Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Import the third world, get the third world. Is it any surprise that immigrants from a country in which stealing from the government is a way of life would steal from the government here?

Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) was just terribly, terribly upset that President Donald Trump used “hateful behavior and this type of language” when Mr Trump described him as “seriously retarded.”

“We have fought three decades to get this out of our school. Kids know better than to use it,” Walz told (NBC’s Kristen) Welker. “But look, this is what Donald Trump has done. He’s normalized this type of hateful behavior and this type of language. And mainly, look, at first, I think it’s just because he’s not a good human being, but secondly to distract from his incompetency.”

But when the Governor, and 2024 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, decided that junior high and high school boys needed tampon dispensers in their public school bathrooms, “seriously retarded” seems appropriate. Right now I’m reminded of season three, episode 8, of Shameless, where Sheila reclaims the dreaded “r” word. 🙂

Mr Trump wasn’t chastised, but ” target=”_blank”>doubled down on his characterization of Tampon Tim.

However now we have the stories, sourced from state workers, concerning how Governor Walz and the Minnesota state agencies ignored evidence of fraud perpetrated by Somali groups to raid federal funds. From The New York Times:

How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch

Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration.

By Ernesto Londoño, Reporting from Minneapolis | Saturday, November 29, 2025 | Updated: Sunday, November 30, 2025

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.

Note that the embedded link behind “rampant fraud” is dated April 9, 2024, when President Biden was still in office; this isn’t just some accusation by President Trump against his political enemies.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

The SBA estimates more than $200 billion of the $1.2 trillion it disbursed during the pandemic was obtained fraudulently, according to the Office of Inspector General.

Fraud was rampant during the panicdemic — not a typographical error, but exactly how I saw it — as it will always be whenever money from the government, federal, state, and local, is available, and while Minnesota is a blue state, it happens in states run by Republicans as well. From Breitbart:

The fraud has been so endemic in Minnesota that even the usually far-left Times is joining Breitbart News and calling it out. Indeed, the paper even noted that early on many liberals waved off the fraud as a “one-off abuse,” but as each new case rolled out from federal prosecutors the sense of alarm has grown and the blame is undeniable.

“Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided,” the Times reported.

The paper does not spare exposure of the Somali community.

Macalester College professor Ahmed Samatar, a Somali native, said that the fraud among Minnesota’s Somali migrants should not be surprising. The Times added that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.”

Import the third world, get the third world!

The fraud has been so deep that it has undermined all of the state’s welfare programs.

“No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,” federal prosecutor Joseph H. Thompson told the media. “We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.”

Hey, the losses to fraud are very acceptable if they can somehow end welfare programs! But I seriously doubt they will.

Naturally, the left leapt to the defense of the Somalis:

Above and beyond this massive fraud and theft, investigators are also finding that Somali migrants have sent millions in taxpayer dollars to the African Islamic terror group known as Al-Shabaab.

A long list of Democrats have been rushing to stick up for the Somali community in Minnesota, including Rep. Ilhan Omar and a growing number of local officials.

Well, of course they did. After all, to note that the (alleged) fraud committed (allegedly) by Somali groups is raaaaacist. Is it any surprise that our friends on the left would leap top their defense? After all, they want to fight President Trump on everything, including his policies of enforcing our immigration laws. But the Herald-Leader story referenced a white husband and wife caught, prosecuted, and convicted of stealing from the COVIDiocy relief funds.

It’s simple: a clear pile of our taxpayer funds goes not to government agencies, but non-governmental organizations which promise, promise! to do only good things with the money, but which are only lightly, if at all, supervised or audited. That is not to say that government employees can’t commit fraud, but the sheer number of NGOs receiving taxpayer dollars multiplies the opportunities for fraud exponentially.

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Democrisy: There’s nothing the Democrats hate more than President Trump actually enforcing the laws

On Wednesday, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a decent article on a wound care clinic in Kensington, the center of the drug trade in the City of Brotherly Love, and how they’ve been struggling with injuries caused by “tranq,” the veterinary tranquilizer xylazine, which was never approved for use in humans, which dealers have been using to ‘cut’ opioids, to give them a longer effect.

Inside a Kensington wound care clinic

Xylazine, which was never approved for human use, has wreaked havoc in Kensington. Amputations among opioid users have more than doubled.

by Aubrey Whelan | Wednesday, November 26, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

In a small clinic room at Mother of Mercy House on Allegheny Avenue in Kensington, Emma Anderson unwrapped a bandage from a man’s swollen hand.

