Adding to the days of strikes and mass street demonstrations about French President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular plan to raise the retirement age, farmers have flooded the streets of Paris for an entirely different reason. 

French farmers drove hundreds of tractors, if not more, into Paris on Wednesday to protest against a ban on pesticide use.

👍Waouh! Impressive demonstration by 🇫🇷 #sugar #beet #growers & farmers in Paris, around 800 tractors gathered in “Les Invalides” to:
✅explain their urgent need &
❌condemn excess of regulations!@FnseaGBP @CGB_FR #LaBetteraveEnDanger #sauvetonpaysan @SanderFranck @_MissBetter pic.twitter.com/yqAGiXxHT4

— C.I.B.E. (@SugarBeetEurope) February 8, 2023

Ag website Agriland said the protest comes after a recent EU court ruling overturned a French rule that allowed sugar beet growers to use neonicotinoids, an insecticide. Farmers were livid by the EU courts because neonicotinoids are critical for sugar beet production. Agriland said at least 800 large farm tractors flooded Paris streets around Les Invalides. 

Pictures from the farmers tractor convoy protests in Paris. #Paris pic.twitter.com/JcuoivUCWi

— Live Not by Lies (@Dana35300026) February 8, 2023

“The protest has the backing of the country’s leading farm organization, the FNSEA, as well as organizations representing the sugar beet producing sector,” Agriland said. 

Well before the EU court ruling, French sugar-beet yields were expected to slide by 5-7% for the next growing season, according to Bloomberg, citing Francois Thaury, an analyst at Paris-based adviser Agritel. Thaury said losses could not top 10%. 

د فرانسې یوه ډله بزګرو د حکومت ځینو پالیسو خلاف مظاهرې په ترڅ کې خپل تراکتورونه د پاریس لارو کوڅو ته راوړي دي. یو له دغو پالیسیو څخه د حشره وژونکو او افت وژونکو په کارونې بندیز دی.#voapashto #voasocial #voaafghanistan #paris #farmers #protest #tractor pic.twitter.com/74MoRC70Xz

— VOA Pashto (@VOAPashto) February 8, 2023

Meanwhile, in separate mass protests, hundreds of thousands of people nationwide took to the streets against Macron’s plans to raise the retirement age. 

Protests come as Macron’s popularity has hit its lowest level. Spring is ahead, and that could mean additional protests as temperatures rise. 

Authored by Francis P. Sempa via RealClear Wire,

Retired U.S. Army LTC Alexander Vindman, who gained fame for helping Democrats impeach President Donald Trump for a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian officials in July 2019, is urging the Biden administration and its Western allies to swiftly and dramatically increase military aid and supplies to Ukraine to help the Ukrainian armed forces credibly threaten to take back Crimea, which Russian forces seized in 2014. He lays out a Ukrainian military campaign–armed and funded by the United States and its NATO allies–that he claims will cause Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a Russian withdrawal from Crimea and reduce the risk of a wider war. Vindman is reminiscent of those European statesmen and generals before and during World War I who thought that mobilizing for war would somehow prevent it and, if not, would result in a swift victory.

Writing on the Foreign Affairs website, Vindman notes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a video appeal at the meeting of the World Economic Forum, saying: “Crimea is our land, our territory,” and requesting Western nations to “give us your weapons” so that Ukraine can retake “what is ours.” In his article, Vindman urges Washington and NATO to “give Ukraine the weapons and assistance it needs to win quickly and decisively in all occupied territories north of Crimea–and to credibly threaten to take the peninsula militarily.” Vindman suggests that a credible threat to militarily retake Crimea will be sufficient to bring Putin to the negotiating table and end the war on terms favorable to Ukraine.

Vindman has been one of the most vociferous war hawks when it comes to U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine War. Politico reports that Vindman is organizing a group of experienced American military contractors “who would travel to Ukraine and embed themselves with small units near the front lines” and provide Ukrainian forces with “military logistics support.” Back in the summer of 2022, Vindman traveled to Ukraine to help the country wage successful war against Russia. He called the Ukraine war “the most important geopolitical event of the last 20 years & maybe the next 20 years.”

