Jones, an administration official specializing in environmentally friendly "green jobs" with the White House Council on Environmental Quality was linked to efforts suggesting a government role in the 2001 terror attacks and to derogatory comments about Republicans.
The resignation comes as Obama is working to regain his footing in the contentious health care debate.
Liberals push Obama to make government-run health care
House liberals pleaded with President Barack Obama on Friday to push for creation of a government-run health care program as the Senate's chief negotiator said he won't wait much longer for Republicans to compromise amid dwindling chances for a bipartisan bill.
Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., held a nearly two-hour teleconference with his small group of negotiators, who call themselves the "Bipartisan Six." Afterward, Baucus was careful to leave the door open to a long-sought deal, but he clearly signaled the time has come for him to move ahead.
Caucus leader Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., said the lawmakers expressed their commitment to creation of a government-run plan to compete with private health insurers. On Thursday, they sent Obama a letter saying they could not support a health bill that lacked such a public option.
Obama speech to students sparks new controversy
Obama's planned address to students has touched off yet another confrontation with Republican critics, who have battered the White House over health care and now accuse the president of foisting a political agenda on children.
Schools don't have to show it. But districts across the country have been inundated with phone calls from parents and are struggling to address the controversy that broke out after Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals urging schools to tune in.
Districts in states including Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia and Wisconsin have decided not to show the speech to students. Others are still thinking it over or are letting parents have their kids opt out.
Opinion:
Jones is gone, the good guys won, but there is much more to the story.
Van Jones is gone, and good riddance. Howard Dean is quick to say the Jones resignation is a loss for the country. That’s as good an admission Jones’ resignation is a strike against extreme left wing liberals as you can find. Dean, himself, is a left wing nutcase.
Chalk up the deep sixing of Jones as another victory for grass root America. But there’s more to it than that. For one thing, we should remain vigilant lest Jones maintain some form of input to the Obama White House.
Defeating Jones is another victory for grass roots America – on top of having stopped, for the moment, passage of the infamous Obama health care scheme. That battle isn’t over, but the “public option’ – an admitted gateway to “single payer” socialized medicine – is on the rocks.
Added to the defeat of the amnesty bill a few years ago, grass roots are alive and well and clearly have real power. Given the dominating majorities in both Houses of Congress by liberal Democrats, grass root power, outrage, and overt action (such as the tea party protests) may provide the only real means of stopping the Democrat threat.
So far, few of the over-the-air TV network news operations are covering the Jones resignation much. Nuff said. These network operations are again illustrating the degree of outrageous corruption to which they have consciously surrendered -- any vestige of honest journalism is gone.
Of course, that has been the case for decades.
That Van Jones was appointed to such a high position by the Obama White House raises very serious questions about the value systems of those calling the short there – including that of Obama himself. Van Jones is not the only left wing extremist in the lot. Valerie Jarrett gushed over the appointment of Jones – citing his record of activism. Jarrett is either an extremist herself, an outrageous liar, or a fool. Perhaps all three. The shameful and outrageous background of Van Jones was an easy Google search item.
Of course, Jones now claims his opponents lied about him – despite the fact that what deep sixed this left wing loon were his own words, his own deeds, and his chosen associations.
All this raises the questions of what other despicable characters lurk in Obama’s administration. After all, Obama has achieved some sort of record appointing people who are proven tax cheats – including his own tax chief. Is tax cheating an acceptable matter under Obama? “Vetting” is hardly an Obama White House function on which they can brag.
The next battle begins Tuesday as Obama arrives at his desk with a multitude of reports many schools will not be carrying his address to students. Many parents fear any such speech by Obama would likely be one designed to send a pro Obama message.
Given the record of this administration, parents have serious reason to worry.
We are winning, but we cant let up, we must question everything, we must oppose left wing extremism wherever it appears.
Buddy
Special: The Van Jones story:
In April, Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for WND.com, broke the first major story on Jones who was identified as a self-described radical communist and "rowdy black nationalist" who said his environmental activism was actually a means to fight for racial and class "justice."
Succeeding revelations by WND included:
• Jones previously served on the board of an environmental activist group at which a founder of the Weather Underground terrorist organization is a top director.
• Jones was co-founder of a black activist organization that has led a campaign prompting major advertisers to withdraw from Glenn Beck's top-rated Fox News Channel program. The revelation followed Beck's reports on WND's story about Jones' communist background.
• That Jones and other White House appointees may have been screened by an ACORN associate.