“It hurts really bad in the cold,” the man said, wincing at the inflamed wound that covered most of a right-hand finger.

Cleaning it with saline solution proved so painful that Anderson, an EMT and St. Joseph’s University student, let the patient take the lead, wiping carefully at the yellowish-white tissue at the center of the wound.

It was his second time attending the wound care clinic at Mother of Mercy, the Catholic nonprofit that twice a week opens its doors to people with addiction dealing with the serious skin lesions, caused by the animal tranquilizer xylazine, that can develop into wounds so severe the only treatment is amputation.

There follows a long section telling readers about the work the Mother of Mercy House does, which is not necessary for this article, but I recommend readers to follow the embedded link to read it.

Much further down:

This year, medetomidine, another animal tranquilizer that causes severe withdrawal, has supplanted xylazine’s dominance in the Philadelphia area drug supply. Fewer patients addicted to opioids are visiting emergency rooms with soft-tissue damage, according to city data.

But it’s unknown how medetomidine affects those wounds, and there are still enough people suffering from them in Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis, that the clinic felt it necessary to increase its hours.

One doubts that the move away from xylazine by the drug dealers was meant for altruistic reasons. If medetomidine causes severe drug withdrawals, it would seem to be something to ‘encourage’ junkies to keep buying the junk.

But then there was Friday morning’s lead editorial:

It’s Trump — not service members — who could benefit from a reminder about following the law | Editorial

There’s nothing seditious about Democrats reminding military members not to follow unlawful orders.

by The Editorial Board | Friday, November 28, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

Six lawmakers, including two from Pennsylvania, had good reason to remind military members not to follow unlawful orders, given Donald Trump’s illicit history and recent actions, such as sending federal troops into cities and boat strikes that violate international law.

The six Democrats, who either served in the military or the intelligence community, posted a short video telling their former counterparts that “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

As William Teach noted, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), one of the six Democrats who made that short video, admitted:

To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal — but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes, and everything related to Venezuela.

And even the Editorial Board backtracked somewhat:

For example, the legality of Trump’s boat strikes — which have killed more than 80 people — is dubious.

A secret U.S. Department of Justice memo reportedly blessed the strikes by claiming the U.S. is in an armed conflict with drug cartels. But members of Congress from both parties argue it is illegal to target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat. The United Nations’ human rights chief said the strikes violated international law.

It isn’t sedition for the six Democrats to make a video stating that American servicemen do not have to obey illegal orders, but their intent is clear: they wanted to cause some servicemembers to question orders that Senator Slotkin herself were not illegal. The Editorial Board certainly want you to believe that the strikes are illegal.

So, here we have the very same editors, who have read or should have read the previously cited article about the tremendous damage to which drug smuggling from Venezuela has done to our country. Those editors absolutely know about the devastation in Kensington, yet they are appalled, aghast, and outraged that President Trump is actually trying to do something to halt drug trafficking, just as they have waxed wroth about his efforts to reduce crime and stop illegal immigration and deport the illegals already here.

That President Trump sure is an evil genius! He’s managed to get the left to defend previously deported and returned again illegal immigrants accused of domestic violence, crime in our major cities, illegal immigration, and drug traffickers, all by the same people who told us that “No one is above the law” when the Democrats were trying to throw Mr Trump in jail.

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Journolism: CEO of Lenfest Institute for Journalism worries about Freedom of the Press when his own newspaper censors the news "What does not get printed is as important as what does" Jim Friedlich told us, but The Philadelphia Inquirer frequently doesn't print the politically incorrect

Jim Friedlich is Chief Executive Officer and executive director of the Leftist, oops, sorry, Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns what I have sometimes called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.. In this morning’s newspaper, he is “Giving thanks — and offering up a prayer — for America’s free press: On this, more than any Thanksgiving in memory, a free and independent American press seems in peril.” It’s mostly boilerplate stuff, such as claiming that President Trump’s attempt to eliminate the Voice of America as somehow an attack on freedom of the Press, as though VOA is somehow not a government body rather than an independent news source. He decries the defunding of the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, even though both still exist and can survive the way every other broadcaster survives, by selling advertising.

But this is the line which attracted most of my attention:

What does not get printed is as important as what does. The palpable chill of partisan press criticism has meant the self-censorship of even some of the nation’s wealthiest newspaper owners.