And Vindman has not shied away from partisan politics in his “geopolitical” analysis. He has blamed former President Trump, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Republican Party, and Fox News for “emboldening Russia to invade Ukraine,” even though Russia’s invasions of Ukraine occurred during the Obama and Biden administrations. “There is blood on the Republican Party’s hands,” Vindman said. “They were partially responsible for what is happening in Ukraine.”

Vindman claims that if the U.S. and NATO continue to provide military assistance to Ukraine incrementally instead of giving Ukraine everything it needs now, the risk of widening the war and embroiling NATO in the conflict will increase. But, he claims, with swift and decisive Western military support, including hundreds of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, advanced fighter aircraft, long and short-range missiles, and thousands of rocket systems, Ukraine can credibly threaten to retake Crimea, which he claims will force Putin to negotiate, withdraw from Crimea, and will supposedly reduce the risks of a wider war.

Vindman even lays out a tactical strategy that includes tying down Russian forces in the Luhansk, Kherson, and northern Donetsk regions, severing Russia’s land route to Ukraine by pushing through to the Sea of Azov, and interfering with Russia’s military resupply route by destroying the Kerch Strait Bridge that connects Russia to the Crimea. This would be followed by “weeks of strikes” on Russian armed forces, including air bases, naval installations, transportation nodes, and command and control centers. Then Ukraine would launch “land and amphibious attacks to gain a foothold in Crimea,” and move on to seize Russia’s naval installation at Sevastopol, the capital of Simferopol, Feodosiya, and Kerch. Unless, that is, the Clausewitzian “friction” of war intervenes, as it usually does.

There are a lot of assumptions underlying Vindman’s plan. One is his claim that “Western officials are less worried about Russian nuclear saber rattling than they once were.” He does not identify who those officials are or why they are allegedly less worried about nuclear escalation. Another assumption is that a dramatic increase in Western military supplies–giving Ukraine everything it needs to defeat Russia–is less dangerous than what he calls “incremental escalation.” And Vindman assures us that “Putin has no interest in a fight with NATO.” Presumably, that includes a NATO that supplies Ukraine with everything it needs to defeat Russia.

Perhaps Vindman’s most questionable assumption–which is not mentioned in the Foreign Affairs article, but that he voiced after his trip to Ukraine in the summer of 2022–is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “the most important geopolitical event of the last 20 years.” Others would argue that China’s rise–economically and militarily–and its expanded influence throughout Eurasia and beyond is a more important geopolitical event, especially when it is coupled with the growing strategic partnership between China and Russia. In the past, American statesmen recognized the importance of maintaining the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. It is why we sided with Stalin against Hitler. It is why we sided with Mao against the Soviet regime. But all the Vindman approach does is to push Russia even closer to China. And as tensions increase in the western Pacific over Taiwan, Vindman’s counsel may get us into a two-front war that nobody should want.

Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21^stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, The American Spectator, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a former contributing editor to American Diplomacy.

Authored by Robert B. Charles via RealClear Wire,

A Chinese surveillance balloon floats over the United States for a week. No action is taken, until the outcry makes taking it down necessary. A second is over South America, a third was over Hawaii. President Biden says it happened under President Trump. After former Trump administration officials said that didn’t happen, Biden countered they were “discovered” after Trump left. What explains all this?

To start with, China just tested Joe Biden, and he failed. China had put a spy balloon over Hawaii, and the president – we now learn – did nothing about a device about a dozen miles in the air leisurely traversing the United States and presumably sending images in real-time back to the Chinese military. U.S. airspace goes to 62 miles up.

Why was it not shot down? We’re told only that “debris” might hurt someone, or that it was innocuous, and hence no need for action. These were tenuous, if not false, excuses for inaction. Debris would have been minimal and could be engineered into empty spaces. Satellites see things, but a spy balloon 100 times closer sees more.

As for “no need,” well, only if you want more spy balloons next month and see no danger in the precedent, which is to say, the possibility of one day facing a possible chem, bio, radioactive, or EMP threat. Otherwise, you shoot it down fast, as you would a Chinese fighter or bomber.

We did not do that. Why not? The explanation apparently is that the Biden team is timid, afraid to upset China, and believes this provocation will be viewed as a mere “incremental” violation, one they can let slip if not noticed.

