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TechnoratiObama Adviser on Green Jobs Under Attack
Bay Area environmental activist and White House adviser Van Jones is under attack from Republicans for signing a 2004 petition calling for a congressional investigation into the actions of the administration of former President George Bush surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
![[Eco-activist Van Jones accepts an award at Global Green USA's 12th Annual Green Cross Millennium Awards in 2008 in Santa Monica, California. The White House on Friday sought to deflect criticism of a special adviser who reportedly holds controversial views on the role of the George W. Bush administration in the attacks of September 11, 2001. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Vince Bucci)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/vanjones_underattack.jpg "vanjones_underattack.jpg")
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs offered lukewarm support for
Jones Friday, saying only that "he continues to work in this
administration."
Meanwhile, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., called for an investigation of Jones, who signed a 2004 petition by 911Truth.org, which wants attention paid to "unanswered questions that suggest that people within the (Bush) Administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."
Jones, a Yale Law School graduate, said in a statement Friday, "I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever."
That wasn't enough for Bond, the ranking Republican on the Senate subcommittee on Green Jobs and the New Economy. On Friday, he asked for a hearing "to reassure the American people that their government is safe from (Jones') divisive, incendiary and ultimately counterproductive sentiments."
Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said Friday that Jones should resign because "his extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate."
Controversial speech
The controversy is the latest for the longtime Bay Area activist, who apologized this week for calling Republicans "-holes" during a speaking engagement in Berkeley a month before his appointment in March as special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
In the speech, Jones used the same term to describe himself and the political resolve needed to move legislation.
In the liberal Bay Area, Jones - who transformed from street activist and neo-Marxist to being the first African American to write an environmental book to appear on the New York Times best-seller list - has had the support of politicians.
In the mid-1990s, he co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an Oakland group focusing on police brutality that includes Bay Area PoliceWatch.
He is friends with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Al Gore, and has appeared at forums at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. This year, Time magazine named Jones one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Liberal 'superstar'
Newsom described Jones as "a superstar" before the environmentalist's address at last year's Netroots Nation convention of liberal online activists.
"Van Jones and Mayor Newsom are good friends and the mayor stands by him," Newsom spokesman Nathan Ballard said Friday, adding that the sentiments in the 9/11 petition Jones signed "does not reflect (Newsom's) point of view."
But critics, including Newsom's ex-wife Fox News commentator Kimberly Guilfoyle, told the network's Sean Hannity this week that "clearly (Jones) wasn't vetted. All (the White House) had to do was go and ask a couple of questions in San Francisco about this individual."
This summer, Color of Change, an online activist organization that Jones co-founded to focus on issues in the African American community, called on advertisers to boycott Fox News commentator Glenn Beck after Beck said President Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people."
Some ads pulled
A few dozen companies responded by pulling their ads from Beck's show. Jones has not been active with the organization for the past 1 1/2 years.
Beck talked about Jones' past, including his participation in a Bay Area neo-Marxist organization called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement in the mid-1990s.
The East Bay Express, a weekly newspaper, described the group in a profile of Jones in 2005 as hopeful of "a multiracial socialist utopia." Jones left the group in 1996 to co-found the Ella Baker Center.
52 Comments so far
Show AllAfter researching Mr. Jones' political career, speeches and writing, clearly, he is what Progressives cannot seem to grasp nor comprehend - a racist living in a world of color-coded stereo-types who just wants his own sitcom.
Check out this video clip:
http://www.breitbart.tv/van-jones-only-suburbal-white-kids-shoot-up-schools/
Many hundreds of expert professionals, including military officers, architects, engineers, physicists, pilots and others question the government's account of 911. They've put their own professional careers on the line and their own honor to offer reasons why the official account can't be trusted...
Patriots question 911
http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/
The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-Page Lie ?
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050523112738404
Thanks to all the Democrats who rallied to support this co-founder of the Ella Baker Center and advocate of Green Jobs.
Who are they?
New Hymn needed: "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize - BACK DOWN"
Joe
"Who are they?"