“What does not get printed”? Such as the censorship and self-censorship of virtually every outlet among the credentialed media of then-President Joe Biden’s visibly declining mental status? Remember our coverage of Jake Tapper‘s and Alex Thompson‘s book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again? Only a fool would believe that the major television news networks, that the reporters of The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times didn’t see the President’s slips, falls, gaffes, and zoning out. That it was visible to all who paid attention is attested to by conservatives having seen it and publishing it and tweeting it out, but, alas! the credentialed media pooh-poohed all of that, and told their readership and audiences that it was nothing, that maybe Mr Biden had lost a step physically but mentally he was, according to Mary Peltola, “one of the smartest, sharpest people I’ve met in DC.” That was just before the disastrous debate on June 27, 2024. After the debate, the Associated Press tried to tell us that Mr Biden was “Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful,” but most of the media admitted that his debate performance was a disaster, and, worst of all, the American public saw it, in ways the credentialed media couldn’t cover up.

I asked the Inquirer’s Will Bunch, on Bluesky, if there was “any discussion in the newsroom concerning Mr Biden’s growing incapacity before it all blew up during the debate?” but of course I didn’t get a response.

It’s simple: to the credentialed media, President Biden was running for re-election, and nothing, nothing! was more important than defeating the evil Donald Trump. And Mr Friedlich’s newspaper was definitely in the forefront of that effort: following the debate, the Editorial Board of The New York Times said, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race,” to which the Editorial Board of the Inquirer replied, “To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race.”

So, Mr Friedlich, I had to laugh when you wrote what does not get printed is as important as what does. Your own newspaper chose not to report on the mental condition of the 46th President of the United States, at the time it was most important, when he was running for re-election, but Mr Bunch keeps crying that Mr “Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state remains mostly off-limits for the elite media. It’s a massive error of omission that the world will look back on and regret.” Perhaps the Lenfest Institute for Journalism needs to push the newspaper to actually engage in journalism.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Will these bad guys finally do some serious time?

Will the left be mad about this as well? They’ve been defending drug runners since President Trump has ordered action to sink their boats in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of America, so this ought to get them grinding their teeth as well. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

How law enforcement built a sprawling case against a longstanding Kensington drug gang

Philly police and federal authorities used wiretaps, cameras, and confidential informants to target dealers on Weymouth Street.

by Chris Palmer and Jesse Bunch | Tuesday, November 25, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

Ramon Roman-Montanez knew the police were watching.

One day last April, as Roman-Montanez prepared to hand out free drug samples to users on Weymouth Street — a common tactic that dealers use to attract customers — he stood in the middle of the Kensington block and spotted a problem.

The cops had put up a pole camera.

Using binoculars, Roman-Montanez scouted out the new device at the end of the block, prosecutors said in court documents. But he had a business to run — and so, after talking with a few associates in the street, he decided that giveaway day would move forward as planned.

Clearly, Mr Roman-Montanez and his “associates” — is that the new euphemism for gang-banger? — did not see it as very much of a problem, not in a city in which George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police hating Larry Krasner is the District Attorney. If caught, what would they get, a slap on the wrist?

Whatever their thought processes, they (allegedly) went ahead and did it.

The camera, however, was just one hint of what authorities now say was a sprawling, multiyear investigation into the gang Roman-Montanez helped lead — a group that sold thousands of doses of heroin, fentanyl, crack, and cocaine over the course of more than a decade, and effectively took over a residential block in a neighborhood that has long suffered from crime, open-air drug dealing, and neglect.

The results of the probe came to light last month, when FBI Director Kash Patel came to Philadelphia to announce that 33 people, including Roman-Montanez, had been indicted for drug crimes. Patel called the case a model for law enforcement across the country, and an example of how to take out a drug gang terrorizing a community.

The most important part of this? This is a federal case, so Mr Krasner can’t deal out lenient plea bargains!

In August, for example, Roman-Montanez was charged in state court with drug possession and related crimes after police found fentanyl, crack, and $20,000 in cash in his house — the result of a raid on Weymouth Street that was part of the investigation into his gang.

But a few weeks later, his attorneys persuaded a Philadelphia judge to reduce his bail and he walked out of jail. The 40-year-old — who federal prosecutors now say was the de facto chief operating officer of one of the city’s biggest drug conspiracies — was only taken back into custody this month, when federal authorities unsealed his indictment.

No wonder Mr Roman-Montanez didn’t see much downside: in the state prosecution, which means the prosecution under Mr Krasner, nothing happened.

Other interesting paragraphs:

In 2020, Angel Rios-Valentin was convicted in federal court of illegal gun possession after officers found him carrying a loaded handgun that he’d taken from Roman-Montanez’s house. He was sentenced to five years in prison and was on supervised release when he was arrested again last month.

