year to double down

This is a post by Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who served with Liz Cheney as the only 2 Republicans on the January 6 Committee.  For that, both of them were drummed out of the GOP. You could say they were the only 2 Republicans with actual integrity.

2024: The Year to Double Down

By Adam Kinzinger

There has been a reality that has existed probably since the beginning of humanity, but has been evident in recent years in American politics. The forces of chaos are exhausting, depressing, and can drive us to a feeling of helplessness. We try to talk logic and truth into a portion of the population which feels threatened by such things, and our temptation is to throw up our hands, and give up.

This is exactly what the forces of chaos are counting on. You see, the chaos that drains us- energizes them.

I often think back to my Grandfathers service in World War 2. Joining the Army Air Corps at the old age of 24, he trained over a year stateside before entering Europe to operate behind German lines after Normandy. My grandpa could never talk about the war, the one time her tried with me he broke down in tears. Many of his stories died with him, but we have recently begun knitting together the snippets of what he told various kids, and now we have a better picture. His story is his, but I know that in the vigor of battle he operated heroically, often taking missions himself because he felt an affection for the guys he led, and worried about their lives. But we also know he hit a wall, and his letters after the war revealed a man ready to come home, and somewhat disillusioned with his country leaving him to occupy Europe into 1946. Regardless, I know when he returned he was proud of his service even if he could not revisit it in his mind.

When I was in Iraq, we were proud of our missions, but a significant amount of time was spent complaining about missed birthdays, holidays, 120 degree heat, etc. Complaining is a soldier’s favorite past time, how else can you defeat shear boredom (besides turning curse words into verbs and adjectives). We wanted to be home.

In those moments, my grandpa, my men in Iraq and I, felt exhausted. Yet when we think back to those moments, we don’t remember that. We miss those days. The complaining seems trivial now, and in my discussions with my guys we often revisit those days with humor and a sense of longing.

Such is human nature. And this is the moment we find ourselves in today. Granted, our lives are not on the line, we aren’t surrounded by (much) danger, but we are tired. We feel like we can’t make a difference, but we can, we are, and we will.

This year will bring many days where we feel defeated and like the fight for America’s soul isn’t worth the cost. But it is. In a decade or two we will tell our kids and grandkids about this moment and how we stepped up to be the bulwark against the forces of evil in the nation seeking to tear us down.

We will prevail, I am confident of that. Not because of polls, or anything that can shift on a daily basis. I am confident because I know and have seen that in this time, Americans of all background and philosophies have put aside their differences in defense of what we hold close…freedom, and self-governance. We are not whiners, complainers, and victims, as the former President wants us to be. We are strivers, innovators, and self-sufficient winners.

This will be the year of the winner, and the year the whiner finally goes away forever.

So, buckle up. Sign up to join me in this battle. We are going to have quite a few days where we shake our head, and wonder if it’s time to give up. It isn’t, and the rewards will be great when we hold the line, and retake ground for our nation. More importantly, we will be able to tell our kids and grandkids about how WE were part of the battle to take our nation back.

And we won!

Happy new year! Let’s get ready for battle, there is no other fight I’d rather engage in together!

Original.

Hope in 2024

Looking for some optimism for 2024? Simon Rosenberg has some.

Biden’s 2024 chances are much stronger than people realize

Two things have happened to Trump since 2020 that are going to make it very hard for him to win in 2024

By Simon Rosenberg, Democratic strategist

As we head into 2024, the conventional wisdom is that Democrats are on the back foot for next year’s elections. But there are three reasons I am optimistic that 2024 is going to be a good year for Democrats:

First, President Joe Biden has kept his central promise in the 2020 election: that he would lead the nation to the other side of Covid, successfully. The pandemic has receded. Our economic recovery has been better than any other G7 nation. GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.9% last quarter, and more than 3% for the Biden presidency. We have the best job market since the 1960s and the lowest uninsured rate in U.S. history. The Dow Jones broke 37,000 this month for the first time. Wage growth, new business formation and prime-age labor participation rates are all at historically elevated levels. Prices fell — yes, fell — last month. Rents are softening, and gas prices and crime rates are falling. Domestic oil and renewable production are at record levels. The annual deficit, which exploded under Trump, is trillions less today. 