Except that Americans saw it with their own eyes, so we were treated to predictably partisan and self-serving crisis management: Biden’s team quickly said they had “discovered” it, were “monitoring” it, would decide what to do next. Meantime, the secretary of state immediately waffled on postponing his planned trip to China.

Biden’s team wrung their hands, said little, did less, and hoped this would just drift away. The outcry was significant, so they finally decided to shoot the offending balloon down over the ocean, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken bravely delayed his trip.

The courage quotient in this White House, Biden’s Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and State Department, is stunning – for its absence. Are we to imagine no one thought of the possibilities here? Are we to imagine we only consider planes or missiles a threat?

So, the Biden team finally shoots the Chinese spy balloon down over the ocean, while China mumbles, lies, and carries on. But this is where the “scandal within scandal” begins. Under the gun to explain themselves, Biden and his team belatedly says “three Chinese balloons” were over the U.S. under Trump. Almost every highly cleared Trump intelligence and national security appointee (more than a dozen) flatly deny that.

This leads to the next hard-to-believe deflection. Biden’s team says the Chinese balloons Trump did not shoot down were only discovered after he left office. What?

Yes, they say it happened then but was only “discovered after” Trump left, which is probably why no one had heard about it. This is hard to credit. Are we to believe that NORAD’s 24/7 operations center was asleep – that China dared cross Trump, and we only saw the spy balloons after reviewing the tape?

All this sounds increasingly absurd, throws water on solid facts, damning, indefensible, and which should require – in an accountable republic – high level resignations. Here are the big, real questions.

First, if any spy balloon from China really floated over the United States during Trump’s time and not one appointee was briefed, do we have an “intelligence deep state” – which is either pro-China or which so feared Trump’s penchant for action that they withheld that? Exactly who knew what, when, and said nothing?

Second, if the balloons were over the U.S. under Trump, and NORAD or the intelligence community did not see them in real time, why not? That is a major intelligence failure. How did that happen? Third, either way – and regardless of which scandal is worse – the Chinese spy balloon in U.S. airspace should have immediately been brought down. Would we wait on a fighter, and say debris worried us?

China has learned a key lesson, and it cannot be unlearned. Biden will hesitate, deflect, do almost anything to avoid confrontation with China, even allow penetration of U.S. airspace. None of this will make Taiwan feel good, or Japan, Australia, the Philippines – or any U.S. ally.

Communist China’s deliberate penetration of U.S. airspace is not a non-event, not inconsequential, not something to pretend did not happen. And it should have instantly triggered a shootdown.

Who will be held accountable for this fiasco? What will China do next? This is not a small error, passing oversight, or victory – nor was the disastrous U.S. exit from Afghanistan. This is another layered scandal.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.

Deepfakes, AI and virtual reality are blurring the line between reality and a computer-generated illusion. Powered by AI software, deepfake audio and video move us into an age where it is almost impossible to discern what is real, especially as it relates to truth and disinformation. At the same time, the technology sector continues to use virtual reality to develop a digital universe—the metaverse—that is envisioned as being the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.

Advances in technology are outstripping our ability to protect ourselves from its menacing side, both in times of rights, humanity and workforce. In the absence of constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, we desperately need an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

The courts have aligned themselves with the police state. In one ruling after another, the courts have used the doctrine of qualified immunity to shield police officers from accountability for misconduct, tacitly giving them a green light to act as judge, jury and executioner on the populace. All the while, police violence, the result of training that emphasizes brute force over constitutional restraints, continues to endanger the public.

The nation’s dependence on foreign imports has fueled a $1 trillion trade deficit. While analysts have pointed to the burgeoning trade deficit as a sign that the U.S. economy is growing, it underscores the extent to which very little is actually made in America anymore.

World governments, including the U.S., continue to use national crises such as COVID-19 to expand their emergency powers. None are willing to relinquish these powers when the crisis passes. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the U.S. government still has 42 declared national emergencies in effect, allowing it to sidestep constitutional protocols that maintain a system of checks and balances. For instance, the emergency declared after the 9/11 has yet to be withdrawn.