• One day after the 9/11 attacks, Jones led a vigil that expressed solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans as well as what he called the victims of "U.S. imperialism" around the world.
• Just days before his White House appointment, Jones used a forum at a major youth convention to push for a radical agenda that included spreading the wealth and "changing the whole system."
• Jones' Maoist manifesto while leading the group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, was scrubbed from the Internet after being revealed by WND.
• Jones was the main speaker at an anti-war rally that urged "resistance" against the U.S. government – a demonstration sponsored by an organization associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party.
• In a 2005 conference, Jones characterized the U.S. as an "apartheid regime" that civil rights workers helped turn into a "struggling, fledgling democracy."
• Jones signed a petition calling for nationwide "resistance" against police, accusing them of using the 9/11 attacks to carry out policies of torture.
While talk radio and cable television picked up WND's reporting and increased the pressure on the administration to cut Jones loose, there was no significant coverage of the scandal by the major U.S. news media until September.
"It wasn't necessary for the New York Times to cover this story for a top administration official to be ousted," explained Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND.com. "The Jones story is bigger than a mere political development. It's also a giant media story – illustrating just how profoundly our media landscape has changed as a result of the Internet. Once there was a blue dress. Now it's a red czar."
On Friday, Rep. Mike Pence, R-IN, chairman of the House Republican Conference, called on Jones to quit or be fired.
"His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate," Pence said.
Jones has tried to deflect the rising chorus of criticism: "In recent days some in the news media have reported on past statements I made before I joined the administration – some of which were made years ago. If I have offended anyone with statements I made in the past, I apologize."
It was his second apology of the week. On Wednesday, Jones apologized for labeling Republicans with a vulgarism in a February speech, saying that his comments were "clearly inappropriate."
The day’s top blogs:
1.
Charlie Crist Lite
A case of Senate cronyism in Florida.
Democrats have embarrassed themselves by naming political buddies to replace Joe Biden and Barack Obama in the Senate, and now a Republican is showing he can do the same. On Friday, Florida Governor Charlie Crist picked a long-time aide and political consultant to fill his state's soon-to-be-vacant U.S. Senate seat, presumably as a placeholder until Mr. Crist can win the job himself in November 2010.
The Florida vacancy is due to the strange decision by Republican Mel Martinez to abandon his post early for no other reason than that he seems sick of the job. His departure couldn't come at a worst time given that Republicans have only 40 seats and need every one of them to stop the most radical expansion of government in two generations.
That makes it all the more puzzling that Mr. Crist bypassed well known Republicans in favor of selecting his former campaign manager and chief of staff George LeMieux. The 40-year-old Mr. LeMieux ran Mr. Crist's campaign for governor in 2006 and is famous for saying about Mr. Crist that "we make decisions together," adding that "he's the senior partner and I'm the junior partner." He quickly said he has no plans to run for Senate in his own right and has declared that "the Charlie Crist way" is "the way we need to address things in Washington."
What that means on crucial legislation is anyone's guess, given Mr. Crist's protean politics. The governor has driven private property and casualty insurers out of the state by expanding a government-favored public option for hurricane insurance. He also made a show of endorsing President Obama's $800 billion "stimulus" earlier this year. With a health-care public option in the balance in coming weeks, no one seems to know how Mr. LeMieux might vote.
Mr. Crist is running for Senate in his own right next year, and he faces a primary challenge from former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, who called the choice of Mr. LeMieux "disappointing."
Democrats called it "political cronyism" and it's hard to disagree. Florida voters have a right to expect more than a mini-me appointee to serve for 16 months in what could be a momentous Congress.
Mr. Crist's Senate choice is another reason to wonder if his principles extend beyond his own political ambitions.
2.
'Conservatives, Shut Up and Step Aside'
David Limbaugh
The hubris, arrogance and deceit of President Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership are breathtaking. In their maniacal frenzy to assume control over every aspect of our lives through socialized medicine, they are behaving like the thuggish autocrats they have proved themselves to be.
The jig is up on their designs, evidenced by the very contents of the health bill they're promoting. As increasing public awareness has translated into increasing grass-roots opposition to the bill, the Democrats have ratcheted up their bullying tactics and deceit.
Our self-styled bipartisan president is telling his critics to shut up, while his partners in crime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues, are calling them un-American and Nazis.
