If she thinks this makes her cool, she's sadly mistaken

On the latest episode of “The Tony Kinnett Cast,” we prepare for Donald Trump’s incoming administration as the new Republican coalition—from the establishment, conservatives, and populists to the new converts and centrists—prepare for the largest out-of-the-gate “Day One” of any administration in U.S. history. We’ll dive into recess appointments, Senate hearings, executive orders, and the magic of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s warning—no, not the rumor mill about appointments—but the classic McConnell warning and prophecy from 2013 (and its fulfillment via Trump). Trump sets the chess board with the biggest pieces he can find, and the swivel-chair bureaucrats weep massive tears. Also, we’ll dig into a deep and meaningful conversation about the Christmas season sweet tooth. Catch the live radio show and livestream weeknights at 7 p.m. ET on The Daily Signal’s YouTube, X, or Facebook—and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode or exclusive interview! The post Trump’s Spring-Loaded Administration appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The biopic “Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid as the nation’s 40th president, is set for release Tuesday on DVD and Blu-ray. Rob Bluey, president and executive editor of The Daily Signal, interviewed “Reagan” producer Mark Joseph over email to mark the occasion. Rob Bluey: “Reagan” exceeded box office expectations, earning over $30 million after its Aug. 30 opening. What do you think resonated so strongly with moviegoers? Mark Joseph: It’s very similar to political polling. Our core audience is difficult to poll because they’re not typical moviegoers. So we doubled official predictions by industry experts for that first weekend. We’re gratified that the film seems to have struck a nerve. We received many reports of tears and standing ovations in theaters. I think people yearn for a time when our leaders could fight fiercely in the ring, but then be friends outside of the ring. And that’s one of the things people reacted to—the relationship between [House Speaker] Tip O’Neill and Reagan.  Q: The movie spans Reagan’s entire life. How did you capture such a long and eventful life in a feature film? A: We broke a major Hollywood rule that a biopic is supposed to center on a small window of time in someone’s life. I firmly disagree with this “rule,” and I think the audience does as well.  To understand Ronald Reagan without understanding where he came from and the influences in his early years of his parents and his community is simply impossible. We knew the rule we were breaking by covering an 80-year span and we did it for a good reason. And we’ll probably do it again. [“Reagan” was directed by Sean McNamara and written by Howard Klausner.] Q: Dennis Quaid, who plays Reagan, spoke about how this film helped him understand Reagan’s complete story rather than just “bits and pieces.” What were your goals for the movie? A: Our goal was to tell his story from beginning to end, and we had a great storyteller in Jon Voight as the KGB agent who knew everything about Reagan. I joked with Jon that this was going to be the greatest acting stretch of his career—for Jon Voight to play a communist. But he was the perfect storyteller to connect all of those bits and pieces. Fundamentally, when I realized that Reagan’s pastor when he was a young boy was something of an anti-communist activist who invited Soviet dissidents to speak at the church, everything about Ronald Reagan and what he did in Hollywood and on the global stage made sense.  Q: What were some lesser-known aspects of Reagan’s life that you felt were important to include? A: I spent time with 50 of his colleagues and associates, who sometimes let things slip that were lost to history or that didn’t make their biographies so we put those things in here and there and we also had some fun. The scene with Pat Boone, for instance, is one that has been ignored by most historians. But we had Pat, who told us the story exactly as it happened. The scene with Judge [William] Clark was something that Clark gave me word for word, and George Shultz and Ed Meese were great resources. And I couldn’t resist having some fun with Shultz’s having a tattoo on his rear end, so we had the Russian negotiator bring that up. Reagan’s preacher and the doctor who operated on him also helped us to get those scenes post-assassination attempt just right.  Q: The film’s DVD release follows the presidential election and is on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Was this intentional? A: None of our timing—including releasing in an election year in the middle of a campaign—was intentional. This movie had a mind of its own when it came to timing; we were just along for the ride.  Q: What parallels do you see between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump? A: They’re very different men for very different times. But what they have in common is a keen understanding of the hopes, dreams, and fears of the average American. Reagan got it from growing up in the heartland and from spending time on the GE [General Electric] lecture circuit, interacting with workers at GE plants across America. Trump learned it from spending time with workers on construction sites. Both of them got significant numbers of traditionally Democratic voters to vote for them as Republicans.  