*crickets chirp in the silence*
Van Jones is a fine man and inspiring leader. His appeal to me has been his ability to speak his truth clearly and forcefully and with great vision, heart and style to diverse portions of the population. This nation needs more leaders like Van Jones. The Republican noise machine is now at work trying to discredit this man and get at Obama. I believe their attacks are disingenuous and calculated to be disruptive of the open, robust, discourse needed for a democracy to be effective. Plain visual evidence from the videos of the Twin Towers and Building 7 seems to show they were demolished from within so, obviously, there are important questions regarding 9/11 to be answered, With the health care legislation needing focus, now is not the time to pursue this issue. Of course Republicans are a-holes -- particularly as the context of Jones' remarks makes clear, that is to say in a simple way they are aggressive, -- going for their win at all costs. Most of us can be moved to use this very expression under certain circumstances to describe people we know -- and almost all of us know just what we are intending to communicate. We've had 8 years of this behavior under the Republican Congress and Cheney/Bush Whitehouse -- call it what you will --but a-holes is a robust a way to label it. Jones himself admitted to behaving like an a-hole and to finding such behavior needed at time to be effective. Jones was talking about how Republicans succeed because of this aggressiveness. His choice of metaphor, I suspect, was well understood and also appropriate in the Berkeley setting. Obama's big issue is to get the country refocused on Health Care on Monday and Wednesday and get a good bill passed. The Van Jones issue is another "red herring." Obama and his minions need to be able to call a red herring out for what it is, not flinch each time one is dragged across their trail. This may require them all acting like a-holes on both issues. If Obama, et al decide to "throw Van Jones under the bus," this administration will throw a sizable portion of the progressive activists in the nation under the bus. No doubt this action would create a progressive martyr and, for me, (once he has recanted his recantation) set the stage for Jones to establish himself as a straight talking leader who can mobilize other pissed off progressives to alter the political equation that is frustrating needed change in America and on the planet.
I like Van Jones. Always have.
However, the 9-11 conspiracy is utter nonsense and has been thoroughly debunked if one cares to objectively look into the arguments put forward by both sides. This issue is just another reason why the 9-11 "truth" movement makes the left look like a bunch of idiots and gives extremists on the other side the ammunition they need to actually get one of the few good advisers Obama has to step down.
Sure, Jones has the right to his opinion and it's stupid that he should have to step down.
But the 9-11 crap is going to continue to hold the left back if we don't counter it with careful research and fact.
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" -Epicurus
I'm not going to get into the 9-11 stuff except to say that the petition that Van Jones signed demanded an investigation as to whether the Bush administration, more or less knew it was going to happen and let it happen, not that it carried out the attack itself.
From all the stuff that's come out about what happened during the Bush administration, the kind of investigation that petition was calling for seems entirely reasonable.
And for a loon like Glenn Beck to attack him on this when he believes that Obama is forming a private army made up of AmeriCorps, ACORN, and similar groups, with Van Jones as "the commander of the boots on the ground", is beyond ridiculous.
Always always irks me to hear people perpetuating the foolish meme that "the left" somehow owns 9-11 trutherism. All of it is hunches, impressions, anecdotal evidence, anyway. Does any serious analysis of the truther 'social movement' history exist? I haven't seen it. I don't buy this trutherism is a problem of the left. When you hear it, it's usually a go-to red herring of someone making the argument that the kooky left and kooky right are symmetrical mirror images of each other. Followed by the inevitable punch line that I, the speaker, in my squishy middling indiscriminate centrism, am superior to both. It's lazy and misleading.
While it may be true--I think it is--that some anarchist-tending lefties made common cause with libertarians in the early 2000s in suspiciously, aggressively demanding answers and transparency on the issue of 911 investigation, the Alex Jones crowd captured that 'movement' in fairly short order. A questioning of malfeasant "letting it happen" distilled down into a lunatic, uncertainty-free "made it happen" set of claims.
