In Petaluma, California, a one-of-a-kind beauty pageant unfolds each year, drawing crowds and canine contestants alike. This isn’t your typical dog show – it’s the world-renowned competition aimed at finding the “world’s ugliest dog.” The event celebrates the unique appearances and stories of various dogs, showcasing their charm and resilience. Amidst the excitement and wagging... The post Pekingese is crowned ‘World’s Ugliest Dog’ but wait till you see his adorable face appeared first on Animal Channel.

A new study conducted over a nine-month period determined that among guests who discussed political issues on late-night programs, an overwhelming 94% were liberal.Between October 2023-June 2024, guests of the following late-night talk shows were analyzed: "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" (ABC), "Late Night with Seth Meyers" (NBC), "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" (NBC), "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" (CBS), and "The Daily Show" (Comedy Central).Guests were tallied as either liberal or conservative regardless of the subject matter but were labeled based on what they said in the segment. Categories of guests included celebrities and journalists and partisan officials. Former partisan officials who changed jobs were counted among celebrities and journalists. The politician label included current and previously elected office holders, staffers, spouses of politicians, etc.The study found that the overwhelming majority of guests could be considered liberal, totaling 137 versus just eight conservatives.Host Stephen Colbert has the highest discrepancy between hosting Democrat and Republican officials, at a ratio of 14:1. Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Fallon did not host any Republicans at all. The various "The Daily Show" hosts, however, hosted the most with four. The Comedy Central show had Republicans Nancy Mace and Nikki Haley on its program, while Colbert's Republican of choice was Liz Cheney, Media Research Center reported.'Late-night hosts have abandoned comedy to dutifully deliver regime-approved talking points in lockstep.'For Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and former Obama staffers were just some of the left-leaning individuals who were welcomed on the shows.In terms of journalists and celebrities, 104 liberals were interviewed versus just three conservatives. Colbert again had the most partisan showing with 34 left-wing interviewees and none from the right wing. "The Daily Show," on the other hand, had 29 liberals compared to three conservatives; Meyers went 21 to zero.Those who were tallied in the conservative category weren't exactly hard-line Republicans, either. The three who were noted as journalists or celebrities were Dr. Phil, author Jonathan Haidt, and comedian Bill Burr, who makes it a point to consistently mock both sides of the political spectrum.The most frequent appearances by partisan guests were led by a fellow late-night host John Oliver, who had seven guest spots on the shows. MSNBC's Chris Hayes, CBS's Gayle King, and CNN's Jake Tapper were some of the more frequent guests as well. Host Meyers himself made three appearances on the circuit.Other notables included Arnold Schwarzenegger, CNN's Anderson Cooper, and ABC host George Stephanopoulos. A complete list of guests is available online."Late-night hosts have abandoned comedy to dutifully deliver regime-approved talking points in lockstep," political strategist Kingsley Wilson told Blaze News. "The only thing amusing about these hosts is their inability to connect with the average Americans outside their elitist bubbles.""It's no wonder late-night TV is losing viewers and money faster than Joe Biden loses his train of thought," Wilson joked.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Christian and pro-life Republicans are bracing for a betrayal in Milwaukee when Republican National Committee members gather the week ahead of the convention to hammer out and vote on a party platform. Word is spreading around town that the Trump campaign wants a smaller, simplified party platform — one that excludes (or at least waters down) the pro-life plank. The 2016 platform, which was used again in 2020, states: “We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.” Similar language has been included since Ronald Reagan was nominated in 1980. Now, that forceful stance is on the chopping block. The moves, planned in secret, are intended to broaden former President Donald Trump’s appeal but risk backfiring badly, fracturing the party and dominating RNC headlines. Warning signs abound. For the first time since conservatives forced entry into the party’s back rooms in 1980, activists have been barred from the proceedings. Those original activists, spearheaded by the late conservative legend Phyllis Schlafly, knew that sunlight disinfected the closed-door process — and fought to keep that light shining. Exorcising the socially conservative parts of the platform won’t bring in new voters, but it will alienate committed voters. Worse yet, the party has barred media, including C-SPAN, from Platform Committee deliberations. While media have never had access to the smaller subcommittee meetings held