The nation’s infrastructure is rapidly falling apart. Many of the country’s roads, bridges, airports, dams, levees and water systems are woefully outdated and in dire need of overhauling, and have fallen behind that of other developed countries in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that crumbling infrastructure costs every American household $3,300 in hidden costs a year due to lost time, increased fuel consumption while sitting in traffic jams, and extra car repairs due to poor road conditions.

The nation is about to hit a healthcare crisis. Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other high-income country, it has the worst health outcomes than its peer nations. Experts are also predicting a collapse in the U.S. health care system as the medical community deals with growing staff shortages and shuttered facilities.

These are just a small sampling of the many looming problems that threaten to overwhelm us in the near future.

Thus far, Americans seem inclined to just switch the channel, tune out what they don’t want to hear, and tune into their own personal echo chambers.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

Instead of tracking how “Russia” influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming: https://t.co/vxnKAoI9T7

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023

That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.

The arguments in this article are self defeating (a crisis of democracy should use secret unaccountable CIA subsidies to push “democracy”) and have already been refuted countless times, and is pointless as we are still using disguised cutouts and pass throughs to do propaganda https://t.co/kMtQxShCSp

— Joel Whitney (he/him) (@joel_whitney) January 30, 2023

All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

*  *  *

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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After a surprise UK visit, Ukraine’s President Zelensky went to Paris immediately afterward in a whirlwind European tour to meet with Western leaders. In Paris he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz

Macron asserted during the visit that Russia cannot win the war against Ukraine. “Ukraine can count on France, its European partners and allies to win the war. Russia cannot and must not win,” Macron said before a working dinner among the three leaders at the Elysee Palace.

Just ahead of the meeting, Zelensky in an interview with Le Figaro hailed a change of heart in Macron. “I think he has changed, and changed for real this time,” Zelensky said. “After all, it is he who paved the way for the delivery of tanks. And he has also supported Ukraine’s membership to the EU. I think that was a real signal.”

Macron had angered Kiev when in June he said the West must not “humiliate Russia, so that when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.” 

Macron has also come under fire for being among the only Western leaders to hold frequent phone conversations with President Vladimir Putin, in order to attempt a diplomatic breakthrough towards ending the war. But Ukrainian leaders have suggested such diplomatic efforts are a form of ‘capitulation’.

As for Macron’s slow pivot away from pursuing a diplomatic offramp, the Associated Press now describes: 

Macron has said France hasn’t ruled out sending fighter jets but set conditions, including not leading to an escalation of tensions or using the aircraft “to touch Russian soil,” and not resulting in weakening “the capacities of the French army.”

As for Scholz, he was cited in the following on Wednesday:

He added that Paris would “continue the efforts” to deliver arms to Kyiv. Mr Scholz also assured the Ukrainian president of enduring allied support.

“We will continue to do so as long as necessary,” he told reporters, noting Germany and its partners had backed Ukraine “financially, with humanitarian aid and with weapons”. He added that Ukraine belongs to the European family.

⚡️Video showing Zelensky meeting Macron and Scholz a few moments ago. pic.twitter.com/65T0BmVfnQ

— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) February 8, 2023

The US and UK too have lately signaled no options are off the table at this point. UK leaders took it further on Wednesday in saying Ukraine might expect Typhoon fighter jets in the longer-term.

After Paris, Zelensky is expected in Brussels on Thursday, where he will continue pushing for Ukraine to be fast-tracked into EU membership.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A 73-year-old Arizona rancher has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder for the killing of an illegal alien who has been tentatively identified as a Mexican citizen.

Full details about the shooting have not been made available, and it is unknown whether the rancher, George Alan Kelly, and the deceased, Gabriel Cuen-Butimea, 48, knew each other. The killing occurred on Jan. 30, and Kelly’s arrest was preceded by authorities finding the dead body of Cuen-Butimea on Kelly’s cattle ranch. Cuen-Butimea’s was identified from a Mexican voter registration card he carried.

Kelly is being held at the Santa Cruz County Jail in Nogales, Arizona, and his bail was set at $1 million by Justice Emilio Velasquez. Kelly has requested the judge to reduce his bail in order to go back home and take care of his wife.

“She’s there by herself… nobody to take care of her, the livestock or the ranch,” he said, according to Nogales International. “And I’m not going anywhere. I can’t come up with a million dollars,” he said.

