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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.

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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.

The hatred for the Jews continues in New York City. Whether they were encouraged by the election of Zohran Mamdani to become the city’s next mayor is speculative, but it certainly seems probable. They don’t want American Jews to emigrate to Israel, calling them “settler colonialists,” but they also try to make life miserable for Jews in the United States.

From The Times of Israel:

Anti-Zionist groups announce protest outside Manhattan synagogue

By Luke Tress | Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Anti-Zionist groups announce a protest for tomorrow at New York City’s Park East Synagogue.

The protesters are demonstrating against an event at the synagogue hosted by Nefesh B’nefesh, an organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel.

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

“No settlers on stolen land,” say advertisements for the protest on social media, branding the event a “settler recruiting fair.”

Nefesh B’nefesh does not direct immigrants to settlements; anti-Zionist activists often brand all Jewish Israelis as “settlers.”

Yet the protesting groups are here, in the United States, in New York City, which is land taken from the Indians by our settler colonialist ancestors.

The protest is led by the Pal-Awda activist group and is shared by other anti-Zionist organizations such as the city’s branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, Writers Against the War on Gaza, student groups from around the city and individual activists with large followings.

Pal-Awda is a group calling for the so-called “right of return” for Palestinians to lands within Israel proper, the same excuse given by Yassir Arafat for rejecting the 2001 initiative by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to create a ‘Palestinian’ state in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Like so many of the irredentists, they want their “From the River To the Sea” ‘Palestine,’ with the Jews expelled . . . or just plain slaughtered.

The hyperlinks were not in the original, but were added by us.

The National Lawyers Guild, a nonprofit, sent an email to its members asking for volunteer legal observers to attend the event. The observers serve to provide legal defense for protesters against police. The guild is anti-Israel and put out a statement in support of the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, the day after it happened.

The image to the left was attached to the National Lawyers Guild statement.

Who are the “National Lawyers Guild”? They are just another leftist ‘progressive’ group who hate the United States — despite being headquartered here — as they tell us in their About Us page. But one wonders: did these oh-so-progressive people, saying that they “actively educate, litigate, and truth-seek toward the end of social justice,” and “reaffirming the legitimacy of the struggle of people for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle,” mean to include the rape, murder, and kidnapping of unarmed people, including children?

Their statement was issued on October 8, 2023, the day after the massacre of 1,199 innocent people and the kidnapping of 251 others.  The numbers hadn’t firmed up on that next day, but The New York Times had several different stories on the attack dated on the seventh. The “National Lawyers Guild” cannot have been unaware of just what the attackers had done. And, of course, they chose to post their support for the ‘Palestinians’ before the Israel Defense Forces had moved into Gaza to respond to the Hamas attack

There have been thousands of anti-Israel protests in New York City since the Hamas attack, the NYPD has said.

Demonstrations outside synagogues and in heavily Jewish neighborhoods are rare, but tend to be especially vitriolic. Park East is a prominent synagogue in an area with a large Jewish population.

Yup, anti-Semitism. These fine people could have held their protests anywhere, but they chose to protest in heavily Jewish neighborhoods, around the synagogues which are the most visible symbols of Judaism. They deliberately chose locations to try to intimidate Jewish Americans.

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.

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For today’s left, there can be no compromise with us evil reich-wingers!

Our good friends on the left are doing everything that they can to express their disgust, and try to score political points with far-left voters, over the eight Senate Democrats who agreed to end the filibuster and allow the continuing resolution to reopen the government to be passed. Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) is trying to tell us that he’d have gotten a better deal to reopen the government, because he finally got the state budget passed, a mere 135 days late. 🙂

Gov. Josh Shapiro says national Democrats folded in the federal shutdown, while he stayed ‘at the table’ for Pa.’s late budget deal

As Shapiro portrays the outcome of Pennsylvania’s 2025 state budget as an across-the-board victory, the path to get there was harder, messier, and longer than anyone in Harrisburg would have liked.

by Julia Terruso and Gillian McGoldrick | Tuesday, November 18, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST | Updated: 10:08 AM EST

The turning point in Pennsylvania’s budget impasse, by Gov. Josh Shapiro’s telling, came just before Halloween, when he and leaders in Harrisburg gathered in his stately, wood-paneled office to meet twice daily to hash out a deal to end the bitter, monthslong stalemate.

The long grind eventually led to compromises 135 days in, and a deal Shapiro said he thinks is far better than what national Democrats, hoping to extend healthcare subsidies, got in Washington at the end of the federal shutdown.