in the lead-up to the Platform Committee meeting, barring cameras from capturing the arguments and stands of the 112 committee members is a serious break in precedent — and a serious cause for worry. Next, the campaign seized control of the process. There are 2,429 delegates to the convention, and each state and territory gets to nominate some of their numbers to the Platform Committee and to its subcommittees. “When the Trump campaign was working with state parties to name delegates, absolute loyalty to whatever platform changes the Trump campaign wanted was a mandatory qualification,” one person familiar with the matter told Blaze News. It was an “unprecedented” level of “command and control.” “We're being shut out for the first time,” Catholic Vote director of public affairs and Platform Committee veteran Tom McClusky told Blaze News. “At the state level, delegates with strong pro-life credentials are being blocked and replaced. … It’s a series of troubling occurrences that make me wary for when we see the language.” “It isn’t just pro-life stuff,” another person long connected to the process told Blaze News, pointing to the former president’s turn away from the defense of traditional marriage. “But the fundamental problem is unlike any campaign in the past; they’re insisting this is the campaign’s platform,” the convention veteran said. “It's not: It's supposed to be the party’s platform. Until you address that, the rest is just circumstantial.” It’s unusual for a campaign to make these sorts of demands. No administration since Richard Nixon’s in 1972 has worked so imperiously to exert itself over the process. That’s not to say there haven’t been fights, but they came with pushback from the ground up. When then-Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) demanded that the pro-life aspects of the platform be watered down during his ill-fated presidential bid, independent-minded committeemen ( and a little staff sabotage) aborted his plans. The problem for pro-lifers today, McClusky dryly notes, is that Trump generates a lot more excitement and loyalty than Dole, then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Mitt Romney, or George W. Bush did. And the campaign is counting on that. "Unfortunately the votes are probably not there to prevent changes," one activist said. "As of right now, they are planning to simplify and stick to the president's 10th Amendment [back-to-the-states] language, which is going to really anger the pro-life people no matter what." There’s a point to the platform. It’s long and complicated but represents a thousand party interests, with all of them paying in. More, it’s a useful tool to organize. For example: The IRS allows churches to post the platform, even if they’re technically not allowed to endorse candidates. Evangelical Republican activist Ralph Reed mastered this in decades past, sending out portions of the Democrat and Republican platforms and allowing them to speak for themselves. “That’s the problem,” another person familiar with the process explained to Blaze News. “Trump people marched in, said, 'We’re running this show. Now, how does this show work?'" And it’s essential to understand that changing the platform doesn't deter Democrats’ attacks. The campaign of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris (or whomever) is going to paint Donald Trump as anti-abortion, anti-contraceptive, and anti-woman. You can bet the house on that. So what is stripping it from the platform actually going to achieve? The short answer is a lot of things Republicans don’t need to be dealing with right now. Trump has unified the Republican Party. Democrats are in total meltdown. Exorcising the socially conservative parts of the platform won’t bring in new voters, but it will alienate committed voters. What’s more, it will hijack the proceedings, and the infighting will dominate headlines. Conservatives are already clamoring about the rumored changes, and people and organizations new to the process are suddenly making noise about it. “There are people who have never worked on the platform suddenly caring for the platform,” McClusky said, citing groups like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Students for Life. That is not to say that conservatives can’t live with an altered platform — just not one that kicks abortion entirely to the states without tackling the federal government’s active, 50-year role in abortions at home and abroad. “No one in their heart of hearts can believe there is no federal role,” McClusky explained. “The federal government has been pro-abortion since Roe v. Wade, sending billions of dollars toward abortions. At the very, very, very least, Donald Trump should call for neutrality at the federal level — that he will not block states and that he will stop subsidizing abortion.” “You can change the language to say we’re working toward a culture that accepts a pro-life stand and, at that point, a constitutional amendment, but if you walk away from backing a constitutional amendment, it will deflate a lot of pro-lifers.” The first sign delegates can look to will be Sunday, when they arrive at the welcome reception. There’s no rule that they have to be given a party platform to read over that