An address by a Roman Catholic bishop that compared President Obama\’s health care policies to Hitler\’s actions did not play well in Peoria.
Randy Altschuler conceded the congressional election in a suburban New York district to incumbent Rep. Tim Bishop. Altschuler, a Republican, is trailing the Democrat Bishop by 263 votes, unofficial counts show in the eastern Long Island district. In his concession Wednesday, Altschuler said he concluded that a hand recount of 200,000 ballots was unlikely to change the result and would be overly burdensome on district taxpayers. Altschuler would have joined Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the incoming majority leader, as the second Republican Jewish lawmaker in Congress.
As Rabbi Allen Freehling of University Synagogue in West Los Angeles and a bus load of bishops and rabbis left the Rome airport for their hotel near the Vatican, one of the bishops read aloud a document that would soon spark a firestorm of controversy around the world: the Vatican\’s March 16 statement on the Holocaust, released just hours before. The group had just flown in from Israel, where they had spent a week worshiping together, learning about each other\’s histories, and beginning to understand, as only true friends can, what the other believes.
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