Steelman Steve

I have found that you can really get away with quite a lot just by adopting a particular affect when talking to liberals about controversial topics. The most important thing, the thing everything hinges on, is that they have to be convinced that you’re basically just like them, a good person just like them, not somebody on the other side. You have to hedge a lot, sprinkle your language full of, “to be sure” and other qualifiers. You don’t want to be too direct. If something is too controversial, then you want to signal convincingly that it brings you no pleasure to report it, that you’re not saying you like it. And you have to try very hard to be reassuring, to make them believe that above all you are concerned with the welfare of the people most harmed by these revelations. You have to go into it believing that it’s your job to manage their emotions throughout the entire conversation and remain attuned to how various pieces of information are hitting their ears, adjusting your approach based on how well they’re handling it. You have to talk to them, in other words, sort of as you would to a small child whose pet has just died. I’m not saying you should do this or that you’d even want to, but I am telling you that it works.

Here is the best explanation so far in regard to the red vs blue button. For those that are team blue button can yall explain why?

The Big Four airlines (American, Delta, Southwest, United) control 75% of the U.S. market. Fewer choices = higher prices for you.

Only one question: who’s the exit liquidity?

I repeat if you need religion to have morals you’re a bad person.

Ultimately I’d rather die as a blue button voter than be alive as a red button voter and know that my vote helped billions of people die

It's happening again.

It's been 7 months since we had our baby and we're still receiving unexplained hospital bills in the mail. Hardly ever an adequate description of services. Just a QR code to pay online. It feels intentionally confusing and difficult to get answers. We want price transparency.

My initial January 6th prosecutor Patrick Scruggs has been sentenced after being charged with three felonies for stabbing a man that could have ended any life sentence. You won't believe what just happened.

I am a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I have worked eleven of these. I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired. The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass. A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed. Everything else was improvised. I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76. What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation. I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one. She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure. The theme of the dinner was "A Free Press for a Free People." The banners were still hanging when the evacuation began. I know because I hung them. Twenty-three banners, navy blue, gold serif lettering, $11,400 for the set. They were still hanging when 2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet. The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent. That's priority. The video went viral by 10:15 PM. Not the video of the evacuation. Not the Secret Service response. The wine. Three guests in formalwear grabbing bottles off white tablecloths while being told to move toward the exits, while a man with a shotgun stood in the same motor entrance where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan 45 years ago. A woman near the service entrance was crying. She said "I just wanna go home." She was not holding wine. She was holding her phone. She was the only person I saw that night who looked afraid rather than inconvenienced. That's the distinction. The rest of the ballroom did not look afraid. They looked interrupted. An active shooter at the WHCD is a logistical problem. The dinner was disrupted. The timeline was off. The after-party at the French Ambassador's residence would need to be rescheduled. These are contingency matters. Contingency matters have solutions. Fear is for people who attend events without security details. I have produced eleven of these dinners. I have managed seating charts that require diplomatic-grade negotiations. I have handled comedians, cabinet secretaries, network anchors, and the editor of a major newspaper who once threatened to leave because his table was behind a column. I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously. 188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken. A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.