I just watched the U-Tube video of the sermon given by Fr. Michael Phlegler last Sunday at Barack Obama’s long time church…. you know the one where Rev. Jeremiah Wright was the pastor. Unbelievable. Phlegler looked like he had been smoking something in the first place. This is a guy that until last week was one of Barack Obama’s closest advisors. (Probably still is privately behind closed doors.) He spewed forth some of the most racist stuff I have ever heard and it was done in the style of Jimmy Swiggert. He was as disrespectful of Senator Hillary Clinton as anything I have ever heard…… even from Rush Limbaugh. And the crowd…. who by the way thinks the world of Luis Farrakahn… cheered. The new pastor praised Phlegler for his message.
This is the environment in which Senator Barack Obama was raised. He has spent over 20 years, almost half of his life, attending this church. Are we to believe that he absorbed nothing? And he only put some distance between himself and the leaders there publically when it was politically the wise thing to do. How can anyone trust Obama? I can’t.
It is interesting to read the bios of some of the folks at Conservative think tanks. You find just what you would expect to find: a whole lot of people who talk about subjects they know very little about. I just took a look at the Hudson Institute, for example. There are folks there who claim to be experts on all sorts of scientific subjects that have had very little science in their backgrounds. There are others affiliated with such think tanks that I call Rachael Carson experts. These are the folks who are being paid by the industries they defend…….. far from being independent experts. As the old saying goes, “follow the money”. People will say about anything for a buck and claim to be an expert in the process. I think many of these folks are much like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck except they do have university degrees…….. mostly in economics. Neither Limbaugh nor Beck made it through college and they are the biggest mouths. Again……’follow the money’.
I find it most interesting that the two most popular conservative radio talk show hosts, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, have a lot to say about scientific issues when neither has anything more than a high school education. Yes, Beck studied theology one semester before becoming a Mormon. Yes, Limbaugh attended college a couple of semesters but was completely unsuccessful in the end. Do you think either of them is qualified to make informed judgements about anything scientific……….. like climate change or stem cell research or endangered species or any other environmental concern???? I more than think not.
I suspect neither would even know what a scientific journal looks like let alone be able to read one. They have to be reading and repeating nothing more than the propaganda from the “Conservative” think tank folks that have a hidden agenda. That agenda would be to promote industries and persons that stand to lose money. As many say, “follow the money”. I wonder what an investigation into the finances of both Beck and Limbaugh would find? The same sort of thing happened during the Rachael Carson days when the excessive use of DDT was going on. The folks against her were the chemical companies and the scientists that worked for them.