night, but it would be highly unusual if they weren’t — and a sign that the authors don’t to give much time to read it at all. "It's going to come in a tricky way,” one of the conservative activists working on the issue predicted. “Here's how it’s going to play out: The Trump campaign is going to have the RNC delegates introduce a pre-written platform, and it’s going to be streamlined and it's not going to include any of the abortion language. Then the committees will deliberate for one or two days, and they'll make changes and add amendments, but we've looked through the list and it's stacked for the campaign. The campaign really thinks abortion is going to kill us this year.” A streamlined platform “makes a nice, clean platform,” one platform veteran said, “but it makes a sterile platform.” “It’s like Jenga,” McClusky explained. “If you take a piece out, and Trump nominates a bad vice president like [Gov.] Doug Burgum, then suddenly pro-lifers realize they don’t have a party any more.” “I don’t think the people writing the platform understand the significance of the platform.” “We don't have a majority to keep it,” one activist worried, “so the hope is the Trump language isn't as bad, or it is bad and you pull together 30, 35 delegates to amend the language. We’re willing to accept some watering down of the language so long as it maintains the message. You need to throw a bone to these people. It's just a needless provocation.” “They don’t have to do this! The Democrats are going to spend a billion in attack ads regardless, so you're not gaining — you're just losing. You've got the party united behind you. This divides the party.” National Review: For guidance on ensuring a good Republican platform, look to the past Sign up for the Beltway Brief by Blaze Media newsletter Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter. The fire rises: The Daily Caller News Foundation: Communist Party talent program scooped up former Microsoft researchers. Now they work in China’s AI industry. China has no greater ally or asset in the United States than our own greedy corporations. Some of them are even dumb enough to brag about it. Will Kessler reports: ...Microsoft boasted in a 2016 news release that 20 alumni of its Asian research institute, called Microsoft Research Asia, had been selected for membership in the Thousand Talents Program. Through Chinese-language news reports, the DCNF identified six prominent former Microsoft researchers who went on to join the CCP’s Thousand Talents Program while working for China-based companies and universities. ... More than 10,000 scientists have been recruited as part of the program, former CIA Senior Intelligence Service member William Hannas told The New York Times. “This isn’t just any old recruitment program that recruits and trains technologists like we would have in America,” Geoffrey Cain, an author and journalist who’s spent a decade investigating Microsoft in China, told the DCNF. “This is a communist party-run project to ensure that China can achieve technological supremacy over the Western liberal democratic world.”

Disney's "She-Hulk: Attorney At Law" was a total disaster. The budget for each episode of the lecturous series was reportedly $25 million — an investment that translated neither into quality nor viewership. The audience score for the show on Rotten Tomatoes is 32%. Even woke blogs like the Daily Beast couldn't stand it, noting it offered "every tired 'man=bad' trope you've ever seen" and nothing of substance. While Disney ultimately mercy-killed the series after nine episodes, its star, Tatitana Maslany, has not given up on blathering leftist talking points to small audiences of fellow travelers. Maslany recently returned to her hometown of Regina, Saskatchewan, to receive a plaque commemorating her 2022 induction into Canada's Walk of Fame. She seized upon the opportunity to decry the democratic will of the people of Saskatchewan and the parental rights they hold dear. 'It should not be in the control of parents how a child identifies.' In recent months and years, there has been an effort in Canada to replicate American red states' success in bolstering parental rights. The province of Saskatchewan, for instance, ratified a parental bill of rights in October. Blaze News previously reported that Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe's government, handed an overwhelming majority and clear mandate by the electorate in 2020, announced in August 2023 new parental inclusion and consent policies aimed at protecting parental rights in the classroom. The province would accordingly not only temporarily cut radical LGBT activist groups out of sex education in the classroom, but require that if a child wanted to identify as a member of the opposite sex in school, educators could not play along unless the student's parents consented. This would help ensure that educators would not groom students for transition behind parents' backs. The socialist New Democratic Party, LGBT activist groups, and other radicals fought ardently to keep parents in the dark. The LGBT activist group UR Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity even secured a temporary injunction against the proposed policies. However, the