The winning one-two punch of Bush's Spiritual Advisor and Donnie McClurkin. AUDACIOUS!

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Bush's spiritual adviser backing Obama

Published: Jan. 20, 2008 at 4:25 PM

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/01/20/bushs_spiritual_adviser_backing_obama/1049/

HOUSTON, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush's spiritual adviser, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, has decided to support the presidential bid of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

The leader of Houston's Windsor Village United Methodist Church said Obama's "character, confidence and courage" inspired him to support his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Houston Chronicle reported Sunday.

"I have been in contact with the Obama campaign team," Caldwell said. "I will be making visits on his behalf."

The pastor did clarify that his support of the Illinois politician was based entirely on his personal beliefs and did not represent support from his United Methodist church.

The Barack Obama/Donnie McClurkin Debacle

http://www.blackvoices.com/blogs/2007/11/16/the-barack-obama-donnie-mcclurkin-debacle/

n his momentous campaign for the presidency, Illinois Senator Barack Obama has managed to evade political attacks from Republicans and sidestep comments from Senator Hillary Clinton. Even after digging into his past, all right-wing detectives could find was that he smoked cigarettes.

Miraculously, Obama seemed to be favorably courting the votes of conservative African-Americans while at the same time labeling himself as a person who believed in equal rights for the gay and lesbian community.

During the Logo channel's gay debate in August 2007, Obama bragged, "I'm somebody who I think is willing to talk about these issues even when it's hard -- in front of black ministers." Many wondered if the non-threatening Obama could find a manageable middle ground between two divided groups -- the black church and the gay community. At that point, the answer was yes.

On the face of it, Obama was running one of the cleanest campaigns in election history; ironically, it was a move from his own camp that ignited a firestorm.

BONUS:

Michelle Obama: 'Black Americans will wake up and get it'
David Edwards and Jason Rhyne
Published: Monday November 12, 2007



http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Michelle_Obama_Black_America_will_wake_1112.html

Sen. Hillary Clinton's lead among African Americans voters, who consistently favor the former first lady to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) in presidential primary polling, is just a temporary phenomenon, according to Obama's wife, Michelle.

"First of all, I think that that's not going to hold," Mrs. Obama said of Clinton's current numbers in an interview with MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski. "I'm completely confident."

Acknowledging a certain reluctance in the African American community to back her husband for president, she said that support would come -- but it would take time.

"Black Americans will wake up and get it," Obama said. "But what we're dealing with in the black community is just the natural fear of possibility. When I look at my life, the stuff that we're seeing in these polls is played out my whole life: always been told by somebody that I'm not ready, you know, I can't do something, my scores weren't high enough."

[FrenchieCat]

1. Extra Bonus:

Hillary Clinton and her spiritual advisors, who she prays with, and her faith.

what may startle people, including her supporters, is that the group she has associated herself with since 1993 which sponsors these groups as well as the National Prayer Breakfast is very conservative and exclusive. Known now as the Fellowship, it is a group that reporter Sharlet knows very well given his past investigative pieces in Harper's Magazine several years ago, and a Rolling Stone piece about Sam Brownback in 2006. Digby has written about this group as well. Even though Mother Jones will not post the piece online until Tuesday, I have been given permission to post segments of the piece in the extended entry. I encourage all of you to buy the current issue and read the piece for yourselves, because Hillary’s association with the Fellowship may lead some to question her judgment and true beliefs, given what the group stands for. http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/010937.php

Hotline-- Sept 2006

Hillary Clinton: The Faith Angle

Hillary Clinton’s hiring of “faith guru” Burns Strider as an adviser to her presumptive presidential campaign, reported two days ago in the Hotline, draws some rare attention to Clinton’s religiosity, as yet unexamined in the same way that ’08 heavyweights like Mitt Romney and, through his high-profile meeting with Pastor Rick Warren, Barack Obama have been.

In Clinton’s case, there’s plenty to examine: religion seems to be the only part of her life that hasn’t undergone rigorous scrutiny.

Though Strider, as a onetime staff member for Nancy Pelosi, is squarely in the liberal camp, Clinton is part of not one, but two, prayers groups with distinctly conservative bents: an exclusive Senate prayer group that meets on Wednesday mornings, and a women’s prayer group that she’s been a part of since her early White House days. The women’s group is run by Holly Leachman, a layperson at the McLean Bible Church in Virginia, itself magnet for prominent conservatives, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Republican senators John Thune and James Inhofe, as well as several Bush staffers and their families.

Leach's prayer group includes many prominent Republican wives, among them Susan Baker, wife of Iraq Study Group co-chairman James Baker, who along with Leachman ministered to Hillary Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Leachman, mentioned briefly in Clinton’s memoir, Living History, is the wife of Washington Redskins chaplain Jerry Leachman).

Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics
For 15 years, Hillary Clinton has been part of a secretive religious group that seeks to bring Jesus back to Capitol Hill. Is she triangulating—or living her faith?

September 01 , 2007

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer."
<>
These days, Clinton has graduated from the political wives' group into what may be Coe's most elite cell, the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. Though weighted Republican, the breakfast—regularly attended by about 40 members—is a bipartisan opportunity for politicians to burnish their reputations, giving Clinton the chance to profess her faith with men such as Brownback as well as the twin terrors of Oklahoma, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, and, until recently, former Senator George Allen (R-Va.). Democrats in the group include Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, who told us that the separation of church and state has gone too far; Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) is also a regular.

Unlikely partnerships have become a Clinton trademark. Some are symbolic, such as support for a ban on flag burning with Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) funding for research on the dangers of video games with Brownback and Santorum. But Clinton has also joined the gop on legislation that redefines social justice issues in terms of conservative morality, such as an anti-human-trafficking law that withheld funding from groups working on the sex trade if they didn't condemn prostitution in the proper terms. With Santorum, Clinton co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act; she didn't back off even after Republican senators such as Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter pulled their names from the bill citing concerns that the measure would protect those refusing to perform key aspects of their jobs—say, pharmacists who won't fill birth control prescriptions, or police officers who won't guard abortion clinics.

Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons' approach to faith-based initiatives "set the stage for Bush." Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.
http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html
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Most of the prayer groups are informally affiliated with a secretive Christian organization called the Fellowship, established in the 1930s by a Methodist evangelist named Abraham Vereide, whose great hope was to preach the word of Jesus to political and business leaders throughout the world. Vereide believed that the best way to change the powerful was through discreet personal ministry, and over his lifetime he succeeded to a remarkable degree. The first Senate prayer group met over breakfast in 1943; a decade later one of its members, Senator Frank Carlson, persuaded Dwight Eisenhower to host a Presidential Prayer Breakfast, which has become a tradition.
<>
Hillary Clinton’s proficiency in this innermost sanctum has unnerved some of the capital’s most exalted religious conservatives. “You’re not talking about some tree-hugging, Jesus-is-my-Buddha sort of stuff,” says David Kuo, a former Bush official in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who worked with Clinton to promote joint legislation and who, like Brownback, has apologized to her for past misdeeds. “These are powerful evangelicals she’s meeting with.” Like many conservatives, they are caught between warring dictates of their faith: the religious one, which requires them to embrace a fellow Christian, and the political one, more powerful in some, which causes them to instinctively distrust the motives of a Clinton. Everyone in Washington experiences their dilemma at one time or another—the lack of an Archimedean point from which to judge Hillary Clinton.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611/green-hillary

[sunonmars]

2. yup a winning team of supporters that.....not

jesus i would run a mile.