Consumer sentiment has risen sharply in recent weeks, and measures of life, job and income satisfaction are remarkably high. There is no doubt that recent years have been hard — Covid, an insurrection at the Capitol, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, repeated OPEC price hikes, global and domestic inflation — but it is increasingly clear that America is getting to the other side of this challenging period, and are in a far better place than when President Biden took office. 

Second, the strength of the president’s record is only matched by the strength of his party. I don’t think it is widely understood how strong the Democratic Party is right now. The party has won more votes in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party has done in modern American history. Over the last four presidential elections, Democrats have averaged 51% of the popular vote, their best showing over four national elections since the 1930s.

In both 2022 and 2023, Democrats prevented the historical down ballot struggle of the party in power and had two remarkably successful elections. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats’ statewide margins were greater than the 2020 presidential margins in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania — all recent battleground states. That showing led the party to pick up a Senate seat, four state legislative chambers and two governorships, and helped keep the House of Representatives close, making it far more likely Republicans lose it in 2024. 

This year, Democrats flipped a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin; defeated a six-week abortion ban in Ohio; kept the Virginia state house, debunking the idea that Republicans could hide behind a 15-week abortion ban; and took state legislative seats, municipalities and school board seats across the country. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, grew his margin of victory from 2019, and Republicans lost mayoral elections in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Jacksonville, Florida, two of the largest GOP-controlled cities in the country. And in over three dozen state legislative special elections around the country, Democrats outperformed 2020 – an election we won by 4.5 percentage points — by an average of 5 percentage points. 

While in 2022, Republicans could point to gains in New York and California to offset their losses in the battleground states, there were no places in 2023 where they outperformed expectations. A blue wave washed across the U.S. in 2023, and this ongoing strong performance of the Democratic Party in election after election, in all parts of the country, should fill Biden’s supporters with confidence.

Finally, while Democrats keep winning, conventional wisdom continues to overly discount Trump’s historic baggage and MAGA’s repeated electoral failures. Despite these repeated failures, Republicans are on the cusp of nominating Trump again, who this time is an even more degraded and dangerous version of MAGA than he was in 2020.

Two things have happened to Trump since 2020 that are going to make it very hard for him to win in 2024 — the stripping away of women’s reproductive rights, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and end American democracy for all time. Additionally, this year courts have already determined that he sexually abusedjournalist E. Jean Carroll in a department store; oversaw a yearslong financial fraud; and led a party-wide effort, involving hundreds of Republican leaders and thousands of willing allies, to overturn the last election, culminating in a violent attack on Congress. 

Democrats will be able to argue that no one is more responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade than Trump; that his mishandling of classified documents is to blame for the most serious security breach in American history; that in concert with Russian President Vladimir Putin he will end the global liberal order that has brought America and the world unprecedented prosperity and peace; that he supports more dead kids in schools, a faster warming planet, lost health insurance for tens of millions of Americans and the end of American democracy for all time. Trump represents an unprecedented threat to the country, is even more extreme than 2020, and has, in political parlance, the highest “negatives” of any candidate perhaps in our history. It is going to be very hard for him to win next year. 

For all these reasons, as we head into 2024, I am optimistic that Joe Biden and the Democrats will once again beat Donald Trump, and hopefully, this time, send MAGA into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Original.

You're a Nazi

...if you still support Trump.

If You Support Donald Trump, You're a Nazi

by The Rude Pundit

12/23/23

I said what I said.

I've been thinking, as former president and current inevitable doom of the republic Donald Trump proudly goes full Hitler in his speeches and social media pronouncements: do MAGA redcaps pause between filling their kids' Never Surrender Christmas stocking with Trump candy bullion and wiping their dicks with a Mar-a-Lago towel after jacking off to their iPhone videos of when they went into the Capitol on January 6 (and still haven't been arrested yet, motherfuckers) and think, "Am I a Nazi? And if I am, am I okay with that?" 