Police found four guns in Rios-Valentin’s house, a discovery that prosecutors said showed his ongoing commitment to the gang.

Roman-Montanez, meanwhile, was arrested twice in the last three years, court documents show — but in both cases managed to avoid significant consequences.

In October 2022, police searched his house and found 96 grams of fentanyl, four loaded guns, and nearly $125,000 in cash, prosecutors said. Roman-Montanez was charged in state court, but the case was withdrawn.

The article continued to tell us that scheduling issues with attorneys and witnesses delayed proceedings for more than a year, and prosecutors — there’s that Mr Krasner again! — withdrew the charges.

The investigation has dragged on for years, and the (alleged) principals managed to distribute tons of drugs into Kensington. There’s a reason that neighborhood is internationally infamous — the government of Mexico has actually used photos of Kensington in ads to discourage drug use in Mexico! — and is simply a waste case, because years and years of law enforcement looking the other way, the city government being oh-so-sympathetic as far as drug use and junkies are concerned, have left the bad guys in charge, the addicts littering the streets, and the decent people living there stuck in their homes, afraid to come out of doors any more often than absolutely necessary. After eight years of neglect under former Mayor Jim Kenney, current Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins has made some moves to do something about the neighborhood, but Mr Krasner has attempted to throw roadblocks into that effort where he can.

The federal investigation dates from the beginning of President Trump’s first term, continued through the Joe Biden years, and finally, nine months into Mr Trump’s second term things are getting done. I only have to wonder how quickly new ‘entrepreneurs’ will replace the 33 gang-bangers now under arrest.

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World War III Watch: So many people want to fight, fight, fight for Ukraine who never actually go to Ukraine and fight

We noted, on Saturday, that the proposed peace plan is “a horrible deal for Ukraine, no doubt about that. But it does one thing: it stops the killing! It would be very dispassionate to suggest that Ukraine should keep on fighting, and its people keep on dying, if there were any reasonable prospect that they could eventually win the war.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin opined against it, and wants President Donald Trump, who she clearly hates, to send Patriot missiles and other weaponry to Ukraine, but she, like so many other people who want to help Ukraine, never told us what it would take for Ukraine to actually win its war against Russia.

And late Sunday, the Inky published a straight news story on a demonstration by Ukrainian Americans:

Philadelphia’s Ukrainian American community rebukes proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan

Rallygoers outside a North Philadelphia Ukrainian American club condemned Sunday a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine. The plan has been criticized for capitulating to Russia’s demands.

by Maggie Prosser | Sunday, November 23, 2025 | 4:38 PM EST

About 60 people gathered at a North Philadelphia Ukrainian American club on Sunday afternoon to condemn a U.S.-brokered proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Waving Ukrainian flags and hoisting signs that read, “Appeasement Isn’t Peace,” demonstrators outside the Ukrainian American Citizens’ Association described the plan as a laughable, “copy-and-paste” of Russia’s demands, signaling America’s willingness to capitulate to the Kremlin.

The peace deal put together by Washington and Moscow calls for Ukraine to cede territory, reduce its military, and give up on NATO membership — stipulations that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has categorically rejected in the past.

And here comes the money line:

“Nobody in their right mind would ask a country to give up its territory,
its military, its freedoms,” said Ulana Mazurkevich, president of the Philadelphia-based Ukrainian Human Rights Committee. “They do not know Ukrainians. … We will not give up — we fight, we fight, we fight.”

Really? Who’s this “we” about whom President Mazurkevich speaks? In the photograph accompanying the article, which you can see as part of the Inquirer’s tweet reproduced above — I prefer to use tweets as article illustrations, because those tweets are not under copyright, and can specifically be embedded — there are several men and women as part of that about 60 people demonstrating, but as part of “we fight, we fight, we fight,” they are doing so in North Philly, not on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Even Mrs Rubin admitted Ukraine’s “dire shortage of man power,” a shortage exacerbated by all of the Ukrainians not living in Ukraine, not fighting in Ukraine. We have at least twice mentioned that the vocal and vociferous supporters of the Palestinians certainly didn’t actually go to Gaza to fight the Israelis, and I have to ask here: why aren’t these Ukrainians in Philly picking up a rifle and heading to Kiev? Don’t tell me that you fight, you fight, you fight if you aren’t there, actually fighting.

We noted, eleven months ago, a Washington Post article telling readers about “exhausted soldiers” on the front lines and men in their late thirties, and their forties, and their fifties, on the front lines, of a few women on the front lines, not the soldiers the Kiev government would prefer to have, but the ones they do have.

