A Letter of Thanks and the Passover Principle: A GOOD day has come. Passover, a holiday celebrating the joys of freedom, will soon be upon those who are Jewish and celebrate it. Even if one is secular, like I am, one can still appreciate its significance and be thankful for the momentous accident of birth to have been born free and thankful to have lived through such incredible historical and social change.

I thank our President for his sterling efforts in securing this momentous health care win. It was not all we wanted but it is a HUGE start. I think he with the other Democratic greats of the Congress will be responsible for the saving of many lives. A mere thank you is not good enough.

We need to now know and the Brown election teaches we can NEVER take our power for granted. We must always be vigilant. I am hoping that the sages of entertainment news predicting a Republican win in Congress in November are monumentally wrong. I think they may be overstating with their right wing vituperative malevolence their coming successes as the Democrats now have the opportunity to concentrate on banking regulation and most importantly on creating more jobs to take the economy out of the ditch into which the Republicans drove us!

I thank the President, Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reed for their wonderful efforts, hard work and brilliant leadership. I have hope again. We must go forward. YES WE DID, YES WE CAN, AND YES WE WILL AGAIN!!

God bless you all and God bless our country which allows us all to breathe free!!

The Abomination -- The Pope in the Crosshairs: A March 25, New York Times editorial says, among other things indicting the Catholic Church for the most recent European pedophile monstrosity, that "The Pope’s expression of “shame and remorse” for the Irish scandal is not to be doubted." Really? Well, I do doubt it. Are you kidding me? The Pope WEAKLY criticizes the legion of sex abuse in Ireland but says nothing about the horrific abuse actions in his own country, Germany, not to mention pedophile sex actions perpetrated on 200 DEAF young boys in Wisconsin and pedophile actions committed by priests around the entire continent of Europe! This is unconscionable and if the Pope were a regular citizen of any country he may face arrest and jail for aiding and abetting a KNOWN pedophile, transferring him to other parishes where even the psychiatrist who treated him said he would be dangerous to place among children and could commit these heinous acts again and did!

The hypocrisy of this Pope and the Church in general is mind numbingly staggering. Sure, voice at the pulpit against gay marriage between two adults who love each other but PROTECT your Catholic children against predatory priests NOT SO MUCH even when it is among the Vienna Boys Choir! This Pope Benedict is up to his eyeballs in trouble within his own Church. The buck stopped with him as an Arch Bishop in Germany, Cardinal Ratinzger head under John Paul II of the so called Doctrine of Faith (you know the entity that formerly brought us The Inquisition) and now as Pope, he passed it failing to punish the priests involved. Where have we heard this story before?

Institutions are about power and money and they are about protecting it at all costs even when that cost means that young boys will have to suffer torments that will affect them disastrously for the rest of their lives at the hands of priests they trusted and the abominable illegalities those priests perpetrated upon them. SHAMEFUL is too weak a word for what this pope and the entire church itself is guilty.

That this hypocrisy of shouting the sin of homosexuality from every pulpit and then committing the most egregiously illegal sexual sins against mostly male CHILDREN by priests without a hint of conscience is an abomination that cannot be doubted. The pedophilia in the Catholic Church is NAUSEATING and systemic. The cover up by its officials of it and the back turning of some of its laity is UNFORGIVABLE. If there is a God I only HOPE He cannot forgive it either!