Van Jones One Foot Out The Door

Add Sen John Cornyn (R) to the fray. I quote Sen Cornyn "This guy has to go" unquote. Thank you Senator Cornyn.

Steve
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From the San Fransisco Chronicle


Obama adviser on green jobs under attack
Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, September 5, 2009

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.

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.