Moe government and parents in the province prevailed. Moe's education minister introduced the act to the legislature as Bill 137 on Oct. 12, revealing that the province would invoke section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to see it through. This maneuver, called the "notwithstanding clause" or the "nuclear option," enabled Saskatchewan to override certain Charter rights with which the legislation might conflict, thereby protecting it from court challenges as well as challenges under the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code. In addition to making sure teachers couldn't use pronouns mismatched with a student's actual sex, the legislation underscored that parents were the primary decision-makers with regard to their kids' education. The bill passed in a 40-12 vote and subsequently became the law of the land. Maslany, who has apparently lived in Los Angeles for years, claimed at her plaque conferral last week that the law affirming parents' rights amounted to "overreach," reported CTV News. "It should not be in the control of parents how a child identifies. How a child knows themself to be. That isn't a parent's place — it's an overreach," said Maslany. "It's an overreach on the part of the provincial government to legislate that. It's absurd." After implying that it wasn't overreach for teachers — also government employees — to shape how other people's children identify, the Hollywood script reader said, "Children have rights. Children are human beings who have knowledge and who know themselves, and we should be taking cues from them. In so many ways, we should be taking cues from them." "Listening to them, empowering them to know who they are and to name that," continued Maslany. "It's their right. It's not the parent's right." Footage of Maslany's remarks obtained by state media reveal that she did not limit herself to bemoaning parental rights. Fighting back tears, she also accused Israel of genocide. "As a Canadian, it's strange to be standing up here when we are witnessing the genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli settler colonial state," said the script reader. "We watch and we do nothing, and I would say with whatever platform I have that we can't do nothing and I would demand that our government demand a ceasefire. Stop funding the genocide. Stop being complicit in it." She concluded her rant with, "Free Palestine." Bounding into Comics highlighted that Maslany's radicalism is nothing new. Before it was altogether clear that her Marvel show was a dud, Maslany told Elle magazine in 2022 that she had worn pro-transgenderism apparel in "She-Hulk" publicity videos in protest of Florida's Parental Rights in Education law. "I felt, as an employee of Disney, that I had to speak," said Maslany. "Stand with the people who I stand with. I wanted to let people know, who needed to know, that I was with them." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has recently made headlines after releasing DeepSeek Coder V2, an open-source mixture of experts code language model. The company previously made a splash in the AI world after the release of DeepSeek Chat, which is a rival to ChatGPT and was trained on 2 trillion Chinese and English tokens.The company's latest development has demonstrated superior abilities in both math and coding tasks. Not only does DeepSeek Coder V2 outperform closed-source models, such as Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and GPT-4 Turbo, but it can support 300 programming languages. The company has claimed it is the first to create an open-source model to achieve such a task, far outperforming Llama 3-70B and other models in the same category.Additionally, DeepSeek Coder V2 also appears to perform well in both language and reasoning tasks.DeepSeek's unique qualitiesWhat appears to set DeepSeek's recent development apart is that it is open source and relatively small. Samuel Hammond, senior economist for the Foundation of American Innovation, told Blaze News that DeepSeek Coder V2 "integrates state of the art 'mixture of experts' and sparsity methods that are also being integrated into newer U.S. models, which is why GPT-4o and 4-turbo run so much faster than the original GPT-4."Some of the most popular chatbots available, such as Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT, use MoE to help tackle a wide range of user-based prompts. To achieve both broad and deep expertise on a given subject, these chatbots must have access to highly specialized data that they can then share with the user.'They are bringing top talent, but also many Chinese entities have a history of stealing IP of their Western competitors.'The purpose of MoE stratagems is to combine several specialized models, known as "experts," into one overarching system. This allows for each "expert" to specialize or focus on a specific task to generate the deepest and most sophisticated bits of information. This strategy is significantly different from a one-size-fits-all machine-learning system, which may be able to generate a significant amount of information but may come up short in specialization.Another element that makes DeepSeek V2 such a powerhouse is that it is open-sourced, meaning that the source