It’s easy to say “we fight, we fight, we fight,” when you are not the ones out there actually fighting. It’s easy for the brave people in the United States and the capitals of democratic Europe, people who are not facing the bullets and bombs of the Russian army to advocate for continuing the war.

David J Kramer, Executive Director of the George w Bush Institute and Vice President of the George W Bush Presidential Center, argued:

The United States and the democratic community of nations must stand with Ukraine against Russia’s brutal, forcible seizure of Ukrainian territory. Ukraine represents the frontline of freedom, and its heroic citizens, who endure deadly and daily Russian bombardments and who have pushed back against a much larger military, deserve Western support. If not stopped in Ukraine, Putin will target other nations, which he already has been doing, but more aggressively. If we want to prevent the possibility of a Chinese attack against Taiwan, an important way to do so is by showing unstinting backing for Ukraine and imposing greater costs on Russia and its accomplices.

The United States should not be discussing the future of U.S.-Russian relations while Russian missiles and drones continue to wreak havoc on Ukraine, killing innocent civilians and trying to freeze and force the population into submission with winter coming.

The 28-point plan should be dropped and replaced with a simple one-point plan: Russia, get out of Ukraine!

It’s easy to make those arguments from the safety of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It’s easy to say that Russia must “get out of Ukraine” when he’s not there to force such. It’s beyond naïve to think that Russia would somehow accept a military defeat — “get out of Ukraine” — that no one has inflicted on them.

Mr Kramer’s site biography tells us that he is ” a leading expert on Russia and Ukraine,” and lists all sorts of impressive credentials, but his policy proposals amount to giving Ukraine more weapons and more money, but conspicuously avoids the only thing that could actually help Ukraine win, sending actual United States or NATO ground troops to directly fight the Russians. There is virtually no support for doing that, as Mr Kramer certainly knows, irrespective of what he might believe in his heart. He wants to:

Seek accountability for Russian war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Putin, after all, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his kidnapping of Ukrainian children

when a man who earned “his M.A. in Soviet studies from Harvard University and his B.A. in Soviet Studies and Political Science from Tufts University” has to know that war crimes can only be prosecuted on men who led nations and lost, and were then captured. Does Mr Kramer seriously believe that we can capture and drag Vladimir Putin before the bar? You’d have to spent a lot of time in a bar to think that!

Russia invasion of Ukraine is a terrible thing, something we all hate, but I have yet to see anyone present an actual plan to enable Ukraine to win the war. Simply sending money and weapons to a nation whose army has a “dire shortage of man power” is no plan at all.

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Kristallnacht in New York City? It’s not so far-fetched! As long as their protests remain peaceful, they are protected by our First Amendment, and its provisions protecting freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. But make no mistake about it: these people are total scum.

This site noted, on Friday, how self-proclaimed ‘imam’ and ‘Islamic scholar’ Abdullah Mady led a walkout of about 100 attendees at an interfaith service at the City University of New York because there was a ‘Zionist’ there.

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch apologizes to famed synagogue’s congregants for botched response to antisemitic protest

By Rich Calder | Saturday, November 22, 2025 | 4:53 PM EST

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch issued a heartfelt apology to the congregation of an historic Manhattan synagogue Saturday — conceding cops should have done a better job of keeping away hateful anti-Israel protesters.

Tisch told a crowd of 150 congregants attending service at Park East Synagogue that this week’s protests are legally allowed outside houses of worship — no matter how vile the topic — but said the NYPD failed to keep the front entrance clear and ensure “people could easily enter and leave shul.

“That is where we fell short, and for that, I apologize to this congregation,” the 44-year-old top cop said during a 10-minute speech which drew a standing ovation.

“Our plan didn’t include a frozen zone at the entrance. As a result, the space right outside your steps was chaotic.”

This story makes me appreciate the recently ended television series Blue Bloods and sadly fictitious Police Commissioner Frank Reagan.

Some 200 demonstrators gathered outside the Manhattan synagogue and heckled Jews attending an event by Nefesh B’nefesh, a Zionist organization that helps Jews immigrate from North America to Israel.

Many chanted “Globalize the intifada” and sinisterly urged the “resistance” to “take another settler out.”

Internal hyperlink not in the original, but added by this site.

Can someone tell me how such chant would not be seen as direct threats by the attendees? That was the direct intention of at least some of the protesters:

“It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events,” one protest leader told the crowd.