Taking YouTube to be as good a guide as any in reflecting the 'truth' about this largely youthful and inchoate gaggle of questioners, one finds a massively viewed and commented-on Chomsky clip where he--and if there's a person with a more heavyweight cred in what you might call the 'mainstream' of American left-radicalism, I'd like to know who you thought it might be--dismisses an audience question on 911 conspiracy as not something he buys, or is really even interested in seeing aggressively pursued; his point is that the problem with even good-faith trutherism is that it chases an unknowable set of questions and channels limited activist resources down a fruitless rabbit hole: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzGd0t8v-d4
And as I'm sure Chomsky is well aware, it's not as if the early 70's New Left didn't have a similar history of getting lost and divided down some druggy paranoid rabbit holes of it's own (see 'cointelpro').
Beyond that, on YouTube one also finds a bunch of rabidly conspiracist ranters and clip-uploaders, whose rhetoric and 'favorites' lead back almost universally in my experience to this Alex Jones character. A far-right loon who likes to insist his brand of crazy is 'beyond right or left,' a laughable absurdity when you listen to his fever-swwamp spiel.
There's even a clip of Jones--a TX am radio talk show huckster--having Chomsky on as a "guest"...a hugely distinguished and indulgent guest he eventually calls a liar and an agent of a dystopian fantasy of a Bircher-style New World Order: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwjK07gEpCM
There might well be some persons in this dopey 'infowars' community who self-identify as 'left'...but so what? We're talking about a splinter of a splinter of a fraction of 'the left'. Which is to say, not at all a meaningful representation of anything fairly tagged as 'lefty'. I mean, recently on Huffpo there was a Paul Krassner article where he recalled taking an acid trip long ago with Squeaky Fromme.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/my-acid-trip-with-squeaky_b_252681.html
Reading this one could argue, culturally at least, she was a person at home in the social conventions and cultural milieu of the hippie left. At their nihilistic craziest, the weather underground made a show of celebrating the Manson murders as revolutionary. But who would, with any sanity, argue that the Manson Family were seriously of 'the left'?
I don't see it, unless we are also to swallow (a vapid point recently repeated on the Maher show) that Lyndon f-ing LaRouche's gang are 'lefties' in good standing. Right. A guy who ran against Carter on a pro-nukes platform...a guy & group who pimp their own version of an Obama-is-a-treasonous-monster fantasy...sure, that's a lefty. If up is down and black is white. It's bogus.
In the wake of 911--and recall that Jones' signature on this thing was circa 2002--it was extreeeeemely rational (as I recall, at least) to demand that this most secretive and propagandistic administration--and with every reason to be secretive, as history continues to prove out) not be left to it's own devices in investigating and reporting back wtf exactly happened here.
The petition amounts to a ratification--with all the 'power' usually attaching to email petitions--of the public's right to openness and objectivity in the investigation of the crime of 911.
911 trutherism doesn't hold the left back. Because it isn't a part of 'the left'. People who claim 911 truthers are OF the left, maybe they make trouble, by finding problems that aren't there, as opposed to focusing on the REAL set of problems. A real set of problems that in my mind hew pretty darn closely to the critique Ralph Nader's been offering for decades.
perceptionexperiment September 6th, 2009 4:40 am..........Truthers have done the research and it's on hundreds of sites for anyone to view. If you can refute any of it, go right ahead and present your evidence. If not, then what you state is hogwash and propaganda. Have you read any books? Done any research? Thought? Reasoned? Tried to understand the overwhelming evidence that has been presented?
Here are a few questions that maybe YOU can answer........and when you are done with those, I have MANY more.
Why didn't jets intercept the airliners since they had numerous warnings of terrorist attacks?
