Michael Pfleger
Posted at 11:52am on Jun. 2, 2008 The Obama Spiritual Advisors: Preachers of Hate
Guess who introduced Harry Bellafonte before Bellantone likened Powell to a slave and blamed the US for 9/11
By Erick
In 2004, Barack Obama gave an interview to Cathleen Falsani with the Chicago Sun-Times about his faith. You can read it here.
Here's part of what the interview captures:
Still, Obama is unapologetic in saying he has a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." As a sign of that relationship, he says, he walked down the aisle of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ in response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's altar call one Sunday morning about 16 years ago. . . .
Friends and advisers, such as the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in the Auburn- Gresham community on the South Side, who has known Obama for the better part of 20 years, help him keep that compass set, he says.
"I always have felt in him this consciousness that, at the end of the day, with all of us, you've got to face God," Pfleger says of Obama. "Faith is key to his life, no question about it. It is central to who he is, and not just in his work in the political field, but as a man, as a black man, as a husband, as a father.... I don't think he could easily divorce his faith from who he is."
Another person Obama says he seeks out for spiritual counsel is state Sen. James Meeks, who is also the pastor of Chicago's Salem Baptist Church. The day after Obama won the primary in March, he stopped by Salem for Wednesday-night Bible study.
Well, we all know about Jeremiah Wright, but what else is there about Pfleger and who is James Meeks?
Read on . . .
Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | James Meeks | Jeremiah Wright | Michael Pfleger | Obamafiles — Comments (4)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 9:28am on Jun. 2, 2008 Pfleger: America the greatest sin against God
By Soren Dayton
Can you believe that Barack Obama gave this guy "at least $225,000" in earmarks?
In September, the Obama campaign brought Pfleger to Iowa to host one of several interfaith forums for the campaign. Pfleger has given money to Obama's campaigns and Obama as a state legislator directed at least $225,000 towards social programs at St. Sabina's, according to the Chicago Tribune. Pfleger appears to have been scrubbed from the Obama campaign's page that features the testimony of faith leaders, but you can see the cached version HERE.
How many more of these are we going to find? Is the press drilling down on his other "campaign leaders" and Chicago earmarks?
Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Michael Pfleger | Pflegler — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 4:28pm on Jun. 1, 2008 Barack's 2nd pastor has another attack on Clinton
By Soren Dayton
Jake Tapper reports that Father Mike Pfleger again has spoken out attacking Hillary Clinton. But this time he threw John McCain in the mix:
"Hillary and McCain would wish they had a preacher with the integrity of Jeremiah Wright. … They got some old weak preacher…some old Joel Osteen cotton candy preacher."
Listen to the audio of the sermon here.
Earlier, Tapper had noted in a story about the local diocese rejection of Pfleger's that:
I just have to say, as someone of faith, I have never before heard a cleric engage in such disdainful mockery from a pulpit. Have you?
Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Michael Pfleger | Pflegler — Comments (24) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 5:58pm on May 31, 2008 Thirty Pieces of Silver From the Pulpit
By Erick
CNN is reporting that Barack Obama is leaving Trinity United Church of Christ. It is a little late for that. He has been there for twenty years. Why is he leaving all of a sudden? Is it because there is another untold story out there? Does he suspect the media will stop covering his connections to Wright and Pfleger if he now throws the church under the bus? The way the media operates, he is probably right. But I suspect there is one more untold story out there about Obama, Wright, Pfleger, and Trinity.
Anyone who has ever run a political campaign objectively knows there is a double standard between Democrat and Republican campaign activities in churches.
Were a Republican to go into a church and pass a hat for campaign dollars, he'd be thrown out and the IRS would swarm through the church doors to yank the church's non-profit status.
With Democrats, very typically fundraising goes on hand in hand with campaigning from the pulpit. Witness Reverend Pfleger's comments from the pulpit about Hillary Clinton. Witness also the $250,000.00 in tax payer funds that Barack Obama secured for Rev. Pfleger's church. Had it been, for example, Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn getting that money for their church, Barry Lynn and Kathryn Kolbert would be sending out their great hordes of lawyers to put an immediate stop to it.
Let me let you in on a little secret -- I've been known to run a Democrat race or two in my time. These are local races where, in Georgia at least, some Democrats are more conservative than some of the Republicans. And these local campaigns involve a lot of connections with a lot of pastors, particularly in the black community.
I generally give an initial piece of advice to non-partisan and Democratic candidates running for office: get into the black churches early and often. Every other constituency comes after the pastors. The pastors are the gate keepers between the candidate and the congregation. The pastors can turn out the money in the congregations that have it, like Trinity United Church of Christ, or, particularly in the rural south, the pastors can turn out the votes. I know of pastors endorsing from the pulpit. I know some pastors whose churches are broadcast on television who will keep their congregation until after the camera go off and open up about preferred candidates. Some times they do it with the cameras on hedging their bets that the IRS will not do anything.
Given the video we have seen of Reverend Wright and Reverend Pfleger stumping for Obama from the pulpit and given their high level of political engagement on his behalf, I suspect that they have raised money from within the church walls for Barack Obama.
Every candidate of every party goes into the heart of the community to campaign and raise money. Largely for historic reasons, in the black community the heart of that community is the pulpit. So how much money did Reverend Wright and Reverend Pfleger raise for Barack Obama behind their pulpits?
Posted in 2008 | Michael Pfleger | Obamafiles | Rev. Wright | Trinity United Church of Christ — Comments (13)/ Email this page » / Read More »