“We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared,” the agitator repeated emphatically.

The crowd also chanted “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada” to the beat of a drum.

“Resistance you make us proud, take another settler out,” the hate-filled group chanted at one point, video shows.

It’s not as though the NYPD did not have advance warning about the protest, as we reported last Wednesday.

Counter protestors were also on the scene, calling the masked demonstrators “cowards” and “pussies” for not showing their faces.

Cops set up metal barricades to keep protestor at bay, but some of the barricades were left too close to the synagogue entrance – putting event attendees coming and going in potential risk.

Pal-Awda NY/NJ, the anti-Israel activist group leading the protest, said it was demonstrating against an effort to “recruit American settlers to illegally occupy stolen Palestinian land.”

Again, internal hyperlink not in the original, but added by this site.

I find it amusing that Pal-Awda is whining about “stolen Palestinian land” while living on what some of our friends on the far-left call stolen Indian indigenous land.” They don’t want American Jews to immigrate to Israel, but they also try to make life miserable for Jews who live in the United States.

Oddly enough, of the four women most visibly protesting the Jews, three looked like very white Americans.

American Jews, in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel, are learning the hard way, as have their brothers in the Holy Land, that such virulent anti-Semitism has to be resisted from the very beginning. The history of Nazi Germany, and of Kristallnacht, has demonstrated for Jews the dangers of hoping that anti-Semitism just disappears, just goes away.

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World War III Watch: the neocons want to see the fruitless fighting in Ukraine go on and on and on

If there is one thing that The Philadelphia Inquirer’s ‘Worldview’ columnist has been adamant on is arming Ukraine to fight the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Russia. But even she couldn’t hide the fact that after 3½ years of war, Ukraine is starting to lose.

As Ukraine falters, Trump tries to hand the country to Putin with a shamefully pro-Russia peace plan

As Russia cracks Kyiv’s defenses and attacks Europe, the president refuses to send aid and kowtows to the Kremlin.

By Trudy Rubin | Thursday, November 20, 2025 | 5:01 AM EST

While America has been obsessing over Jeffrey Epstein, Vladimir Putin has been making dangerous headway in Ukraine — and expanding his war into Europe.

Under such circumstances, genuine peace negotiations are impossible because Putin thinks he is winning. America’s top foreign policy priority should be to reverse the Russian leader’s mindset by increasing military sales to Ukraine — which the Europeans will pay for.

Instead, the Trump team and Russian officials together have drawn up a new 28-point “peace” plan, without first consulting Ukraine or European allies. This pro-Russian plan calls for major Ukrainian concessions and would leave the country naked to further Russian aggression.

The White House has already denied Ukraine the weapons that could still stop the Russians, thereby effectively helping Putin slaughter Ukrainian civilians nightly with missiles and drones that target apartment buildings and heating systems.

Mrs Rubin knows, though she never says it, that many of President Trump’s voters, 77,302,580 Americans, were in part motivated by the fact that he did not want us to get more involved in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The United States has been involved in too many wars, costing us blood and treasure, and we haven’t actually won any of them. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were both expensive failures, with thousands of Americans killed and more wounded. It’s hard to forget that as the Wounded Warrior Project keeps running advertisements seeking donations on television. Saddam Hussein might be gone, but the government of Iraq is little better than it was, and the Taliban we deposed upon entering Afghanistan are back in power today.

And some of us still remember the debacle in Vietnam. I’ve said it dozens, if not hundreds of times: Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without American/NATO troops on the ground, directly fighting Russians. Does Mrs Rubin believe that the American people would stand for that?

Mrs Rubin wants us to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine, but even she admitted to the country’s “dire shortage of man power,” which begs the question: who’s going to operate the Patriot systems? Ukrainians are not trained to operate the complex systems, and cannot spare anyone from the front lines. The Patriots would have to be operated, at least at first, by American or NATO technicians, which puts the US and NATO directly at war with Russia, and that’s World War III. At least some of us don’t think that’s a particularly good idea.

Although things look bleak for Ukraine, I believe its fighters will manage to hold back the Russians this winter, but at a brutal cost to civilians’ and soldiers’ lives. Trump will bear much blame for the suffering to come.

Will they? Who knows, but Russia has made at least some small progress even during the распутица, the autumn mud time, but the fields of Ukraine are about to freeze over, once again providing solid surfaces for military vehicles. Nevertheless, the eastern European fields are no great place for soldiers, and much of the country is north of the 49th parallel, which is the same latitude as our longest border with Canada. The winter will be just as cold on the Russians, so it is at least reasonable to think that there won’t be much movement in the lines over the winter, but then there’s that “brutal cost to civilians’ and soldiers’ lives,” something Ukraine simply cannot afford.

