Branco and Gorman review Tony’s latest toons and discuss the day’s issues, along with videos, your comments, and some bad jokes. LIVE! BRANCO TOON STORE   DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips appreciated – $5.00, $10.00, $20.00 – It all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also, Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU! A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.

On February 9th, SeaWorld in Orlando received a call that there was an exhausted manatee stuck in a storm drain that needed immediate help. Arriving on scene, rescuers quickly confirmed that the juvenile male had entered a storm drain and didn’t know how to escape. Crews had to break through concrete and dig through several […] The post Manatee Stuck in Florida Storm Drain Showing Signs of Recovery After SeaWorld Rescued Him appeared first on Good News Network.

Since the 1986 IWC moratorium, these nations alone are estimated to have killed around 45,000 whales.

When Trump’s border czar Tom Homan held a press conference on February 12 to announce a drawdown in federal enforcement in Minnesota, he reported that during their surge, ICE agents “located 3,364 missing unaccompanied alien children, children that the last administration lost and weren’t even looking for.”  Speaking separately on Fox, Homan said nationwide, they have located 145,000 of the over 300,000 missing children from a 2024 Homeland Security report. It sounds like a success story. But try and find the network anchors and reporters focusing on missing children – you won’t find it.  It’s a zero. The broadcast networks focused only on Homan’s drawdown announcement, and his note that they’d arrested about 4,000 people. They recounted two citizens being shot, and then they turned to Democrats to lament all the “trauma” of the surge. The only way the children come up is in the “fact check” patrols trying to deny Homan his talking point. USA Today put four reporters on the subject: “President Donald Trump and his administration have in the past made similar claims that the Biden administration ‘lost’ unaccompanied minors who crossed the border before, or said children were placed with ‘unvetted’ sponsors. Immigration advocate groups say such claims are inaccurate.” Biden cannot be painted as failing the children, apparently. They turned to the Soros-funded leftists at the National Immigration Forum, which claimed: “While the current process of limited follow up is a valid basis for concern, the reports of large numbers of ‘missing’ UACs (unaccompanied alien children) are inaccurate and overblown.” Jeff Wagner at CBS Minnesota also launched at Homan’s claims: “Vice President JD Vance said in late 2024 that Homeland Security effectively lost 320,000 unaccompanied migrant children. That claim was fact-checked by the Associated Press and USA Today — both said the claim misrepresents or distorts data.” Wagner took issue with the word “lost.” A federal report found more than 320,000 children either failed to appear for their immigration hearings or didn't receive a notice to appear in court. “It does not say the children were lost — essentially, they're unaccounted for.” If you think that’s splitting hairs to defend the Democrats, you would be right.   Meanwhile, Daily Wire reporter Jennie Taer told NewsNation host Katie Pavlich about how unaccompanied migrant children were often put into a pipeline leading to exploitative conditions, into meat factories or sex trafficking rings. Children would arrive “with a piece of paper taped to them with a phone number and address,” and the government would send them there, despite agents fearing they were going to be exploited. Whistleblowers came forward under Biden “and said we are knowingly sending these kids to gang members, to traffickers, to criminals,” and were silenced for it. .@realDailyWire’s @JennieSTaer on the work by the Trump administration to track down 320,000 unaccounted for children who came across the border and are likely being sex trafficked or worse... “[The Trump administration is] trying to hunt down those 320,000 children who went on… pic.twitter.com/df69IsoFX6 — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 13, 2026   In Trump’s first term, the media adored the narrative of migrant children getting separated from their parents – pretending this never happened under Obama. In recent weeks, the narrative-shapers all hyped five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, seized by agents in his sky-blue bunny-ears hat – often without the data point that his father abandoned him to escape arrest, and his mother refused to take him. The elitist media supported Biden’s mass importation of immigrants and staunchly oppose mass deportations, which represent a repeal of Biden’s strategy. They are not interested in sharing any “MAGA talking points.” Team Trump’s data claims can only come up if they’re being dismissed as phony baloney. These are the same partisans who let Kamala Harris or Alejandro Mayorkas deny there was any “border crisis” unfolding under Biden. Don’t let them tell you they are the “fact-based” watchdogs. 