2. Why did Ashcroft stop flying commercial airlines, citing an unidentified "threat" in July 2001?
3. Why did FEMA lie about their presence in New York on 9/11?
4. Why didn't the Secret Service hustle Dubya out of the classroom?
5. Why did George H.W. Bush meet bin Laden's brother on 9/11?
6. Why did passengers or crewmembers on three of the flights all use the term boxcutters?
7. Where are the flight recorders?
8. Why were the FISA warrants discontinued?
9. How did Bush see the first plane crash on live camera?
10 Why was security meeting scheduled for 9/11 cancelled by WTC management on 9/10?
11. How did they come up with the "culprits" so quickly?
12. How did they find the terrorist's cars at the airports so quickly?
13. Why did Shrub dissolve the Bin Laden Task Force?
14. Why the strange pattern of debris from Flight 93?
15. How extensive was the relationship between the Taliban, the ISI and the CIA?
16. What exactly was the role of Henry Kissinger at UNOCAL?
17. When was it decided to cancel building a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan?
18. Why did the FBI in 1996 close the files to investigate Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington?
19. Why did .Bush stop inquiries into terrorist connections of the Bin Laden family in early 2001?
20. Who made the decision to have John O'Neill stop investigating Al-qeada accounts?
21. Who gave the decision to give him a security job at the World Trade Center?
22. Did John O'Neill meet anyone of the FEMA in the night of September 10th?
23. What about media reports that hijackers bought tickets for flights scheduled after Sept. 11?
24. Why did none of the 19 hijackers appear on the passenger lists?
25. Why would devout Muslims frequent bars, drink alcoholic beverages and leave their bibles?
26. Why would the hijackers use credit cards and allow drivers licenses with photos to be zeroxed?
27. Why did the hijackers force passengers to call relatives?
28. How did the hijackers change the flight plan without law enforcement or the military try to stop them?
29. How did a hijackers passport miraculously appear near the WTC? Who found it and what time?
30. How could the FBI distinguish between "regular" Muslims and hijacker Muslims on those flights?
31. Why was there not one "innocent" Muslim on board any of these flights?
32. Did someone go through the passenger lists looking for Muslim names and label them as hijackers?
MOHAMMED ATTA
33. Did the Florida police provide information that Atta was searched because of 1) an expired Visa, 2) driving a car without a license, 3) because of an incident at Miami Airport?
34. Why did Atta leave his bag at the airport and the employees didn't put it on board?
35. Who found his bag? How can we be sure it it was his bag?
36. Why did Atta place a video "how to fly planes", a uniform and his last will into his bag, knowing that he would commit suicide?
37. Why did Atta leave his drivers license in a rental car?
38. When did Atta train on a flight simulator?
39. Did Atta leave the US while in training and then return?
40. Why did Atta decide to study at Opa Locka, a famous hub of 6 Navy training bases and includes government partners like U.S. Coast Guard Air Station, Police (Miami-Dade) Aviation Unit?
41. Why was Atta allowed to study since he was stopped by the police for driving without a license and also for violating his visa?
THE BLACK BOXES AND CRASH VIDEO
42. Why were the Black Boxes never recovered ?
43. Why didn't the FBI release the air traffic controller's protocols?
44. Why did the FBI not release the Flight Data Recorder info?
THE HIJACKERS
45. How did the FBI receive a tip from a passenger who boarded a different plane and reached his destination safely that he had a confrontation with two ME men at the Logan airport in Boston?
46. Who tipped the FBI to storm the Westin Hotel in Boston on September 12th?
47. Where did the photos of all 19 hijackers come from?
48. How were all hijackers identified just 2 days after the attack
Furthermore..........
If you are truly interested in finding the truth for yourself, there is no need to be an engineer...the facts and research are readily available on many sites and on myriad DVDs. Even if you accept the pancake theory (which is total hogwash and has been disproved hundreds of ways and hundreds of times) you would still have a rubble piles tens of stories high. The concrete and everything else (bodies, desks, chairs, fixtures, TITANIUM ENGINES et al) would not have disintegrated in to nano particles of dust. Vehicles almost a half mile away would not have caught fire in strange patterns. Explosions witnessed in the basement BEFORE the buildings collapsed would not have occurred (recorded on seismograph readings). The truth is on it's way and cannot be stopped. And remember that in the history of mankind, steel structured buildings have never collapsed from fire...NEVER...and on that fateful day, three huge buildings came down from very short and small fires. WTC 7 was NOT hit by any plane.
Free DVDs from the 911dvdproject.com
Other valuable sites that will lead you to many more and some excellent books:
ae911truth.org
911sharethetruth.com And please support NYC CAN
911weknow.com
stj911.org
911blogger.com
physics911.net
911research.com
infowars.com
wtc7.net
pilotsfor911truth.org.
