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In addition to hating Easter, the Obama Administration seems to love ... a different religion:

President Obama failed to release a statement or a proclamation recognizing the national observance of Easter Sunday, Christianity's most sacred holiday.

By comparison, the White House has released statements recognizing the observance of major Muslim holidays and released statements in 2010 on Ramadan, Eid-ul-Fitr, Hajj, and Eid-ul-Adha.

The White House also failed to release a statement marking Good Friday. However, they did release an eight-paragraph statement heralding Earth Day. Likewise, the president's weekend address mentioned neither Good Friday or Easter.

Why does the White House ignore the resurrection of Jesus Christ while honoring secular liberal Islamofascism?

Thankfully, our press corps was on the case! White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked why the president declared war on Easter at today's briefing. He literally laughed at the question, instead of answering it. The arrogance of this administration is breathtaking:

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Grave conditions, indeed. The survivors of the deadliest attack against Iraq's Christians still attend mass amid the destruction left when suicide bombers killed dozens of attendees last October. They are the last members of a community that is perishing by the day. Today, on Easter Sunday, we take a closer look at their story. (All photos by Karlos Zurutuza.)

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• Morris Glass was living in a Nazi-controlled ghetto in Poland when he turned 13, and thus never had a Bar Mitzvah. Now, 70 years later, Glass has finally celebrated the Jewish rite of passage with four generations of his family. (CNN)

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Though the male co-anchor here does have a point. These aren't really spheres. I like that he has the literal definition handy though, just in case. Because it's really the spheres part that bother them, not taking the word "Easter" out of it.

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Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported an unnamed Labor Department blaming the unexpected jump on technical factors.

Wall Street Journal:

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On the opposite wall from Jesus hung a painting of a clown. Not just any clown, but a clown that clearly wanted to devour my soul.

I was a brainy, imaginative 5-year-old who was savvy enough to know "Family Circus" wasn't funny. But I found it difficult to sleep so close to both a terrifying clown painting and an intimidating Jesus, particularly when the moon lit up my room and their faces glowed at me in the dark. Sometimes I would take them down and hide them in the closet, a terrifying task in itself. My closet contained the steps to the attic, which meant that it was very likely that I could encounter both the closet and the attic monster if I hid Jesus and the Clown. Not a good situation. I couldn't put them under the bed, because that's where all of my stuffed animals were protecting me from another monster that lived in the box spring.

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As plastic eggs have replaced the chicken-laid variety for hunting and decorating, demand has been declining since 2000, when sales doubled in the two-week period leading up to the holiday, Sauder said. This year, sales may rise 25 percent, he said.

If fewer chicken-laid eggs are sold for Easter, I suppose that means fewer chickens are consigned to nightmarish factory farms -- what the egg industry proudly calls "modern sanitary cage systems" -- so perhaps the rise of the plastic egg is good for chicken karma.

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I came to church as a pagan this year, though wearing a Christian suit and white shirt, and sat in a rear pew with my sandy-haired gap-toothed daughter whom I would like to see grow up in the love of the Lord, and there I was, a skeptic in the henhouse, thinking weaselish thoughts.

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Depression is a wilderness; the landmarks of ordinary life are torn loose from their meaning. I am in a desert like the one Jesus inhabits during Lent. In the day, I can talk myself down: I have a little money in the bank. My daughter will not fall out of the window of the apartment. But at night I can't control my thoughts. My neck is tight and my sinuses ache. Lent is nearly over and I'm annoyed with Jesus. I'm frustrated he's getting so much attention.

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You know the one. You've had a bite perhaps, and taken a moment to admire the ingenuity of Britain's food scientists. (Invented in 1971, the thing is "still unique in the confectionery marketplace as the only product which closely resembles a real egg," crows the Cadbury Web site.) Then you've put the uneaten half down, maybe for later. You're no health nut, but you are a reasonable person -- and let's face it, a full ounce of sugar oozing from a cheap chocolate shell is hard to stomach. Maybe in your reckless youth you might have tried to down the whole thing. And of course, it's precisely there -- to my misspent youth -- that those foul yet seductive little sucrose bombs lead me, too.

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She had always loved to ski, and was a graceful daredevil on the slopes. I only started skiing six years ago, and tend to have balance and steering issues. I fall fairly often, and can't get up, but enjoy the part between the spills, humiliations and abject despair -- sort of like real life.

No one, including Sue, was sure she'd even be able to ski, or if she would make the trip at all. Except for me. No one could know that she would die one month after my invitation. At any rate, I thought that if she saw those Wasatch Mountains, she'd want to try, at least. I invited her because otherwise I was never going to see her again -- she had cancer of the everything by then -- and because she was distraught on Easter when I called to say hello. I felt she ought to have one last great Easter before she died. I felt that that would make up for a great deal. Easter is so profound -- Christmas was an afterthought in the early church, the birth not observed for a couple of hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, "martyred plants rising up from their shrouds." Easter says that love is more powerful than death; bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, or airport security lines.

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The rabbits have more to do with this pilgrimage than you might think. For this Nazareth and Bethlehem aren't in anyone's Holy Land; they're in Pennsylvania's rolling Lehigh Valley. And the Mecca I'm traveling to is decidedly secular. It's Bethlehem's Just Born factory, breeding ground for the most ubiquitous of all Easter candies: sugar-encrusted marshmallow Peeps and their cousins, marshmallow Bunnies.

For five years running, Peeps and Bunnies have been America's favorite nonchocolate Easter treats. But numbers don't tell half the story. These innocent-looking creatures -- the chick-shaped Peeps in particular -- have become icons of American pop culture. People don't just eat Peeps. They take pictures of them. They make crafts with them. They write songs about them. They put them on wreaths. They put them on pizza. They create parody porn Web sites for them. And some curious souls devote countless hours to Peep research, testing the effects of everything from heat to liquid nitrogen on the hardy little fertility symbols.

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When I was in high school in the suburbs, in the early-'80s, Patti Smith was
no kind of icon. Musically, she didn't jibe with buzz-saw punk, ominously danceable
new wave or pasteurized FM radio rock; she evaded the jury-rigged
radar of adolescent rebellion. Teen rebels, of course, generally want an
existing "countercultural" pack to join, complete with wardrobe and hairdo
guidelines. Even if Patti Smith had not recently stopped making records (and
even if we'd known to listen to the ones she had made), she was too much of
a misfit for the misfits to embrace.

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But above all, this is a big time of year for my Jesus-y people, these
days and nights when we celebrate the birth, death and resurrection of our
darling Jesus. So when I am doing radio interviews, I get much crankier
crank calls -- half from people who think Jesus was a nice man, a shaman, a
New Age guy who probably would have dated Linda Evans if He'd come back during her
heyday; and half from fundamentalists who
say I am not any kind of real Christian at all and am going to rot in hell
for all eternity. I thank all my cranky callers for sharing, and I say, "Hey,
you know the difference between you and God? God never thinks He's you." Then
I get on with celebrating.

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Days later, Waters' agent in Hollywood received a scathing letter intended for the director. "In response to your sarcasms about chickens," the missive began, "you are wrong. Chickens are intelligent, sensitive, and social birds ... It's interesting that you eat creatures whom you despise. In calling chickens 'frighteningly stupid,' you are projecting an image of yourself onto them."

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