I mean, sure, sure, I know that this straw MAGA moron doesn't believe what the wackos in the fake, failing lamestream media are saying about Trump. But the orange goon himself is giving credence to the Hitler comparisons by insisting that "I never read Mein Kampf" and saying to lipless fuck weasel Hugh Hewitt, "I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works." (You just know that behind all that is that Trump doesn't want anyone to get credit for the shit he says. I'm sure he's told one of his lickspittles, "Hitler wasn't as smart as me" or some such fuckery.)

To be a loyal redcap stormtrooper, you gotta go along with Trump no matter which way his insistent madness drives his rhetoric. And, truly, you don't disagree with him when says, "They’re coming from all over the world. People all over the world, we have no idea. They could be healthy. They could be very unhealthy. They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country, but they do bring in crime, but they have them coming from all over the world and they're destroying the blood of our country." But what you're agreeing with is Nazi shit. It's flat out Nazi shit. Trump can say, as he told Hewitt, that it's not the same as what Hitler said, but it is the same as what Hitler said, except Hitler was talking about Jews and Trump's talking about undocumented migrants. And Trump wants to round them up and put them in camps before deporting them by the millions. And he wants laws passed that would allow authorities to check the papers of anyone they "suspect" of not being American. It's absolute insanity that would fundamentally alter the fabric of the country. It will cause upheaval and violence and economic ruin. But Nazis don't give a shit about that kind of thing because purity matters above all. The rest will take care of itself once the blood is purified. Or, you know, un-poisoned. 

I'm gonna bet that your average redcap doesn't give a shit if they're called "Nazis." Indeed, many of them are likely to embrace it because they think it drives the liberals crazy. They'll post memes of that screaming bespectacled woman as a snarky reaction to how the left thinks mass execution of undocumented migrants at the Trump concentration camps is wrong and tweet out to the Nazis on Elon's Internet Bullshit Factory that we should be rounding up liberals and hanging them. Oh, wait. They already do that last part.

Sure, sure, some Trump supporters, desperately hoping to rationalize away the stink of Nazi, will try to say that they know the "rhetoric" Trump uses is over the top and even problematic, but they just think what he did for the country was so awesome that they have to support him and, hey, he can't do all those bad things. You know what you call someone who tries to justify what a Nazi says? You call them a "Nazi." (You also call them "fucking brain damaged" if they don't remember how Trump gave this nation a bloody ass fisting during Covid.)

That's where we are right now in the United States as we watch the MAGA redcaps goosestep closer and closer to mass violence. Trump promises to abuse the criminal justice system: "What I’m going to do is give indemnifications to any police officer that gets in trouble for pursuing a criminal because that’s what we have to do." And to have mass purges of perceived enemies: "We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media." And he declares that America under Biden is a nightmare: "We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has lost its way, but we are not going to allow this horror to continue." Man, Nazis know how to use propaganda to keep the rubes all pissed off and ready for action.

So, yeah, I'll call these sick motherfuckers "Nazis." If you're gonna follow someone whose language lines up with Hitler, who has praised dictators and who wants to bring their methods to the United States, who promises to round up millions of people just trying to live their lives, who threatens to attack our neighbors and break our alliances, who sees non-white people as invaders or criminals who must be dealt with harshly, who wants to "cleanse" the country of people who don't believe the same shit he does, fuck, yeah, you're a Nazi. I don't wanna wait around until gas chambers are built to finally sound an alarm. 

And that's how the 2024 campaign should go. You can be with the Nazis or you can be with the people who think Nazis deserved to have their asses kicked into the garbage heap. Indeed, history teaches us that we are obligated to kick Nazi asses. If only there was a short, punchy word we could use for anti-facist...

Original.

Dan Rather

We live in strange times. The GOP has sold their soul to Donald Trump, perhaps the most menacing public figure in decades. They are scared of Trump and Trump's rabid supporters, who make all types of threats against people who dare oppose Trump. 

Very few elected Republicans had the temerity and spine to oppose Trump, and for that they were drummed out of the party. But you know as well as I know that not every regular Republican out there thinks that Trump is the second messiah. Many think he is demented and a threat to democracy, but they lurk undetected in the shadows. Come election time, I trust them to do the right thing, and if Donald Trump is on the ballot, to vote for Democrats. The nation depends on it. I find it hard to believe that the GOP is willing to toss 230+ years of democracy for this orange illiterate piece of shit.