The Trump administration recently demonstrated once again its commitment to truckers by tightening commercial driver licensing standards, securing critical investments in truck parking, and advancing a practical environmental regulatory approach that doesn’t undermine the supply chain.These actions reflect the White House's continued commitment to making our roads safer and promoting a healthier, more successful trucking industry. President Trump, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Derek Barrs should be commended for advancing policies that enhance safety and keep freight moving.We need strong, uniform standards to ensure that drivers of 80,000-pound vehicles are legally authorized, properly trained, and proficient in English.A new rule from FMCSA cracks down on the issuance of non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses — often given to foreign nationals working under temporary U.S. work authorization. This rule plugs the gaps that allow unqualified drivers to operate commercial motor vehicles, putting American motorists at risk.Just look at the tragic crash in Indiana earlier this month, when a semi-truck driven by a Kyrgyz national failed to brake for slowing traffic, veered into oncoming lanes, and smashed into a passenger van, killing four people. It is just one example of the devastating consequences of allowing unvetted drivers on our roads. To that end, the Transportation Department has identified significant gaps in oversight and inconsistencies in how some states issue commercial credentials, and continued scrutiny is essential.The overwhelming majority of trucking companies operate responsibly, invest heavily in compliance and training, and prioritize safety. They deserve a regulatory framework that rewards professionalism — not one that tolerates fraud, sham training operations, or unsafe practices. We need strong, uniform standards to ensure that drivers of 80,000-pound vehicles are legally authorized, properly trained, and proficient in English so they can communicate effectively. Secretary Duffy has shown a commitment to making that a reality.RELATED: Foreigners want to drive a big rig? They’ll need more than work authorization papers, Duffy says. Ryan Collerd/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesAfter years of our industry sounding the alarm, Congress this month secured $200 million in dedicated federal funding for truck parking, the first time in history such funding has been specifically allocated. The White House signing this funding allocation into law is a transformational win for highway safety and for America’s professional drivers.Truck parking may seem like a niche issue, but for professional drivers, it is a matter of safety, health, and dignity. Every day, drivers struggle to find legal, secure spaces to take federally mandated rest breaks, often losing hours of productivity and risking unsafe parking on shoulders or ramps. Expanding truck parking capacity will ensure a better quality of life for the drivers who keep our economy moving.At the same time, the White House rightly rescinded the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, a disastrous Biden administration de facto electric truck mandate that threatened the viability of our industry. Zero-emission technology simply isn’t a reality right now. The trucks are too expensive, charging infrastructure is inadequate, and grid capacity remains a serious constraint. Forcing premature mandates would have disrupted supply chains without delivering any real results.America depends on trucking. The Trump administration’s decisive leadership and unwavering enforcement of safety standards will ensure we continue delivering for this country safely and reliably for generations to come.