And so the Russian leader is doing with a disastrous plan pushed by Trump’s supremely naive negotiator, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, who has has no grasp of Putin’s history or goals and seems to swallow his lies whole.

That “supremely naïve negotiator” was, along with the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the one who got Hamas to accept the ceasefire deal which has (mostly) stopped the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Witkoff’s draft plan would reportedly require Ukraine to give up the 14 per cent of the Donbas region it still controls, and cut the size of its armed forces by half. It would require Ukraine to abandon key categories of weapons, endorse a permanent rollback of vital U.S. assistance including long-range weapons, and ban foreign troops from basing on Ukrainian soil.

Yup, it’s a horrible deal for Ukraine, no doubt about that. But it does one thing: it stops the killing! It would be very dispassionate to suggest that Ukraine should keep on fighting, and its people keep on dying, if there were any reasonable prospect that they could eventually win the war.

But if there is no reasonable prospect that Ukraine could win the war, could reverse the military situation and force the Russian army out of Ukraine, it has to be asked: to what purpose does the continual bloodshed serve? Hamas waited over a year beyond their military loss to Israel, before they finally agreed to release the hostages and agree to a ceasefire; how many ‘Palestinians’ died in those months, died for nothing? As the people of Gaza are now whining about worn-out tents not offering any real protection from the oncoming winter, how many of them are living in those tents because Hamas refused to surrender for well over a year following the Israel Defense Forces complete occupation of Gaza?

Like the Hamas leadership living in luxury in Qatar, Mrs Rubin lives very well, thank you very much, in Philadelphia, 4800 miles removed from the war in Ukraine. She can advocate that the Ukrainians fight on, she can argue that President Trump should send Patriots, tanks, and the kitchen sink to Ukraine, but she is calling for more death and destruction in a war Ukraine cannot win.

We don’t have to like the end result of that war, we don’t like to have to see President Putin ‘win’ a war he started, but that doesn’t mean we ought to advocate that it continue.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well-reasoned conservative commentary.

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How can Israel and the Arabs live next to each other in peace if an “Islamic scholar” cannot sit in the same room in NYC with a Jew?

So many good and kind Americans believe that the solution to the strife between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors is a simple one: an independent Palestinian nation, living in peace, side-by-side with Israel. What could possibly the objection to that?

Well, Yassir Arafat, then President of the so-called ‘Palestinian Authority,’ objected, because even though President Bill Clinton had gotten Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to agree to an independent Palestine in 97% of Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza, and a land swap from Israel proper to make up for the 3% in the ‘West Bank’ which had Jewish settlements, it didn’t include the ‘right of return’ for displaced ‘Palestinians’ to return to their homes in Israel. That, at least, was his stated reason, though the real reason was that he knew he would be assassinated by the irredentists who would never agree to allow Israel a single foothold in the Levant.

In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon forced all Jewish settlers to evacuate Gaza, turning it all over to the ‘Palestinians’ to do with it what they would. What Israel and the rest of the world hoped they would do is create a peaceful enclave, the type of thing which would prove that the Arabs could and would live in peace beside Israel. Instead, Hamas took over governing control of Gaza in 2007, and what was built were tunnels from which to attack Israel.

Still, that was all seven time zones away from the United States. Arabs and Jews could live side-by-side in peace here, right?

‘Imam’ tells CUNY Muslim students to leave interfaith event because a ‘Zionist’ is present

By Carl Campanile | Wednesday, November 19, 2025 | 6:54 PM EST

So much for kumbaya.

A self-proclaimed imam speaking at a CUNY City College interfaith event went into a Jew-hating tirade, urging Muslim students to leave in protest after complaining that a “Zionist” was present.

The City University of New York said it is now investigating the shocking incident last week that targeted Ilya Bratman, an adjunct lecturer at Baruch College and the director of the Hillel Jewish campus organization.

“I came here to this event not knowing I would be sitting next to a Zionist and this is something I am not going to accept,” said the Islamic scholar Abdullah Mady, referring to Bratman, according to an audio recording obtained by The Post.

Gaza is 5,689 miles away from New York City, but Mr Mady couldn’t sit next to a Jooooo who was in no way threatening him.

“My people are being killed right now in Gaza,” he said. “If you’re a Muslim, out of strength and dignity, I ask you to exit this room immediately.”