Meanwhile, Cuen-Butimea has entered the United States multiple times illegally and was deported repeatedly, according to reports.

The Shooting

The incident happened in the Kino Springs area just outside Nogales, according to Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Gerardo Castillo. A call came in at about 2:40 p.m. Monday, regarding a shooting in the Sagebrush Road area, per Nogales International. There were reports of a commotion at the scene but the deputies found nothing on arrival.

However, around 6:00 p.m., the sheriff’s office received another call about shots fired at the property. This time, deputies found the deceased body of Cuen-Butimea with a visible gunshot wound 100–150 yards from Kelly’s house.

Kelly lived 1.5 miles north of the border with Mexico, roughly three-quarters of a mile southeast of Kino Springs Road. Kelly was arrested because the body was found on his property.

According to the outlet, Kelly requested a reduction in the bond amount but Judge Velasquez said that it would be determined by the County Attorney’s Office. Kelly was cordial with the officers when he was brought to court.

At present, Kelly, who appears to be a self-published fiction writer based on the Nogales International news report, is being held at the Santa Cruz County Jail and is set to appear in court on Wednesday.

Stand Your Ground

A person can fight, and even kill, in order to protect himself or others based on Arizona law.

The state’s Justification statute, which is similar to Florida’s “stand your ground” law, says “a person is justified in threatening or using physical force against another when and to the extent a reasonable person would believe that physical force is immediately necessary to protect himself against the other’s use or attempted use of unlawful physical force.”

The burden lies on prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not justified in using deadly force during self-defense.

As of December 2022, the number of illegal immigrant encounters along the southern border was at 251,487, a new monthly record, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The earlier record was in May at 241,136 encounters.

Authored by A.B. Stoddard via RealClear Wire,

The Chinese spy balloon was perfect for Mike Pompeo, an opportunity that fell from the sky. He has been running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination since 2021 and badly needs a way to stand out.

BalloonGate gives Pompeo a mini moment to weigh in as a national security hawk, call President Biden weak, and tweet about his important experience on the world stage.

“I took many shots at the CCP during my time in the Trump administration. Read more in my new book ‘Never Give An Inch,’” Pompeo wrote in the most cringey tweet before the balloon was shot down, with a picture of the balloon marked “problem” and a picture of him pointing a rifle marked “solution.”

It’s hard to know who will even notice. Sens. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and many others are out there blasting away at Biden for dithering on the balloon. And Pompeo is a low poller in the 2024 sweepstakes. He seems to lack a plan for how to break through. He’s not criticizing or challenging the popularity of Trump, or of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the other frontrunner. But he has picked what appears to be a pointless fight with Nikki Haley.

In the weeks after the midterm elections, Pompeo joined the chorus of disappointed Republicans expressing frustration with Trump and his losing candidates, tweeting, “We were told we would get tired of winning. But I’m tired of losing. And so are most Republicans.” But he has since otherwise refused to put any real distance between himself and his former boss. He assiduously avoids criticizing Trump in his book, instead choosing to note that Trump often called him “My Mike,” which seems an embarrassing thing to admit. Pompeo also seems proud that he was the “only member of the president’s core national-security team who made it through four years without resigning or getting fired.”

Still, Pompeo has used his memoir, a best seller, to try to reach GOP voters and convince them he is macho, mad, mean, and ever-in-battle with the mainstream media. In his fight to uphold the “highest principles” Pompeo wrote, “I was vicious, relentless, manic, determined – you pick the adjective,” and he calls reporters “hyenas” and “wolves.”

His fly-by attack on Haley, including an accusation that she conspired with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to dump Mike Pence from the 2020 ticket, seems gratuitous and petty. (Haley called this “gossip and lies.”) Pompeo writes: “As for Haley, she gave fine remarks supporting Israel, but didn’t do much else … She abandoned the governorship of the great people of South Carolina for this ‘important’ role and quit it after just months on the job. Was it simply to join Boeing’s board of directors, or did she leave to protect her reputation from the inevitable so-called Trump taint the media inevitably slaps on people?”