Can These Two Women Help Save America?

by Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner

Dec 6, 2023

If you’ve been near a TV news program or newspaper in recent days, you might know that former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney is on a book tour. 

If you’ve been anywhere on Earth this year, you probably know that music superstar Taylor Swift is on a concert tour. 

And if you have even the most rudimentary awareness of politics, you probably know that Joe Biden is president of the United States and running for reelection. 

What do these three have in common, other than that they sound like the setup to a joke (Cheney, Swift, and Biden walk into a bar…)? Maybe the rescue of American democracy. 

It is surely a sign that we are in very strange and dangerous times that anyone would write a column putting these three people together. But here we are. And that’s because another person, whom we will leave unnamed, looms ominously over the future of our country.

Recently, coverage has increased (including here at Steady) about how America’s most famous criminal defendant and only twice-impeached former president is running for office again on an explicit promise to destroy our constitutional system of government and the rule of law. And one of the people raising that alarm is Cheney. 

The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and until recently, an exemplar of extreme conservative politics in the United States, Liz Cheney famously became a pariah in her party because she called the former president the dangerous disgrace that he is. 

Her service on the House committee that investigated the violent insurrection of January 6 cemented her role as enemy to many Republicans. It also earned her appreciation and even plaudits from Democrats who had previously clashed with her on almost every imaginable policy issue. On Monday evening, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow introduced a cordial interview with Cheney by explaining how absurd it would have seemed at one point for the two of them to sit down and agree on anything.

But that is what a threat to destroy America will do. 

And this brings us to Taylor Swift, who was just named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Her Eras Tour is estimated to have brought in over $850 million and boosted the U.S. economy by $5 billion, according to Forbes magazine. Swift’s legions of fans, called  Swifties, are drawn not only to her music but to her message of female empowerment. They respect Swift as someone who has stood up for herself in what can be a brutal and demeaning business. She is an entrepreneur and an innovator. And increasingly, she has emerged as someone eager to lend her voice to political causes. 

She endorsed Democrats for election in Tennessee in 2018 and Biden for president in 2020. A single recent Instagram post encouraging her fans to register to vote drove 35,000 new registrations. She is a strong advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. 

Swift’s new boyfriend, NFL superstar Travis Kelce, is also no stranger to political issues. He famously took a knee during the “The Star-Spangled Banner” in solidarity with Black players protesting police violence. And he has been a strong supporter of the COVID vaccine, to the outrage of anti-vaxxers. He also endorsed Bud Light beer after the brand was boycotted by conservatives because it had featured a transgender internet celebrity in one of its ads. 

What might it look like if both Swift and Cheney lend their names and energy to Biden’s reelection campaign? Obviously, the two cases would be very different. But they could add up to a big difference. That is, if Cheney stops flirting with the idea of her own presidential run —  a prospect she has teased in some interviews. Such a bid would increase the chances of a former president’s return to power. And it’s difficult to imagine her making that choice. 

Cheney speaks to disaffected Republicans and moderates who might not like Biden or his policies but legitimately fear a second term for his likely opponent. That Cheney is working to elect Democrats says a lot. It says that there will be a time for us to debate policies again, but now is not that time. Because if we lose American democracy, nothing else will matter. It’s a powerful argument that could sway some voters on the margins or encourage those who might have stayed home to come out and vote. That could be enough to swing elections in battleground states. 

As for Swift, the effects could be even greater. She is extremely popular with young voters (although she has millions of older fans, as well). Standing alongside Biden could help assuage fears about his age. She could highlight the right’s potential harm on race, gender, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and more. She could also entice new voters to register and encourage them to show up on Election Day. Swift’s fanbase is so large that it encompasses many who are conservative and Republican. Might she even change some minds?

We have already seen the modus operandi of the former president when he is criticized. His instinct is to lash out and insult, demean and degrade. How will that play with the Swifties? It would certainly reaffirm Liz Cheney’s point: that he is supremely unfit, morally and emotionally, to be president.

Taylor Swift, Liz Cheney, and Joe Biden campaign for the presidency. That’s not the start of a joke. Could it be an unlikely alliance to save the United States of America?

Original.