code is available to everyone within the public domain. This allows people to use, modify, and distribute their discoveries and developments. Open-source models lend themselves to outside creativity and innovation, which is not the case with close-sourced models."If people are freaked out, it's because DeepSeek V2 is now one of the best open-source MoE models now available. U.S. companies are sitting on comparable or even better models, including Meta with their Llama3 400b model, but it has yet to be released," Hammond said."DeepSeek V2 illustrates the danger of U.S. AI companies being reluctant to open source their models due to public pressure or potential legal risk. Independent developers and researchers around the world will always want to use the best open-source model available, and we'd rather the best open model be American than Chinese."The possibility of artificial general intelligenceDeepSeek was founded in 2023 with a mission to "unravel the mystery of AGI [artificial general intelligence] with curiosity." While this may be a noble goal, there is still debate among those in the world of AI whether achieving AGI will ever be a possibility. AGI is generally defined as artificial intelligence that contains human-like reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, including the ability to learn and adapt on its own.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appears to have an optimistic outlook about the future of AGI, claiming that it is already a "reasonably close-ish future." However, Altman added that AGI will "change the world much less than we all think and it will change jobs much less than we all think."He went on to say that "people are begging to be disappointed [by what AGI can really do] and they will be. We don't have an actual [artificial general intelligence] and that's sort of what's expected of us."Additionally, Shane Legg, chief AGI scientist at Google DeepMind, said that there is a 50% chance that AGI will become a reality by 2028. But not everyone in the field holds this same amount of optimism. Grady Booch, an IBM fellow and chief scientist for software engineering, said that AGI will never happen. "I, being a historian of computing, have a rather jaded and cynical view of the hyperbolic optimism of our field and as such am somewhat conditioned to be a contrarian when it comes to predictions such as this."One unique challenge for DeepSeek and OpenAI — two companies that claim to have the ultimate goal of attaining AGI — is that the issue quickly becomes one not of technology but of philosophy. To achieve AGI, one must establish what that might look like. Sara Hooker, who leads Cohere for AI, a research facility that focuses on machine learning, said, "It really is a philosophical question. So, in some ways, it's a very hard time to be in this field, because we're a scientific field." She added that much of the debate around AGI is more value-driven than technically driven, which can obscure any meaningful definition of AGI.Hooker went on to say that it's "very unlikely" that AGI will be defined or achieved by "a single event where we check it off and say, 'AGI achieved.'" Before AGI can realistically be achieved, there must be a testable definition that everyone in the field can agree on.Microsoft Research, with the help of OpenAI, released a paper in 2023 that suggested GPT-4 demonstrated a nascent example of AGI. Researchers on the project claimed that "GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google's PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models." Until experts and others in the field can productively and specifically define AGI, it is somewhat unclear what researchers mean when they say GPT-4 "exhibit[ed] more general intelligence than previous AI models."The battle for AI dominanceEarlier this month, data analytics firm Govini indicated that the U.S. has fallen behind China in the AI race. Consequently, the U.S. would have a hard time winning a war against the People's Liberation Army if a serious conflict were to erupt between the two world superpowers.Govini investigates the performance of the federal government, specifically focusing on the 15 most important national security technologies through the lens of acquisition, adversarial capital, procurement, supply chain, foreign influence, and science and technology.'The AI aspects of our spending being so R&D focused, it tells me that we’re not actually moving this into the weapons systems and platforms that we’re deploying today, obviously, appropriately so given that it’s artificial intelligence.'Govini's report suggested that the U.S. has continued to under-invest in valuable AI capabilities while also slowing down in the research and development stages. Nine of the 12 areas assessed in the report noted that over 65% of the government's funding was still lingering in the research and development stage in 2023. As a result, many of these potentially valuable technologies are still not production-ready.Govini CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty said: "Despite the fact that artificial intelligence is an incredibly, highly visible, arguably the most transformational technology that matters in the critical tech competition, not just for the United States, but around the world, the Department of Defense is still primarily attacking this as a research and development effort."