For Van Jones, A Week Already Feels Like A Year

This guy getting a "pink slip"....

Quote :

For President Obama's green jobs advisor, Van Jones, Labor Day can't come soon enough.

The Washington Independent has turned up a six-year-old petition Jones signed alleging government complicity in the September 11 terror attacks. This comes just one day after The Hill reported the existence of a video clip recorded in February in which Jones referred to Republicans - and himself - as "a**holes."

Jones joined the Obama administration in May. He was the founder of a green jobs advocacy organization based in Oakland, Ca.

The online petition, issued in October 2004, demanded an "immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur." The signatories called for an investigation into "incriminating evidence" they said either was ignored or not sufficiently considered by the Kean Commission, which was set up to look into the circumstances surrounding the attacks.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/03/blogs/coopscorner/entry5286699.shtml

Do we know for sure he signed it? Creationists and AGW deniers pull this stunt all the time... slapping names on petitions without the individual's knowledge.

Ugh... I hate Twoofers... If he really did sign this...

Heretic wrote:

Do we know for sure he signed it? Creationists and AGW deniers pull this stunt all the time... slapping names on petitions without the individual's knowledge.

Ugh... I hate Twoofers... If he really did sign this...

It certainly appears that he did sign it.

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041026093059633

But like you said, it's quite possible that his name was put on the online petition without his knowledge. I guess we'll find out.

Just for kicks (and I REALLY don't have the time to do stuff like this today, but it only took a moment, so I couldn't resist) I checked the Internet Archive to see if his name was there on earlier versions, and it was...

http://web.archive.org/web/20050122034426/http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041026093059633

So I think that we can at least rule out the possibility that Jones' "signature" was a "late addition," if you know what I mean...

Found this...

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/09/another-possible-link-emerges-between-top-obama-official-and-911-truther-movement.html

Quote :

On Thursday an administration official told ABC News that controversial White House official Van Jones's signature on a 2004 petition suggesting that the Bush administration let 9/11 happen in order to justify war because he did not carefully review the language in the petition.

It's worth pointing out that Ben Smith at Politico has spoken to two signatories of that petition, Rabbi Michael Lerner and historian Howard Zinn, who say they were misled about what they were signing. And the conservative website Little Green Footballs points out that Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of “Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It" has posted on her website, the American Center for Democracy: "PLEASE NOTE: Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is not a signatory of the 911Truth.org. She has asked several times to have her named removed from the list, but the organization failed to comply."

There are links at the page that claim, in the words of the LGF site, that "the Truthers lied about the real intent of their document in order to get people to sign it."

I read Van Jone's book, "The Green Collar Economy". In that book, he presents solutions on how to solve some of the most pressing issues that face us. He has spent his life working on ideas to improve life, rather than advancing wild eyed conspiracy theories. IMO, this is just one more unjustified attack from people who don't even want to allow discussion of ideas which might expand the role of government.
Instead, Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, this path has the practical benefit of both cutting energy prices and generating enough work to pull the U.S. economy out of its present death spiral.
http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061650758/The_Green_Collar_Economy/index.aspx

sparks wrote:

I read Van Jone's book, "The Green Collar Economy". In that book, he presents solutions on how to solve some of the most pressing issues that face us. He has spent his life working on ideas to improve life, rather than advancing wild eyed conspiracy theories. IMO, this is just one more unjustified attack from people who don't even want to allow discussion of ideas which might expand the role of government.
Instead, Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, this path has the practical benefit of both cutting energy prices and generating enough work to pull the U.S. economy out of its present death spiral.
http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061650758/The_Green_Collar_Economy/index.aspx

Who is Van Jone? Did his book come with a box of crayons?

He's OUT!

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9AHL8O80&show_article=1

I actually agree with Charles Krauthammer:

Quote :

So Van Jones, the defenestrated White House green-jobs czar, once called Republicans “a—holes.” Big deal. I’ve said worse about Democrats. I’ve said worse about Republicans. I’ve said worse about members of my family (you know who you are).

How prissy have we become? Are we allowed no salt in our linguistic diets?

Having once written a column praising Vice President Cheney’s pithy deployment of the f-word — on the floor of the Senate, no less — I rise in defense of Jones. True, Jones’s particular choice of epithet had none of the one-syllable concision, the onomatopoeic suggestiveness, the explosive charm of Cheney’s. But you don’t fire a guy for style.

Another charge was that Jones is a self-proclaimed Communist. I can’t get too excited about this either. In today’s America, to be a Communist is a pose, not a conviction. After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.

. . .

In the White House no more. Why? He’s gone for one reason and one reason only. You can’t sign a petition demanding not one but four investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed 9/11 — i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil — and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House.

Unlike the other stuff (see above), this is no trivial matter. It’s beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It’s dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with “truthers.”

You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier — a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.

Though I'd go even farther... that that level of denial is dangerous no matter what the subject at hand - creationism, AGW "skepticism", AIDS/HIV denial, the vaccine/autism link, etc. The ability to look at our evidence based reality and say, "uh... Nope." isn't one that should be held by anyone making any significant decisions in our government. If they're not grounded in our reality to begin with, how effective can any of their policies actually be?