we will see the results. It is my hope that he succeeds. I do not wish to see him fail at these goals that mean so much for …

By The New York Times Editorial Board

Throughout American history, business leaders have been able to assume that an American president of either party would uphold the rule of law, defend property rights and respect the independence of the courts. Implicit in that assumption is a fundamental belief that the country’s ethos meant their enterprises and the U.S. economy could thrive, no matter who won. They could keep their distance from the rough-and-tumble of campaign …

A would-be president and his billionaire. Good for the working man? I have met both of these guys. Take it from me. NO GOOD.

Even though she has compromised her ideals to get elected - and now likes fracking, I will take Kamala Harris any day of the week. She is real.
Neil Young

By Lisa Friedman

JD Vance and Tim Walz on Tuesday both avoided talking about the main cause of global warming that is powering the kind of violent weather that struck the Southeast this week: the burning of fossil fuels.

Mr. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, used a rhetorical flourish during his debate with Mr. Walz to raise doubts about the established science of climate change. “This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change, …

Fossil Fuels are the number one man-made cause of Climate Change. It's happening right now!
The USA should BAN FOSSIL CARS.

Hard to believe? Look around the world. We have to lead.
CHINA is way ahead of us. Get real. Go electric or alternative fuel now. Stop driving alone.
LOVE EARTH.

Howell, Michigan.

Lacrosse, Wisconsin.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania

Those are Sundown Towns in battleground states.

A Sundown town in a battle ground state? That’s where Trump is campaigning. WHY?

The term "sundown town" derives from the practice of all-white towns erecting signage alerting non-whites to vacate the area before sundown.[1] Sundown towns might include entire sundown counties and sundown suburbs and may be strengthened by the local presence of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacy …

By Ketrin Jochecová

Is this Trump’s Waterloo?

Legendary Swedish pop group ABBA on Thursday demanded that former U.S. President Donald Trump stop playing their hits at his election campaign rallies.

“We, together with the members of [ABBA], have discovered that videos have been released where Abba’s music has been used at Trump’s events and have requested that such use be immediately taken down and removed,” ABBA’s record company told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet on Thursday.

…