“While there is more to do in R&D for artificial intelligence, it is well past time for DoD to stop treating AI like it is just a science project,” she continued.Govini's 2023 report indicated that the U.S. was at serious risk of "weakness and dependence" as it fell behind China in the technology race. In 2022, the data analytics firm found that the U.S. was not injecting enough money into AI and ML to win a potential technological race against its Eastern rival.“If you add in an AI advantage that the United States doesn’t have, it potentially tips the war into unwinnable [for the U.S.],” Dougherty said.Nathan Leamer, executive director of the Digital First Project, told Blaze News that "DeepSeek is one of a growing number of Chinese entities heavily investing in [the AI] industry.""They are bringing top talent, but also many Chinese entities have a history of stealing IP of their Western competitors. AI is an arms race, and considering the billions the Chinese are putting into this, it is not surprising they are developing state-of-the-art technology," he added. This appears to echo Dougherty's point that AI can manifest in subtle ways during war. She said that China would not have to weaponize AI to have a dramatic impact during a conflict, but rather the PLA could use AI to penetrate the U.S. energy grid, which could have a catastrophic effect.While the Department of Defense seems to be slow in moving AI and ML technologies out of the development stage, Dougherty said the opportunity is still there. “The AI aspects of our spending being so R&D focused, it tells me that we’re not actually moving this into the weapons systems and platforms that we’re deploying today, obviously, appropriately so given that it’s artificial intelligence." "But, I believe that the department has a great framework to govern that and make sure that AI is used appropriately in a military context. So let’s get going on it,” she added.Additionally, it appears the U.S. has fallen behind China in obtaining patents in 13 of the 15 critical technology areas. China has managed to speed up its patent grants over the last few years after its "14th Five Year Plan for Informatization Development," according to Dougherty.“The way to think about patents is that it’s a leading indicator of technological dominance,” she added.In addition to the Department of Defense conducting an in-depth analysis as to why it has fallen behind, Hammond mentioned that the U.S. must "focus on denying [China] access to AI hardware — the advanced AI chips needed for scaling and serving the largest models."Software engineer Mike Wacker said that the U.S. "should be worried about AI superiority, both in general and specifically with respect to military applications." However, he added that it is "interesting" that "DeepSeek is open-source; if it were truly valuable to the CCP, they probably wouldn't let those researchers open-source it in the first place."While the U.S. may be in a relatively good place in AI development, DeepSeek is an indicator that China is not far behind, and it does not appear that China is trimming investments in the AI race against the West.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Powerful Democratic leaders in blue states are reportedly forming plans to "Trump-proof" the progressive agenda. Anticipating the possibility that Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, Democratic attorneys general are planning "an aggressive legal strategy to fight him again in court," according to Politico. Those plans include hiring outside experts and researching areas of the law where they believe they can fight a second Trump administration. 'They make decisions predicated on politics sometimes instead of what they’re statutorily obligated to do.' The central thesis of the plan is this: Democrat AGs will repeatedly sue the Trump administration for any policy they don't like. Democrats are framing themselves and their plan as the vanguard of democracy and individual rights. In reality, they want to legally hamstring a new Trump administration for policies on immigration, the environment, elections, and "reproductive health" that do not advance the liberal agenda. New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin (D) claimed the effort is about protecting citizens' rights. "When you look at the first Trump presidency, you can see the devastating impact some of the policies that were pursued by that administration had on millions of people across our state," he told Politico. "We need to be prepared for that possibility, even though it may not come to pass, so we’re not caught flat-footed and we’re ready to stand up for the rights of our residents should that be necessary." Democrats are thus "preparing for potential legal arguments and building an infrastructure to be ready to go should we need to," he added. California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D), moreover, boasted that Democrats are experienced at this. "Our office is not new to this. We've been in this position, in 2016 to 2020. And if necessary, we’ll prepare