Q: What can “Reagan” the movie teach us about contemporary politics? A: “Reagan” reminds us that our leaders can be both tough and gracious and that friendship and relationships should be able to cross party lines. Nobody was tougher against his enemies than Reagan, but he was also gracious and allowed them to maintain their dignity even as he crushed them. And he deployed humor against them as well. I put a line in the film where Gorbachev tells Reagan: “They say about you that he picks your pocket and makes you feel good about it.” Bobby Kennedy [Jr.] told me he urged his Uncle Ted to be tougher on Reagan, but Ted demurred and said even though he disagreed with Reagan, he loved his country. Reagan ended political careers and empires, and yet those he defeated liked and respected him. We can all learn from that. He also taught us the importance of fessing up when you’re caught. I don’t think this modern ethos of deny, deny, deny works in the long run, because people can’t trust that and trust is the currency of politics.  Q: What made you choose Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader” as your source material? A: I grew up reading all of Reagan’s biographers, even as a teenager. But I think they all only partially captured Reagan, and his official biographer Edmund Morris famously gave up and called him “inscrutable.” Kengor is one of the few who grasped how important religion was to Reagan’s formation. And the fact that he went back to the church Reagan grew up in and asked to see the sermons he would have heard as a kid—only to be told by the current pastor that they were in the basement, but nobody had ever asked to see them before—tells you what a huge oversight had happened in Reagan scholarship. Religion writer Terry Mattingly says that religion is often the “ghost” in people’s stories, in the sense that often we have to understand those impulses that propel people in order to understand them and what they did. Kengor grasped both the sacred and the secular when it came to Reagan’s story—the importance of his mother and his preacher as well as the realpolitik involved in bringing down the Soviet Union, blowing up pipelines, deploying Bill Casey, etc. We had to have both to tell his story.  Q: How did you decide on the cast, particularly the roles of Dennis Quaid and Jon Voight? A: Dennis was always my first choice because he required almost no hair and makeup touchups to get him camera-ready. He’s a natural, and he has that great Reaganesque smile and persona. He’s a busy guy, so it took some time to nail him down, but he was always the one for me. Before we had the character of the KGB spy Viktor as narrator, I had asked Jon [Voight] to play James Baker. But once we developed Viktor, we moved Jon over to that role. Jon had spent time in the Soviet Union before and after the fall of communism and he had some great insights into how Russians were before and after. And he brought those insights to the role. He said their eyes came alive after they were freed.   The post Reagan Biopic ‘Reminds Us That Our Leaders Can Be Both Tough and Gracious’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The same left-leaning nonprofit advocacy group that unsuccessfully attempted to disqualify Donald Trump from the November ballot in several states is now calling for a recount of the votes, alleging a mass breach of voting systems.  The organization, Free Speech for People, recently publicized a Nov. 13 letter it sent to Vice President Kamala Harris that included the names of computer security experts urging her to seek a recount of paper ballots in the battleground states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, even though she had already conceded the election.  The letter urges Harris to act quickly, since the window for seeking recounts for the November election will close soon. The letter further claims that after the 2020 election dispute, Trump lawyers accessed voting equipment and thus gained copies of software that records vote counts.  “Possessing copies of the voting system software enables bad actors to install it on electronic devices and to create their own working replicas of the voting systems, probe them, and develop exploits,” the six-page letter to Harris says.  “Skilled adversaries can decompile the software to get a version of the source code, study it for vulnerabilities, and could even develop malware designed to be installed with minimal physical access to the voting equipment by unskilled accomplices to manipulate the vote counts,” the letter continues. “Attacks could also be launched by compromising the vendors responsible for programming systems before elections, enabling large scale distribution of malware.” In December 2022, the organization unsuccessfully pushed the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to investigate what it called a “multistate conspiracy to copy voting software.” Susan Greenhalgh, senior advisor for election security at Free Speech for People, complained that the FBI was noncommittal.  Free Speech for People has a history of opposing Trump. The organization has frequently used a variation of the phrase “election denier” to describe Trump supporters who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election in which Joe Biden defeated Trump. Meanwhile, Free Speech for People President John Bonifaz referred to questions about the 2020 election as “the big lie.” On the day of Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, the organization co-launched an online petition calling for Trump to be impeached and removed from office. It partnered with another liberal activist group, Roots Action.  It later called for New York state to dissolve the Trump Organization.  Free Speech for People was behind lawsuits to disqualify Trump from the ballot in Michigan, Oregon, and Colorado—on the grounds that he was an “insurrectionist” for inciting the Capitol disruption that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021. The Colorado Supreme Court sided with the organization, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ruling to keep Trump on the ballot.  Still, not all signers of the letter to Harris were partisan activists.  