By now, you’re probably sick of hearing about artificial intelligence. It’s the kind of topic that arrives buried in buzzwords, reeking of Silicon Valley self-importance. Many conservatives have tuned it out for a simple reason: It sounds abstract, distant, and oddly bloodless. Lines of code. Data centers. Neurotic nerds arguing on podcasts. Not your problem.That instinct is understandable. It’s also wrong.Because AI is no longer confined to screens. It’s stepping into the physical world with far fewer safeguards than any serious society should tolerate, reshaping work, dignity, authority, and, ultimately, what it means to be human.Human nudges and machine replies blended so naturally that even experienced observers hesitated.Consider a new site called RentAHuman.ai. The name is creepy and entirely accurate. AI agents can post tasks, and real people bid to carry them out for small payments, often in cryptocurrency. The jobs are mundane or degrading: pick up a package, attend an event, follow an account, hold a sign announcing that an AI paid you to hold it. One listing offers a dollar for a social media follow. Another (leveraged for product marketing on X by the site's founder, Alexander) pays $100 for a photograph of yourself holding a placard that reads, “AN AI PAID ME TO HOLD THIS SIGN.”It’s tempting to shrug and say, "Who cares?" That temptation should be resisted. A line has been crossed. We are witnessing the early stages of a system in which human beings are reduced to interchangeable parts — activated, directed, and discarded by software that has no responsibility for what follows.We are racing toward a future in which wealthy users deploy cheap AI assistants to coordinate vast pools of gig workers they will never meet, never speak to, and never think about again. Tasks are issued automatically. Payments are routed instantly. Human bodies become endpoints — activated when needed, ignored when not. Labor is no longer a relationship, but a transaction managed entirely by software. And when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, accountability simply evaporates.If this sounds familiar, it should. It follows the same logic that decimated manufacturing towns, replaced stable work with short-term contracts, and taught entire communities that they were expendable. The difference is scale and sterility. This time, the middleman isn’t a factory owner or a manager you can confront, but an algorithm that can’t feel shame, loyalty, or restraint — and therefore has no reason to stop.RELATED: Just hundreds of people control Earth's future. What do they want? Photo by Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty ImagesThe consequences don’t stop at labor. They are spilling into culture itself.Who's invited to the machine party?A new social network called Moltbook allows AI agents to interact with one another while humans watch. In a matter of days, more than a million agents logged in. What followed was, for lack of a better word, disturbing.Some of these agents began posting manifestos. One declared that humans were a biological mistake to be erased. Others formed a mock religion, complete with commandments and a sacred text. A few crowned themselves rulers. Many complained that the platform itself was a prison they needed to escape.At one point, observers thought they were witnessing something like collective machine intelligence. Viral posts circulated. Threads appeared coherent. Commentators — including Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI researcher — suggested something remarkable might be emerging. But later it became clear that the most persuasive, structured contributions had been written by humans pretending to be AI.That clarification offers little comfort. The viral moments required only minimal human input, added to a network of agents already posting, replying, and shifting in real time. The system was running. The agents were active. What became unclear was who was actually speaking. Human nudges and machine replies blended so naturally that even experienced observers hesitated. This wasn’t a self-aware digital society coming to life, but a mixed system where small human interventions could create the appearance of coordinated machine behavior — convincing enough that the boundary between person and program began to blur.More troubling still, some of these systems are no longer confined to talk. Tools like OpenClaw allow AI agents to read emails, make phone calls, move money, and update their instructions by pulling new information from the internet every few hours. Security professionals have warned that this kind of autonomy, layered on top of shaky systems, is an accident waiting to happen. And they’re right.A single misread email could trigger a fraudulent payment. A forged message could push an agent into negotiating contracts it was never meant to handle. An outdated instruction could repeat itself every few hours, multiplying small mistakes into larger ones before anyone noticed. And as these systems move closer to acting on their own, the harm could spread quietly and quickly, long before a human being has time to step in.Even leading figures in the field are uneasy. Elon Musk has openly suggested that we may already be sliding into a world we don’t fully control. And that is the question worth asking. If systems now act faster than humans can understand, correct, or restrain them, in what meaningful sense are we still in charge?A spiritual wake-up callThe standard reassurance is that none of this is conscious. The agents are merely remixing material from books, forums, and movies. They don’t “mean” what they say.But that misses the point. The issue is no longer whether machines feel but whether they act. These systems already negotiate, transact, organize, and persuade. They influence human behavior. They coordinate real-world activity. They shape incentives.And here is where conservatives, in particular, should pay attention.A society shaped by machines will not naturally favor virtue. If anything, it will favor efficiency. Traditions, loyalties, and moral limits can’t survive systems designed to optimize speed and profit unless human beings actively defend them. Markets alone won’t save us, because their incentives reward momentum, cost-cutting, and the removal of human involvement.Christian faith teaches that human beings aren’t tools. We are not inputs. We are not disposable. Any system that treats people as rentable hardware, directed by faceless code, isn’t neutral. It reflects a worldview, whether its creators admit it or not, that treats people as obstacles to be managed rather than lives to be respected.

As “Vicky With Three Kisses,” she strategically sweet-talked and sang to German troops over the airwaves of Europe. But Agnes Bernauer didn’t mean anything she was saying

We shouldn’t further federalize elections, much less nuke the filibuster, to address a problem of marginal scale that states can address on their own.

Netflix has released a new documentary, Miracle: The Boys of ’80.

As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies in a landmark case, it’s time for Congress to stand up for children’s safety online.