For the past ten years or even more, the Catholic Church in America has been consistently criticized for one issue: Child abuse by priests!  Needless to say, the image of the Church has been severely tainted by this and its reputation has suffered greatly. To a certain extent, this could be considered justified especially in light of the fact that these abuses were covered up by Church leaders for nearly half a century. And the Church had to pay dearly, in fact, hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations to the victims of such sexual abuses.

It is therefore not surprising that the magnitude of good deeds by the Catholic Church are never mentioned. Yet the facts remain and are real. The statistics below will shed some light on the work of the Catholic Church as a whole:

• There are currently approximately 68 million Catholics in America;
• There are 259 Catholic Bishops countrywide, supported in 19,000 parishes by over 40,000 priests and about 17,000 deacons;
• The Catholic Church manages 561 hospitals and they are treating about 86 million patients annually;
• The Catholic Church manages nearly 5,900 elementary and 1205 high schools nationwide, totaling 2.2 million students;
• There are 234 Catholic Universities and colleges with about 770,000 students in America;
• The number of charitable organizations supporting local and overseas ministries is large, they are giving aid to the poor and helping the needy throughout the country;
• In addition most parishes have their own service groups such as the Knights of Columbus, Saint Vincent de Paul charities, Catholic Men’s Fellowships and women’s groups;
• This all amounts to many hundreds of thousands of men and women serving the needy and offering their time to do good work in the name of the Lord.

This immense volume of work by members of the Catholic Church in America as a whole for the good of humanity is evidence and testament that they practice what Jesus Christ taught them so many years ago. From the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, we know that Jesus said: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And that is exactly what they are doing, day in and day out, twelve months of every year. It should therefore be a thing of great pride to be a member of the Catholic faith.

The statistics above reflect exactly that and we are acknowledging that these types of Christian services are rendered daily in all other Christian denominations as well by hundreds of thousands of people. It is in this recognition that we want to say Thank You and are wishing not only Catholics but all Christians a very Happy Easter as they celebrate the Holy Days of the Church this week beginning with the Last Supper and ending with the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

As we helplessly stand-by and watch Congress battle over the ever increasing deficits in our country – the Republicans want to cut spending while the Democrats want to keep it going, with Republicans having a majority in the House, the Democrats still controlling the Senate – it is very difficult to understand how these people got elected to office as representatives of the people. There may be kinder words for this incredible fact but we have concluded that they are all utterly dumb, stupid and simply unwilling to even try and to bring our fiscal mess under control. Self-proclaimed experts and pundits explain this simply with the word: Politics!

What does this mean? Does politics excuse the fact that our Federal lawmakers are spending our country into unsustainable depths of debt? Have they gotten elected by telling their constituents before they got elected: Vote for me and I will support run-away spending as far as the eye can see? Of course not, they all said that they would work very hard and do everything necessary to reign in excessive spending so that our children and grand children would not be left with a heavy burden of debt. It’s the same crap we have heard from lawmakers about getting ‘energy-independent from foreign sources of oil’. It is a blunt lie whenever they say it. And so, the battle over our Federal budget goes on in Washington, D.C.

But wait, there was a Republican Senator who tasked the GAO (Government Accountability Office), the independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress to make a study as to whether or not there was duplicity in Federal agencies. The purpose for this report was see if there were potential areas for cutting spending by eliminating actual redundancies at the Federal level of government.. Please sit down as we list just a few of these duplicate services we are paying for.

?  The U.S. Government has more than 100 programs dealing with surface transportation issues;

?  82 programs monitoring teacher quality;

?  80 programs for economic development;

?  47 programs for job training;

?  20 offices or programs devoted to homelessness;

?  17 different grant programs for disaster preparedness;

?  15 agencies or offices to handle food safety and

?  5 offices are working to ensure the federal government uses less gasoline.

?  Even President Obama ridiculed the fact that the Federal Government has 12 different agencies dealing with international trade and at least two regulate salmon.

The GAO stated “reducing or eliminating duplication, overlap or fragmentation could potentially save billions of taxpayer dollars annually and help agencies provide more effective and efficient services.” Upon reading the GAO report, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn said “This report will make us all look like jackasses” Truer words have seldom been spoken. Government waste and abuse has been one of Coburn’s highest concerns and he equally blames the legislative and executive branches of government for this situation and the excessive spending. Last Halloween, he published a report concluding that the federal government has paid nearly one billion dollars to at least 250,000 dead people since 2000.

Will we see Congress in the near future tackle these numerous ‘Empires’ and streamline their activities or will this just be a ‘talking-point’ for fiscally conservative representatives only to be denied action by the free-spending Democrats? Only time will tell!

On January 20, 2009, the current President took the oath of office as follow by declarings: I, Barack Hussain Obama do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution  of the United States.

Well, so much for that. Even though he was allegedly a Constitutional lawyer, he had expressed many times in prior years that in his opinion the Constitution was flawed. When you are an American citizen, you have the right to have your own opinions, but when you are the President, you are expected to live by the oath you swore upon taking the highest office in the land. The critical words in the oath being – to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution – therefore a President cannot pick and choose which laws he will preserve, protect and defend. As President, he has to preserve, protect and defend them all.

We do not have the resources or time to find out if all previous Presidents lived faithfully by their oaths, but we know one thing for sure, President Obama is most certainly not. As example, we cite his recent decision to no longer defend the Federal Law known as “Defense of Marriage Act”, also known as DOMA. This law was enacted in 1996 when then President Bill Clinton signed the law which defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman.

Candidate Obama campaigned in 2008 stating that he firmly believed that marriage was a union between one man and one woman. We do not know if that helped getting him elected President but it certainly did not hurt him. Forward to 2011, he is getting ready for his re-election bid in 2012 and it must appear to him politically advantages to change his mind in order to lock up the votes of the gay community in America. As a candidate, that might be alright to do but there is one minor difference now, he is also the President. In that capacity, he has to uphold ALL Federal laws and not start cherry-picking for political purposes.

We consider this illegal and even unlawful by a President. If a President can decide which Federal law he wants to continue to preserve, protect and defend based on political posturing, then our Constitution becomes just a useless document. What if Obama finds another voting block that would vote for him if he just ignored and no longer defended certain laws, would that be acceptable to the American people? We most certainly do not think so.

The liberal media is naturally a different story when it comes to the dubious actions of their beloved President, for them, he cannot do wrong! It’s that simple. They will defend him in everything he does regardless if it is lawful, constitutional or defendable. This is the reason why we have not heard anything from them in this Presidential flip-flop. The liberals love him for this in that it shows his smartness when it comes to politics.

If you want to know what’s wrong in America today, just observe the liberals and their fanatical co-hordes in the media. It is a sad case of extreme bias from an element in our country that is expected to be unbiased. When the Constitution can be shredded or altered for political gamesmanship, this country is losing its foundation very fast. It should not be accepted.