“Sometimes you’ve got to show that you’re willing to stay at the table and fight and bring people together in order to deliver,” Shapiro told The Inquirer in an interview Friday, touting the state budget agreement finally signed that week.

“I think it’s a stark contrast, frankly, with what happened in D.C., where they didn’t stay at the table, they didn’t fight, and they got nothing,” he said.

Let’s tell the truth here: the Democrats in Washington weren’t “at the table” because Republicans wouldn’t negotiate with them, and that’s because Republicans had most of the power. Republicans control the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House in Washington, while they control only the Senate in the Keystone State.

As Shapiro portrays the outcome of Pennsylvania’s 2025 state budget as an across-the-board victory, the path to get there was harder and messier than he would have liked: a nearly five-month slog that strained his dealmaker image and forced concessions to get the deal across the line — including no new money for mass transit. The absence of a new funding stream in the budget marked a final blow in the saga to Southeastern Pennsylvania commuters who rely on SEPTA — and who are likely to be reminded of the beleaguered agency’s funding woes as delays, staffing issues, and needed repairs persist.

Critics are quick to note it took the self-proclaimed dealmaker so long to get a deal. Counties, school districts, and nonprofits struggled through four months without state payments while officials remained at loggerheads. Pennsylvania was the last state in the nation to pass a spending plan for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

The failure of the budget to include new money for SEPTA is the big bugaboo for Philadelphia-area Democrats. They certainly don’t like the apparently horrible idea of raising fares to have the people who use SEPTA pay more of SEPTA’s expenses.

At the federal level, all the Democrats had was the power to keep the Senate from voting on the Continuing Resolution via the filibuster . . . and the Republicans who control the Senate could have used the so-called “nuclear option” to end the filibuster rule, something the President urged them to do.

But things were worse for the Democrats at the federal level than Republicans in Pennsylvania. Sure, many “counties, school districts, and non-profits struggled,” but at the federal level the 42 million SNAP recipients were having to go without their ‘food stamps,’ their EBT cards being refilled. How much longer could the Democrats have held out?

We have previously reported on how Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch and the newspaper’s Editorial Board were just spittle-flecking mad that the Democrats ended the filibuster, and now the Working Families Party — which is a complete misnomer, since so much of their support comes from non working families and welfare recipients — have decided that they are “committed to recruiting and supporting a primary challenge to him in 2028.”

Earlier this year, Fetterman was the first Senate Democrat to support the Laken Riley Act, a Republican immigration bill that requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain and take into custody individuals who have been charged with theft-related offenses, even without a conviction. Critics of the law say it severely cracks down on due process for immigrants.

Fetterman was the sole Senate Democrat to vote to confirm Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was one of Trump’s attorneys when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

And he has been the Senate’s most outspoken defender of Israel during its war in Gaza, sponsoring a resolution with Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) against antisemitism and appearing for the first time since his fall at an event hosted by the Jewish Federations of North America in Washington on Monday.

He also received recognition from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called him the country’s “best friend” and gifted him a silver pager inspired by Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon that exploded pagers.

“He has repeatedly shown disregard for the rights of Palestinians,” the Working Families Party release said. “Refusing to support a two-state solution and breaking with the rest of the Democratic caucus on Israel’s illegal annexation of the West Bank.”

Translation: Senator Fetterman does not hate Jooooos enough.

You know who else do not “support a two-state solution” for the ‘Palestinians’? The ‘Palestinians’ themselves, along with their fellow travelers who chant “From the River To the Sea” in support of them.

The Pennsylvania (Non)Working Families Party hates things like law enforcement, rejoicing over the re-election of Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police hating District Attorney Larry Krasner, and of course they support the blood-thirsty ‘Palestinians’. Mr Fetterman is a surprisingly good Senator, a Democrat to be sure, but a moderate Democrat rather than a wild-eyed leftist.

So, apparently Senator Fetterman will have a challenger from the far-left in the 2028 primary, assuming that he even runs for re-election; he’s not in the best of health, despite being only 56 years old.

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Another victory for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner!

Another victory for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner! Mr Krasner just loves to put Philadelphia Police Officers in jail, and to release bad guys who are in prison.

Homicide detective Philip Nordo was clearly a bad cop, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

A former Philadelphia homicide detective was arrested Tuesday and accused of grooming and sexually assaulting male witnesses during criminal investigations, then intimidating them to keep them silent — part of what prosecutors concluded was a pattern of misconduct during nearly a decade in one of the Police Department’s most prestigious units.