Understand this: The people who are showing up in droves with righteous anger befitting a body politic steeped in a unique liberty tradition are exercising the very type of bottom-up citizen protest and government watchdogging our Founding Fathers envisioned. They are not the artificially driven "AstroTurf" phonies the Democrats are depicting them to be. No, such activities are the province of Alinsky/Obama-type "street organizers" and union thugs enlisted by the administration to discredit these legitimate protests.
It wasn't enough for Pelosi to call us Nazis. She also co-wrote, with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, an op-ed in USA Today calling us un-American and projecting her own nefarious tactics onto her opposition.
Pelosi and Hoyer accuse the protesters of engaging in "an ugly campaign ... not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue."
They say: "The first fact is that health insurance reform will mean more patient choice. It will allow every American who likes his or her current plan to keep it. And it will free doctors and patients to make the health decisions that make the most sense, not the most profits for insurance companies."
How can these government propaganda ministers sleep at night? They are the ones misrepresenting the legislation and closing their meetings to genuine dissent.
In the first place, it is not "health insurance reform." It is an effort to fundamentally transform the entire health care industry and how decisions are made. Their recent move to euphemize this monstrosity as "insurance reform" is part of their strategy to demonize insurance companies in their ruthless quest to shove this down our throats.
The bill would not allow Americans to keep their plans. It would crowd out and eventually eliminate private care; enormously reduce choice, as well as the quantity and quality of care; and be a fiscal nightmare, as verified by Congressional Budget Office projections. Worst of all, it would further destroy our liberties.
And by Obama's own words, it would decrease doctors' prerogatives over the type of care they provide. He admits he'd control doctors by making their "bundled payments" conditional on their meeting quality standards imposed by an omniscient, omnipotent government, not doctors and their patients.
Pelosi and Hoyer's most laughable claim is that their plan "will stand up to any and all critics."
If that's so, why don't they tell the truth about what's in the bill and truly answer legitimate questions and concerns about it instead of resorting to name-calling and intimidation? If that's so, why is Obama sending out his hired mouthpiece, Linda Douglass, to deny what Obama most clearly said? She protests that his statements promoting a single-payer system were taken out of context and then gives us absolutely no evidence they were. We are just supposed to disbelieve our lying eyes and ears.
It's also disingenuous to argue that in any event, Obama's earlier statements are irrelevant because he says he does not favor a single-payer system today and would protect our right to private care. Again, we have the bill itself, which would phase out private care -- mandatorily -- so the denials are self-evident lies.
Obama isn't delegating all the dirty work to his surrogates. Our pseudo-cool leader himself has become conspicuously unglued. About opponents of his outlandishly reckless agenda, he said that he doesn't "want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking"; he wants "them just to get out of the way so (Democrats) can clean up the mess." He went on, "I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."
He obviously thinks that he has the unilateral right as president, with 53 percent of the vote, to use our money to impoverish and enslave us and destroy our health care and that we have no right even to object. We only get to speak every two years.
Well, this president -- with a faux-messianic wind boomeranging in his face -- has now met his match: an increasingly informed,
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
3.
AmSpecBlog
AARP-- Where The Customer is Always Wrong
Philip Klein
As bad as the video made AARP look, on some level, you could write it off as an instance of a local AARP representative getting frustrated and simply not having the experience or temperament to deal with an audience that was pushing back against her talking points. That's why I found it much more damning when I saw AARP vice president and spokesman Drew Nannis appearing on Fox (clip below).
Not only does he refuse to apologize for the woman's behavior, but he dismisses those dues-paying AARP members as "a bunch of people yelling." This is wrong on several levels. First off, AARP is an organization that claims to speak for its membership, but here we have a clear cut case of mounting opposition to Democratic health care policies among older Americans, not just in town hall meetings, but backed up by polling data showing they remain the most skeptical of Democratic proposals (see here and here). Yet instead of representing the concerns of older Americans, AARP is doing the reverse. Its CEO, Barry Rand, who was a major Obama donor, has gotten cozy with the administration, and along with the rest of the top brass at the Washington headquarters, has decided to support liberal policies. Now the group is actively working alongside the administration to sell these policies that their members are rejecting -- using their members money to do so. In a typically liberal and patronizing kind of way, they think they know what's best for their members, and they're trying to tell them what to think.