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2009/0702-Flight77.html
First and foremost......the mass media, on 9/11, were reporting explosions within the three buildings that came down.
Next, almost 3,000 people were murdered and no crime scene was sealed off and there was no investigation.
Next, all video tapes of the pentagon were taken and, more than likely, destroyed.
A commission was formed, not to investigate, but to validate and it was directed by Philip Zelikow, A Neo-Conservative, co-author of a book with Condoleeza Rice, and eventually appointed to the Bush Administration as one of the advisers.....He controlled who testified and what they testified about.
All the Media, including this one, is controlled and limited to what they can print by "The Power Elite".......Anyone who speaks against the Invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan has been immediately marginalized and ridiculed....If you spoke out for an independent investigation of 9/11, you were ridiculed, "How dare you question your government, how unpatriotic!"
Van Jones was not done in by the Republicans he was taken care of and marginalized by "The Power Elite" and their allies in government. Wait until "They" have their JROTC from over 3,000 schools marching in lock step, maybe then you will understand what the People of the United States have given up.
The reality is that our government has been lying to us for decades: "Saddam Hussein was brought into the CIA in 1959 and he ran a "Proxy War" for the United States for 8 years against Iran and he was praised for his efforts by George H. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld." Or how about Osama Bin Laden, "Osama was used by the CIA to fund "Operation Cyclone, the recruitment of 100,000 Islamic Militants to wage a Jihad and they then became the nucleus of Al Qaeda. Oh , and the National Security Agency had been listening to every one of Osama's phone calls and knew exactly where he was through 2001."......
No, I will give you everything except World Trade Center #7 and that building was "Pulled"= demolitoned and that was the word used by its owner, Mr.Silverstein.
And, there was never an independent investigation.
No, why say we are crazy, when all we ask for is an independent investigation especially of the financial support that came from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Department of Defense. (ISI of Pakistan came to Washington D.C. received $100,000 and that money found its way back to Mohammed Atta.)
The voices of the Media and their owners "The Power Elite" want no criticism and no investigation.......Where did Bernie Madoff's 62 BILLION DOLLARS go? The FBI could only find 628 MILLION and that leaves over 61 BILLION unaccounted for.....Where did Hank Greenberg's (Ex-Director of AIG) billions disappear to and how was his company one of the first to receive hundreds of Billions of dollars from the government?
The FBI had no evidence that Osama Bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks of 9/11...........
Instead of being a loud mouthed bully for "The Power Elite", ask yourself...."Were the attacks of 9/11 "Cost Effective" for "The Power Elite?"
That the buildings that came down at the World Trade Center complex came down just as they did as the result of two planes hitting two buildings just as they did is just not possible. Anyone that says it is possible should either stop lying or take some courses in physics.
herbert r chersonsky and other common dreams readers must keep commenting so we never forget and are not outshouted.
John F. Butterfield September 6th, 2009 8:22 am......................And thank tireless and undaunted folks like Doc Tom Tvedten who has the 911dvdproject.com and has sent out over 200,000 DVDs on his own dime. Check out his site.
(Van Jones) apologized this week for calling Republicans "-holes"
No apology is necessary; they are assholes. Some even have two of them.
Sanctuary September 6th, 2009 4:31 am.............Precisely. And one is right underneath their nose.
i loved the comment on bush being on crack but thats about it
at least he was honest in admitting he was a communist( just what we need with people like john holdren around who believe its okay to force women to have abortions is perfectly kosher under the constititution .
now if barry soltero (alias barack hussein obama) would resign and take biden and crew with him all would be well
Obama's administration is looking more and more like Weimar everyday. The Right only needs to find their charismatic fearless leader. They already have their thousand mini-Goebbels running around on the talk shows whipping up hysteria.
Funny how they also like to project onto Obama all sorts of wild Nazi allegories, when they are acting more like brownshirts every day.
Predictable, the Obama Administration is finally utterly down the tubes.
Van Jones is the only real bright spot in Obama's administration even though he has a relatively low profile. If Obama/Rahm do kick him under the bus, it means that 1% final hope that something good would come of this administration is gone for good.