The accusations against Philip Nordo, 52, who was fired in 2017 after 20 years on the force, were unveiled in a grand jury presentment following a long-running probe into the ex-detective’s conduct. The charges include multiple counts each of rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, and sexual assault.

Mr Nordo was convicted on multiple charges and then sentenced to 24½ to 49 years in prison, which at his age 56, at the time of sentencing, is effectively a life sentence.

The District Attorney then began investigating convictions in which Mr Nordo had been involved, including the conviction of Arkel Garcia, then 21, for the murder of Christian Massey. Mr Krasner then got that conviction overturned:

A Philadelphia judge on Friday overturned a 2015 murder conviction after prosecutors said they believe the lead detective — who has since been charged with raping and sexually assaulting male witnesses during his time on the force — built a questionable case while also attempting to groom potential witnesses as sexual targets.

The District Attorney’s Office said in court documents that it no longer believes the defendant, Arkel Garcia, is guilty of killing Christian Massey, a 21-year-old man with special needs who was shot dead in Overbrook in 2013 over a pair of headphones.

Instead, prosecutors wrote, they believe ex-Detective Philip Nordo obtained a false confession from Garcia — the main piece of evidence supporting an otherwise weak case — as he simultaneously tried to pursue sexual relationships with two men he interviewed as part of the investigation.

“Nordo had ulterior motives during this investigation that had nothing to do with solving this murder,” Assistant District Attorney Michael Garmisa said in court Friday.

So, Mr Garcia was freed after 11 years in the big house. Great thing, right? Well, maybe not so much.

A man whose murder conviction was overturned for its connections to a disgraced ex-detective is now wanted for another murder

Arkel Garcia is suspected of beating an elderly acquaintance to death inside an apartment in Northwest Philadelphia.

by Ryan W. Briggs and Chris Palmer | Saturday, November 15, 2025 | 11:01 AM EST | Updated: 1:45 PM EST

A man whose murder conviction was overturned because of its connection to disgraced former Philadelphia homicide detective Philip Nordo is now suspected of committing another homicide, according to police.

Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Arkel Garcia, 31, for the fatal beating of an elderly acquaintance on Wednesday inside a fourth-floor apartment in the city’s Stenton section in what authorities believe was a robbery, according to law enforcement sources.

Shortly before 11 a.m. Wednesday, 35th District officers responded to a report of a person with a weapon at an apartment unit on the 4900 block of Stenton Avenue, according to a police report. After a maintenance worker let officers into the unit, they discovered David Weinkopff, 68, in a wheelchair, with blunt force trauma to his face and stomach, his apartment ransacked.

Paramedics pronounced him dead a short time later.

Further down:

After Krasner’s office charged Nordo with sex crimes, it began reinvestigating more than 100 cases the detective helped build, and prosecutors later moved to overturn at least 15 convictions tied to him. Some reversals were considered exonerations — instances in which a conviction was overturned and charges dropped — while others were overturned and resulted in guilty pleas to lesser charges.

The District Attorney decided not to prosecute Mr Garcia again after the conviction was overturned.

Garcia’s impending arrest marks at least the second time that a person whose case was overturned due to Nordo’s misconduct was accused of committing another crime.

James Frazier was sentenced to life in prison after he confessed to being an accomplice in a 2012 ambush slaying of a man and his girlfriend. But he later appealed, arguing Nordo had coerced him into signing a false statement of guilt.

Frazier’s conviction was overturned in 2019. But he was later charged with shooting a man twice in the leg in 2021, apparently as part of a botched drug deal. He pleaded guilty the next year and was sentenced to 11½ to 23 months in jail, court records show.

If Mr Garcia is actually the man who murdered Mr Weinkopff — and he is presumed innocent until proven guilty — then it is obvious: the criminal-loving prosecutor’s efforts to release Mr Garcia are directly responsible for Mr Weinkopff’s death. Mr Garcia had previously confessed to assault in the killing of Mr Massey, a young man with ‘special needs,’ though he denied being part of the killing, but the throwing out of the convictions meant the assault to which he had confessed was also thrown out. He did assault several sheriff’s deputies in the courtroom, witnessed by the judge and everyone else in that room, and was sentenced to 5 to 10 years for aggravated assault, which is why he was not released from prison until about a year ago.

That former Detective Nordo is a bad guy does not mean that all of the cases he investigated were bad ones. But when the city’s chief prosecutor apparently believes all non-police officers are helpless and innocent little lambs, that’s what the City of Brotherly Love gets.