to fight in the same way again," he said. Indeed, when Trump was president from 2017–2021, Democratic AGs filed more than 160 multi-state lawsuits against the Trump administration. The states expected to be involved in the effort include New Jersey, California, New York, Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, and potentially Oregon and Washington. Other states with liberal AGs could join their coalition. Meanwhile, the motive behind the plan isn't exactly what it seems. While Democratic leaders are interested in protecting progressive policies, they're motivated by the political rewards they could reap by weaponizing their office against Trump. "Attorneys general often now are looking at the next political step," former Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler (D) told Politico. "They make decisions predicated on politics sometimes instead of what they're statutorily obligated to do." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security recently announced an agreement with the Panamanian government to help shut down the Darién Gap, a path used by illegal aliens traveling north to the United States. In 2023, more than 520,000 individuals traveled the route.In a July 1 press release, the DHS outlined the “new U.S. Department of State-funded foreign assistance program to address irregular migration in the region.”“This program will help the Panamanian government to remove foreign nationals who do not have a legal basis to remain in Panama. This assistance seeks to reduce unprecedented irregular migration through the Darien region, through which over 520,000 migrants transited in 2023,” the press release read.As part of the new agreement, the Biden administration will use taxpayer funds to pay for flights to transport individuals who illegally enter Panama back to their country of origin. A CBS News report explained that the federal government plans to send a team of American immigration officials and asylum officers to Panama to help their local officials with screening illegal immigrants and assist with deportation efforts. The outlet noted that the U.S. officials will not directly be involved in the deportation of illegal aliens from Panama, but they will provide training.“The new arrangement between the United States and Panama advances collaboration on migration management, including support for safe and effective Panamanian repatriation operations that include protection screening. The removal flight program is part of the comprehensive regional approach to address irregular migration. Due to the unique mission set, DHS will support training and capacity building to strengthen and institutionalize safe, humane repatriation processes in Panama,” the DHS’ press release stated.José Raúl Mulino, sworn in as Panama’s president on Monday, said he is committed to cracking down on illegal immigration.“I won’t allow Panama to be an open path for thousands of people who enter our country illegally, supported by an international organization related to drug trafficking and human trafficking,” Mulino said. “I understand that there are deep-rooted reasons for migration, but each country has to resolve its problems.”The U.S. Customs and Border Protection has long since reported a strain on its resources amid the uptick in illegal immigration.CBP’s acting commissioner Troy A. Miller stated in December, “The encounter levels we are currently seeing across the southwest border are presenting a serious challenge to the men and women of CBP.”Former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told the New York Post that the Biden administration should have implemented the agreement with Panama long ago. He called the area a “natural choke point where law enforcement can interdict criminal activity with far fewer resources.”“But before we give this administration too much credit, let’s not forget just a few months they were intentionally making it easier for migrants to get through the Darien gap and get to the United States,” Scott said. “So why the change of heart all of a sudden, one may ask? Maybe it’s because it’s an election year.”Former Yuma Sector Border Patrol Chief Chris Clem told the Post, “Why are we only doing this now, when millions have entered illegally into the US under this administration?”“I wish the President would work on the physical security of the border in addition to these arrangements to protect border communities and the American public,” Clem added.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

KJP Insists Biden's Jet Lag Nearly 2 Weeks After Overseas Trip Led to Debate Disaster

This years Summer Game Fest gave us an extended look at Slitterhead, the upcoming horror action-adventure title from Bokeh Game Studio, and the original Silent Hill creator, Keiichiro Toyama. Set in the neon-filled streets of a fictional Asian city, a boundless entity is tasked with destroying the titular monsters that disguise themselves as humans. Its a premise that anime fans will resonate with, sharing a thematic space with the likes of Jujutsu Kaisen and Parasyte, and the creator recently confirmed a lot of the game's inspiration hailed from manga.

NYT/Siena College Poll Taken After the Debate Shows Trump Lead Growing Over Biden