The AP offers this terse and vague obituary:
Obama adviser Van Jones resigns amid controversy
Sep 5th, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- The White House says President Barack Obama's adviser Van Jones is resigning amid controversy over past inflammatory statements.
Van Jones, an administration official specializing in environmentally friendly "green jobs," is linked to efforts suggesting a governmental role in the 2001 terror attacks and to derogatory comments about Republicans.
Jones issued an apology on Thursday. When asked the next day whether Obama still had confidence in him, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said only that Jones "continues to work in the administration."
The White House issued a statement early Sunday saying Jones had quit the administration.
_____________________________________________
By all indications, Obama wasn't sorry to see him go. The LAST thing Obama needs hung around his neck is the accusation that he's Soft on Backwards-Looking Tinfoil-Hatted Potty-Mouthed Subversives.
Following in the footsteps of the "Don't tase me, bro!" kid, who recanted in courts and begged to be forgiven for inciting a justifiable tasing, Jones tried to renounce his seditious impulse and restore his bona-fides as a decent, respectable 9/11 Falsie.
But it was too little, too late.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Jeez, reading his resignation one sees he blames others' attacks and smears. This is contrary to the president's message to black men to be accountable to themselves and not look to blame whitey for all the brothers' problems. This guy was too stupid to realize that fair-minded whites put Obama in office and that it would not be such a good idea to openly call for the redistribution of white wealth. Van was too busy sharpening his axe to hear the president's message of personal responsibility. Van did the lie, so now say goodbye.
YOS: I believe yours is the appropriate obituary to the Van Jones affair. It's a wonder, though, that he didn't "save himself" by revealing other "Backwards-Looking Tinfoil-Hatted Potty-Mouthed Subversives." But I guess that, unfortunately for him, such folks are already "persons of interest" to the government since they don't bother to conceal their "subversive" sentiments.
This is making me sick to my stomach.
The right-wing attack machine is calling all the shots in this country. This needs to change, and very quickly.
No it doesnt.
And why would you think the right-wingers should continue running the country?
This is a big "So What?"
He said nothing that wasn't true.
Republicans ARE a-holes
We DO have questions and wonder if Cheney let 911 happen.
Van Jones excites me! Why can't we have leaders more like him and less like milquetoast Obama?
Does the White House castrate everyone they appoint?
q
No, they try to make sure you're bought off first, then, if necessary.
That's gov't business.... end of story.
Van Jones needs to run against Nancy Pelosi in San Fran!
The story says:
"Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said Friday that Jones should resign because 'his extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.'"
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Pence is a real sicko who has no place in guvment. FEC records show, for example, that in '05-'06 he received $3,000 from Erik Prince of Blackwater fame, doubtless to keep up the war effort and the no-bid contracts to the likes of Blackwater...
-30-
The following represents the hatred, ignorance and bigotry that is driving so many Republicans;
Preacher Wishes for Obama's Death
I'm still a bit stunned by this, but - as an update - the man who brought that AR-15 to Obama's town hall meeting 2 weeks ago in Arizona was Chris Broughten, a member of Pastor Steven Anderson's church:
"I think we'd be better off if God would send (Obama) where he's going now instead of later," said Broughton.
"(Obama) is destroying our country." When asked if he was advocating violence against the President, Broughton said he wouldn't answer the question directly.
"I don't care how God does it, I'm not going into further detail than that," said Broughton. "It would be better now than later."
Get it? It's not like Chris would be killing the President, it would be God doing it, for the good of all of us.
I see ZERO difference between this religious fundamentalist attitude and the one used as an excuse to kill Westerners.
Creating green jobs! With nuclear power! Clean coal! and cap and trade!
Van, did you lose your balls? Playing it safe? That will only drag you down.
Be proud of your knowledge that 9/11 was a scam. It's obvious to anyone who looks objectively at the videos of WTC tower explosions, and Building 7, not to speak of volumes of other evidence.
We need a president and officers who are intellectually honest. The public will come around. Tho there will always be bikers and corp shills around.
Agreed!