But beyond that, there's a basic customer service angle to this. I can, in some small sense, sympathize with the woman on the video. Back when I was 18, I worked at the box office of an Atlantic City casino, and have some experience dealing with frustrated customers, especially older Americans who can be quite, shall we say, persistent about getting what they want. If there was a dispute over a coupon or a comp they thought they deserved, you can bet they'd make their voices heard. At times this meant shouting at me, cursing at me, blowing smoke in my face, and so on. Yet even as a teenager, I had a basic understanding of the concept that the customer is always right, something that AARP evidently does not get. No matter how angry or unruly or even nasty these gamblers would act toward me, I knew it was my job to remain calm and try to pacify the situation rather than escalate the problem by shouting back. Yet, not only did the woman running the meeting decide to mix it up with dues-paying members, but a vice president from Washington went on national television and defended her actions. So let's just call a spade a spade. AARP is not an organization that represents its members, but a group that treats its members as dupes so it can suck up their money and use it to advocate a liberal policy agenda supported by its Washington leadership.
4.
Obama Brings Chicago-Style Intimidation
Phyllis Schlafly
Obama's staff and retreads from the Clinton administration are using Chicago-style intimidation to rescue his extravagant health-care bill from its decline in public opinion polls.
A congressional Town Hall meeting on Aug. 6 reminds us of a memorable political moment when Bill Clinton and his chief aides were in Little Rock celebrating his 1992 election. Heady with victory, Chicago staffer Rahm Emanuel demonstrated how he planned to punish political enemies by plunging his steak knife into the table and screaming, "Dead!" as he named each target.
At Rep. Russ Carnahan's, D-Mo., town hall meeting on Aug. 6, SEIU (Service Employees International Union) thugs, clad in purple shirts, punched in the face, brutally beat and kicked in the head when he was down an African American named Kenneth Gladney, while hurling a torrent of racial slurs. The SEIU goons were following White House advice: "Don't do a lot of talking," and if they encounter resistance, "punch back twice as hard."
The Purple Shirt Brigade picked on Gladney because he was passing out historical American flags with the inscription "Don't Tread on Me," and the Left won't tolerate African-Americans as conservatives. Gladney was taken to the hospital, and six people were arrested.
We are seeing a coordinated smear on those who oppose socialized medicine. Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse mislabeled them as "angry mobs of rabid right-wing extremists."
The Obama supporters are trying to make it appear that those opposing socialism in health care are "manufactured" protesters, as falsely alleged by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, and in MSNBC's Chris Matthews' words, a "Brooks Brothers Brigade." Majority Leader Harry Reid calls them "Astroturf" to pretend that those opposing Obama's health-care bill are artificial grass-roots.
The opponents of socialized medicine are just ordinary citizens, many of whom (like Gladney) had never before attended a political meeting, and many who are alumni of the spontaneous Tea Parties. There is no evidence that they are organized and financed by the insurance companies, or even by the Republican Party.
On the other hand, there is evidence that Obama's "punch back" tactics are organized. MoveOn.org sent out a "Dear MoveOn member" email stating: "We've got a plan to fight back against these radical right-wingers. We've hired skilled grass-roots organizers who are working with thousands of local volunteers to show Congress that ordinary Americans continue to support President Obama's agenda for change. And we're building new online tools to track events across the country and make sure MoveOn members turn out at each one."
Emanuel is also using intimidation to make the public believe that the stimulus spending is solving the unemployment problem. He orchestrated four letters to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer from four Cabinet secretaries threatening to cut off Arizona's federal funding because of Sen. Jon Kyl's, R-Ariz., criticism of the stimulus.
A letter to Emanuel from Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, described the threat, which Issa called "Chicago-style tactics." Issa wrote, "While this type of scare tactic may work in Chicago, it will not work to intimidate me or other members of the United States Congress."
Since Emanuel's "punch back" tactics are now becoming nationally known, it's no wonder that Americans are apprehensive about the White House plan to build a database of citizens who oppose Obama's health-care legislation. The database will be secret, but the fact that the White House is building it has leaked out.
On Aug. 3, Obama's media people posted on the White House Website a notice complaining that "disinformation about health insurance reform" may be spread "via chain emails or through casual conversation." The word goes out to Obamaites: "Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help."
What kind of help is the White House requesting? The instruction to Obama devotees states: "If you get an email or see something on the Web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."
As Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said, "It is inevitable that the names, email address, IP addresses and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House" (where Emanuel is director-in-chief of Chicago-style retaliation and intimidation).
No doubt Emanuel knows that the White House is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, which means he can keep the names on the database secret for political purposes, and that the Presidential Records Act requires the White House to preserve its records without having to release them to the public for more than 10 years.
Late breaking news: Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., just announced that at her next town hall meeting, she will answer only selected written questions and not allow anyone to speak.
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