Insulting Haley is clearly part of Pompeo’s intentional groundwork-laying, though to what end it isn’t clear. He hasn’t yet said he is running, but praying on the decision with his wife, which will be announced in “the next handful of months.” But Pompeo started his campaign, for relevance, a few months after Trump left office. He formed a PAC to help Republican candidates in the midterm elections and has traveled to early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Pompeo is running as Resume Man. And man, is his resume impressive. He graduated first in his class from West Point, and from Harvard Law and was on Harvard Law Review. After six years in the House of Representatives, he became CIA director for Trump, and then secretary of state – the only person ever to hold both jobs.

The problem for Pompeo is that GOP primary voters aren’t shopping for Resume Man. Pompeo and DeSantis both may want to avoid mentioning their Ivy League degrees in a primary campaign. After Trump no one needs the requisite experience for the presidency, and elites and their credentials are as contemptible as socialists and the media.

What’s more, today’s GOP primary voters – the ones who nominated Doug Mastriano, Gen. Don Bolduc, Tudor Dixon, and Herschel Walker for serious jobs – are also far less interested in foreign policy than Pompeo thinks they are. And wait until they find out about his deep ties to the Koch Network.

Sure, Haley is talking about the same foreign policy issues Pompeo is, but she’s likely running for vice president. The former governor and U.N. ambassador is most definitely qualified to run for president, she has great appeal as the only woman running in the contest, and she is also Indian American. But like Pompeo, she seems ill-suited to MAGA voters. Putting in a halfway decent performance in the primary still makes her the most obvious pick as a running mate.

Other likely contenders, with DeSantis leading the pack, all have their specific appeal as well: Pence has a natural constituency among his fellow evangelical Christians, especially those who believe Trump has too much baggage to win again; Glenn Youngkin flipped a state Biden won by 10 points the year before; Chris Sununu is a pro-choice swing state governor; Asa Hutchinson and Larry Hogan are former governors who have been openly anti-Trump.

Pompeo throws around “America First” labels to describe his four years of work for Trump, but he is no MAGA star or culture warrior ready to rescue the nation from “woke.” You don’t see Pompeo hanging out on OAN or online bashing vaccines or drag shows or grade school syllabuses.

With Ukraine aflame, and the looming prospect of war with China over Taiwan, it’s not that national security is unimportant. In next year’s general election these matters will be a critical part of the debate. But the bulk of Republicans Pompeo must woo for the nomination are more interested in what library books their kids can access than Iran’s current stash of fissile material. And Trump will spend more time talking about transgender issues than the cohesion of our transatlantic alliance as it counters Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Trump now opposes any more funding for Ukraine and, according to a new Politico report, plans to paint everyone else in the primary field as warmongers.

It doesn’t sound like Pompeo’s got a workaround for that. And if he doesn’t, but enters the race anyway, he’s off his balloon.

A hospital in Yuma, Arizona is reportedly on the brink of collapse after providing $20 million in care for what has become a constant stream of illegal migrants.

Dr. Robert Transchel, president and CEO of Yuma, Arizona’s Regional Medical Center, told Fox News that the problem is not new.

“It’s been a long journey,” he said. “We’ve been at this for well over a year now. We tracked our uncompensated care for a period of over six months, and we calculated that we’ve provided over $20 million in uncompensated care to the migrants crossing the border.“

According to Transchel, despite approaching state officials and Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas for aid, neither the city, state, or the federal government have stepped up to help to pay for the migrant care.

“We just don’t have a payer source. Everybody is sympathetic, and everybody lends a listening ear, but nobody has a solution,” he told “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

“We’ve provided $20 million in care to the migrants that are crossing the border and we just don’t have a payer source for those individuals. It’s not a sustainable model to have these continued rising expenses without a revenue source to offset that.”

Transchel said the hospital will keep functioning, adding that most hospitals operate on a “very thin margin.” 

“We’re fine today, and we’ll be fine tomorrow. The problem is, if this continues, it’s gonna build up, and it’s gonna continue to be a problem.”

He added that the $20 million care cost fails to encompass the full scope of losses the facility has suffered since migrant patients became a problem, pointing to flight costs for some, as well as expenses associated with increased staffing. –Fox News

“The infrastructure that we’ve had to add is uncompensated as well,” he added.