About 100 students in attendance took up the call and walked out, leaving about 20 Christian and Jewish students who remained in the room stunned, Bratman said.

The New York Post story does not tell us how many of the 100 or so who walked out were Muslims.

Campus security then escorted the remaining attendees, as the whole thing broke up, outside, to protect them from any hostile demonstrations from the ones who had walked out.

The advertising poster for the meeting, pictured above, uses the silhouette of a Jewish menorah as one of the various religious symbols, but Mr Mady was surprised that there was a Jew there? If an “Islamic scholar” could not sit beside an adjunct lecturer from a Jewish college, a quarter of the world away from the scene of the war, how can anyone ever expect Israel and an independent ‘Palestine’ to share a border in peace?

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The slow growth of the Catholic Church

Stations of the Cross, St Elizabeth’s Church, Lent 2024.

Our own parish, St Elizabeth’s, is too small to draw any conclusions from seeing new members, but we currently have two new attendees taking OCIA, Order of Christian Initiation for Adults, classes, and a third young man showed up last Sunday and is interested. For a parish with only 24 families, this is a very big deal, but statistically invalid as far as any big picture is concerned.

But our parish isn’t the only one seeing new members:

Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse — driven by pandemic, internet, ‘lax’ alternatives

By Rikki Schlott | Thursday, April 17, 2025 | 11:00 AM EDT

Sydney Johnston grew up in a nondenominational Christian household — but now the Upper West Side millennial is a devout Catholic.

“There’s just something so beautiful and transcendent about the rituals and the ancient history in the Catholic Mass that’s been preserved,” Johnston, 30, told The Post. “The church really communicates a degree of reverence that I didn’t find in the more liberal, laissez-faire approach of nondenominational churches.”

Confirmed in December 2024 at the Church of Notre Dame in Morningside Heights, Johnston is one of a growing number of young people turning to the Catholic Church from other denominations, religions and even no faith at all.

According to the National Catholic Register, some dioceses are reporting year-over-year increases of 30% to 70% in new converts. The Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, for instance, experienced a 72% jump in converts just from 2023 to 2024.

There’s much more at the original, and the New York Post, our nation’s second oldest continuously published daily newspaper, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, is not hidden behind a paywall, so you can follow the link freely.

Yes, I had heard, anecdotally, of a surge in Catholicism, which some have attributed to the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the accession of Pope Leo XIV, an American from Chicago, but the Post article predates both of those events. But it was the following article which really caught my attention:

More than one in three Catholic ordinations are former Anglican clergy, says new report

More than one third of priestly ordinations in the Catholic Church in England and Wales from 1992 to 2024 were former Anglican clergy, according to a report published today.

Ruth Gledhill | Thursday, November 20, 2025

Around 700 former clergy and religious of the Church of England, Church in Wales or Scottish Episcopal Church have been received into the Catholic Church since 1992, including 16 former Anglican bishops and two “continuing” Anglican bishops. From 1992 to 2025, five Anglican permanent deacons and 486 Anglican priests were ordained in the Catholic Church.

The report shows that 29 per cent of diocesan priestly ordinations from 1992 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy, while 35 per cent of combined diocesan and Ordinariate priestly ordinations from 1992 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy.

Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain: The role of the St Barnabas Society by Stephen Bullivant, Fernanda Mee and Janet Mellor is published by the St Barnabas Society and the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion, Ethics and Society at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.

Hyperlink not in the original, but added by me. The original is a 24 page long .pdf file, and is available without charge.

It reveals that by comparison, just 9 per cent of diocesan priestly ordinations from 2015 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy and 19 per cent of combined diocesan and Ordinariate priestly ordinations from 2015 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy.

The Church of England General Synod voted to ordain women priests in 1992, and the first women were priested in 1994

In the foreword, Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols, acknowledges that the movement of clergy from the Church of England into full communion with the Catholic Church in recent times is a story of many parts and says that until now, those parts have not been drawn together.

In July of 1980, His Holiness Pope St John Paul II issued the Pastoral Provision, allowing Anglican/Episcopal priests who convert to Catholicism to be ordained as Catholic priests, even if they are married. The Anglican/Episcopal female priests can convert to Catholicism, but cannot be ordained as Catholic priests.

The Church of England has been falling and failing for a long time now. The Catholic Herald reported, last April, that, driven by younger churchgoers, Catholics were on a pace to outnumber Anglicans in England, for the first time since King Henry VIII forced the Reformation on the island nation. Somewhere in Heaven, St Thomas More is smiling.