Any disinterested person with a curious mind will reach the same conclusion--nothing about the Official Story regarding the attacks at WTC is true.
oh puh-leeze! This is really getting ridiculous. These idiots rant and rave about Obama not being born in the US, being a socialist, threatening to pull the plug on grandma and all Van Jones supposedly did was sign a petition calling for an investigation into what is probably the truth? I am getting so sick of this bullspit. It is sickening.
It's okay for cons to lie, but not for libs to tell the truth.
No one can be a truthseeker while supporting at the same time either of the lying political parties.
The extreme right wing of the republican party is desperate. They grab any straw in trying to bring Obama down: McCarthite attacks on Jones, death panels, birthers, sending granny to her death. We must not be distracted from our progressive agenda.
So much of this misses a fundamental issue of today. We are living so busy, so fast that we don't focus on the things that we sign. We sign sub-prime mortgages without reading them because we want the big house or we can't get the online software or access we want without agreeing to something we don't understand, we sign waivers of liability all the time without understanding the implications, by using something we imply our agreement with a company's contract, we give employers the right to invade our privacy or we don't get the job, etc, etc, etc.
Does our leader Van Jones have integrity? Does his word or signature mean anything or is everything just a matter of expedience in order to maintain power? Does what we say or sign mean anything? Obviously with Obama - commitments are things subject to change after he gets what he wants from those who believed him. Remember the FISA vote commitment and betrayal? We are in deep trouble.
Jones signed a 2004 petition by 911Truth.org, which wants attention paid to "unanswered questions that suggest that people within the (Bush) Administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."
So? What's wrong with that? Millions of Americans want a real investigation of 9-11, and millions of us believe that it probably was an inside job. What are the Republicans so afraid of? If they're clean, a real investigation will show that.
Unfortunately, Obama is so afraid of the Repubs that he has no spine at all. So President Rahm Emanuel probably will throw Jones under the bus.
This is more of the right seizing the agenda...Jones needs to come out swinging talking about how those out to destroy him are financially invested in the status quo, re: green economy, which Jones is out to change.
I don't care what Van Jones said about 9-11 (although I do think that conspiracy or not, someone was asleep at the switch to not heed the warnings).
Mr. Jones has written a wonderful book entitled "The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems." I hope that Mr. Jones' ideas find a very wide audience. I wish that people in the administration would listen to his ideas and begin to put them into practice.
A fascinating story! I think I saw that guy once on 60 Minutes, relative to the growing Green Industry. He was very persuasive.
It will be interesting to have his position on the WTC attacks clarified.
Unfortunately it does not appear that Jones does have the courage of his convictions as he has now decided to take back what he had signed on the 2004 petition by 9/11 Truth.org by claiming that he was not aware of what the petition had stated. Is Jones, this [alleged] radical activist, now attempting to claim that what Bush and Cheney said concerning the events of 9/11/01 was the truth? Is Jones naive enough to believe that even though Bush and Cheney had lied about Iraq [and about torture and Hurricane Katrina and benefits to veterans, ad infinitum] they have somehow seen the light by telling the American people the truth concerning what had actually occurred on Sept. 11, 2001? I think not.
I'd say that we're watching another liar at work in the White House because none of them are creating jobs--green or otherwise. This Jones, he's a lawyer for crying out loud. Since when has one of those created a job?
Until we find a way to organize, we're all getting kicked under the bus.
Neocon mentality is to investigate anyone who deviates from the corporate propaganda.
Jones saying he does not agree with the premise of the petition has in fact already recanted.
The neocons don't want to investigate anyone. Lord knows an investigation runs the risk of tripping over the truth--and they are allergic to truth. They want to hurl stones, rocks and bottles, shout down the target and, if they can get away with it, lynch the person in the same way they have done ever since reconstruction.
We'll see if he's got the fortitude to stand by his convictions, or if he will capitulate to the corporatist right as the milquetoast, pathetic, puppet emperor has done.
This sentence in the article says it all: "White House spokesman Robert Gibbs offered lukewarm support for Jones Friday, saying only that 'he continues to work in this administration.'"
Obama, who continues to let Rahm Emmanuel run the show, is likely to kick Gibbs under the bus.
You mean, "likely to kick Jones [not the WH spokesman Gibbs] under the bus." // You're right, too.