Other signers included Duncan Buell, chair emeritus NCR Chair in Computer Science and Engineering in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina; David Jefferson of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Election Integrity Foundation; Chris Klaus, CEO of Fusen World; William John Malik of Malik Consulting, LLC; Peter G. Neumann, chief scientist of SRI International Computer Science Lab; Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance; and John E. Savage, An Wang Professor Emeritus of computer science at Brown University. Neither Free Press for People nor the vice president’s office responded to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this story.   During the post-2020 election litigation, Trump-affiliated lawyers obtained voting machine information through courts and law enforcement agencies. But there was no evidence hackers or bad actors obtained or used the information.  The computer scientists’ “hearts are in the right place” for expressing concern about election integrity, but speculation isn’t grounds for large scale recounts since there is no evidence that any actual voting systems used in this election were compromised, said Hans von Spakovsky, the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation.  “I wouldn’t think you would authorize hand recounts based on speculation,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “If there is evidence of malware, OK, but, just based on speculation doesn’t make sense to me.”  The post Election Deniers? Same Left-Wing Group That Tried to Kick Trump Off Ballot Now Demands Recount appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court again ruled that mail-in ballots must be properly dated to be counted, a boost for Republican Dave McCormick in a recount battle against Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, who is struggling to hold onto his Senate seat.  “Following our latest RNC [Republican National Committee] lawsuit, today, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled yet again that undated ballots CANNOT BE COUNTED,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley posted on X Monday afternoon.  MCCORMICK/CASEY RECOUNT UPDATE:Following our latest RNC lawsuit, today the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled yet again that undated ballots CANNOT BE COUNTED.No more excuses. Election officials in Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and other counties have absolutely no choice…— Michael Whatley (@ChairmanWhatley) November 18, 2024 “No more excuses. Election officials in Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and other counties have absolutely no choice but to reject illegal ballots. We will hold them to it,” Whatley continued.  Nearly every news organization has projected that McCormick won the tight race. The current vote tally shows McCormick with 3,380,310 votes, or 48.93% of the total, to Casey’s 3,350,972 votes, or 48.5%. The deadline for the recount is just before Thanksgiving. On Nov. 1, the state’s high court determined that mail-in ballots must be properly dated to count in the Nov. 5 election. The law requires that when a voter returns his ballot by mail, he must sign and date the envelope. However, Democratic officials in some counties have sought to count undated or incorrectly dated ballots. “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws anytime they want,” said Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia on Thursday. “For me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.” The state’s Supreme Court paid attention to it and on Monday, ruled that all 67 county boards of elections in the state must comply with its Nov. 1 ruling.  We won! The PA Supreme Court issued a ruling today ordering that all 67 PA County Boards Of Election shall comply with their earlier ruling and SHALL NOT COUNT misdated and undated ballots. This is a victory for election integrity and the rule of law. We shall continue to… pic.twitter.com/V7PktrddP9— Bucks GOP (@BucksGOP) November 18, 2024 Without a date on a ballot, it’s not clear whether a vote was cast on or before Election Day. Arguing Thursday morning before the state Supreme Court, the Pennsylvania Republican Party opposed counting undated ballots.  Casey posted on X Monday that the accuracy of the vote count is more important than expediency.   Pennsylvanians deserve to trust that when they cast a vote legally, it is counted.Regardless of the final result, I am committed to ensuring Pennsylvanians’ voices are heard.https://t.co/5BSGOARg3K— Bob Casey Jr. (@Bob_Casey) November 18, 2024 “Pennsylvanians deserve to trust that when they cast a vote legally, it is counted,” the senator said in the post. “Regardless of the final result, I am committed to ensuring Pennsylvanians’ voices are heard.” The post For Recount, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Reaffirms Mail-In Ballots Must Be Dated to Be Counted appeared first on The Daily Signal.

PA Supreme Court -- And Shapiro -- to Law-Defying Dem Vote Counters: Knock It Off!

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From The Witcher series to Fable, there are plenty of must-play, third-person fantasy RPGs out there. Most of the time, though, these grand experiences with their huge open worlds, thousands of lines of dialogue, and intricate combat and skill systems need a lot of resources. Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw Of Ash and Steel - a newly-revealed contender in the genre created by a small team of developers at indie studio Fire and Frost. Despite the size of the operation, this looks and feels like a project that’s aiming to take on the triple-A big guns, judging by its remarkable reveal trailer. Continue reading Of Ash and Steel is a stunning fantasy RPG with The Witcher energy MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best RPGs, Best fantasy games, Best medieval games

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