And Speaking Of Green...

I am green with envy - Jim Hoft, the Gateway Pundit, is credited in the WaPo as the guy who will bring down the Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones.  Not since Captain Ed brought down the Canadian government has a blogger struck so mightily [one, two, three, almost, got 'em!].

White House Says Little About Embattled Jones

White House officials offered tepid support Friday for Van Jones, the administration's embattled energy efficiency guru, who has issued two public apologies this week, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."

...

Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck all but declared war on Jones after a group the adviser founded in 2005, ColorofChange.org, led an advertising boycott against Beck's show to protest his claim that Obama is a racist.

But reporters peppered the White House with questions about Jones after the blogger Gateway Pundit reported Thursday that in 2004 Jones had signed a petition circulated by the group 911Truth.org about the 9/11 attacks.

The "blogger Gateway Pundit" has a name - too bad the investigative sleuths at the WaPo, Garance something or other and Annne I forget couldn't figure it out.  Of course, Garance Whomever looked down upon righty bloggers back in her American Prospect days, so this is arguably breakthrough stuff.

Lisa Lerer of The Politico has lots but not enough; her lead and more:

Republicans who have spent months criticizing the proliferation of “czars” in the Obama White House have finally landed a major punch.

Over the past few weeks, White House green jobs czar Van Jones has been accused of being a communist, an old lecture video showed him calling Republicans a—holes, and he’s been connected to a Sept. 11 conspiracy group.

Here is how she describes the commie connection:

His affiliation with a 1990s group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement has opened him to accusations that he associated with Communists.

"Associated"?  What about this 2005 interview?

"I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the [Rodney King] verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist."

Mickey Kaus suspects that Van Jones will be clearing out his desk over the weekend.  If so, we hope the the news blackout will lift long enough for people to wish him good-bye.

ON THE OTHER HAND:  In this New Yorker profile of Van Jones he comes off as a successful version of a younger Barack Obama - a radical law student turned community activist who is a colorful, charismatic self-promoter with no actual experince of anything outside the political process.  His current claim to fame is his attempt to merge what he calls the racial grievance justice community with the environmental movement. 

As a matter of coalition politics this is ingenious - a Congressman, or a weary public, might not be inclined to throw money at subsidized inner-city factories, and they might not be inclined to throw money at subsidized "green" factories (producing, e.g., solar panels), but they just might be persuaded to throw money at subsidized green inner-city factories.  The New Yorker does tackle this logic, eventually:

When I presented Jones’s arguments to Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard who studies the economics of environmental regulation, he offered the following analogy: “Let’s say I want to have a dinner party. It’s important that I cook dinner, and I’d also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I’m not going to get very clean and it’s not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single-policy instrument.”

Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at U.C.L.A.’s Institute of the Environment, noted that public-works programs have a history of inefficiency. Why would an environmentally oriented public-works program be any different? “How do we make sure this isn’t just a giant green boondoggle?” he asked.

Don't vex us!  Van Jones seems to have spent a lifetime plying politicians and philanthropies; I am sure it seems like work to him, but others would wonder whether he has ever worked a day in his life.

But that said, here are two points for righties to ponder before Jones says good-bye.  One, he would never be a success as a conventional progressive with an attitude like this:

“I’m not looking for the points of difference. I’m looking for the points of commonality. I’ve trained my mind so that people can say twenty-seven things that might be objectionable, but as soon as they say one, that twenty-eighth thing, that’s in the right direction, that’s where I’m going to go in the conversation. I think that’s really important in a country as diverse as ours, to listen. So this guy, he says, I don’t want this, I don’t want that. But he says, I want everybody to be included. Well, that’s all I need. Dayenu.”

Huh?  Among the current crop of lefties, if you only agree on twenty seven points out of twenty eight, you are a despicable outsider.

Van Jones also says things calculated to shock his audience:

He spends a lot of time listening to speeches—the way most people download Coltrane or Mozart, he’s got Churchill and Martin Luther King on his iPod.

“Ronald Reagan I admire greatly,” he once told me. “You look at what he gets away with in a speech—unbelievable. He’s able to take fairly complex prose and convey it in such a natural and conversational way that the beauty of the language and the power of the language are there, but you stay comfortable. That’s very hard to do.”

Churchill and Reagan!?!

Comments

[daddy]

"daddy we should get you to tape your walks. I doubt I'd survive a 40 mile hike esp thru snow and ice and yet your adventure is appealing.

Posted by: clarice "

Clarice, It was a bike trail and bike ride, not a hike. A 40 miler hike would kill me, but I would love to take you on a nice slow mountain bike trailride down the Turn-again to spot Eagles and bear-poop and Beluga's. Plus I'd finally get to know what grafitti was hidden behind door number 2. Cheers!

BTW, ">http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/09/obama_knew_about_lockerbie_bom.html"> great AT story from you this morning on Hillary and Obama both knowing all about releasing the Lockerbie Terrorist during the entire process, and not saying a word about it. This Administration is as out of tune with the heart-strings of America as any I can think of.

[Snarky]

Funny thing about the Midnight Ride of Van go is that it's gone viral on the Net. While the elite media guys are still vacationing the last of their days away.

Who designs a business model in today's world that's not 24/7? And, then goes 'stupidly' top-heavy with speech writers. Back in Nixon's day you needed to personally hire your own lawyer. Now? Being under the bus provides your escape route.

[DrJ]

Glenda,

The fire was extinguished very quickly. Unlike most CA fires, this one was pretty small (about 250 acres) but it happened to hit at the urban/rural boundary, such as it is here in the boonies. It was extinguished in about a day, but it took 60 structures with it. My neighbor's Harley was saved from a shop that burned to the ground.

The protein work is going well. Most of the government preliminaries have been taken care of, and I am starting to spend money as part of gearing up. So far that is mostly labor: an EE and an ME for various design things and a former CFO for some accounting matters with the feds, and my tech comes back next month. There are many equipment purchases, including a new microscope, a high-speed camera for it, and upgrading of a couple of computers that are terribly old. With good fortune, I will start the clean room work in a couple of weeks.

This is exciting stuff, and if I am not visible here it is that I am very, very busy. This is a good thing!

[glenda]

DrJ..I can sense your fast heartbeat and I hope you have time to keep us updated as you progress...I will be telling all my buds I knew you when...:)Raising a stem of some good zin to your success!

[DrJ]

Thanks for the good wishes, Glenda! What I'm doing is pretty small-scale stuff, though of course I think it is important and useful. There probably will be no headlines anyone will hear about.

Drinking Zin is a good thing! And I will be picking up some Pinot grapes from a good friend in Sonoma county so those too will turn into wine. Russian River appellation, so they should be good.

So three cases in the first year! It's a start!

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Obama is no Stalin, or even FDR. Face it, he’s Jeff Spicoli.

Heh.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Whoa! O's simply incompetent?! Wow. Hard to believe. Are we talking about the same O?

There's no reason you can't be both incompetent and vile.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Hey, Daddy, BTW I hope to visit family in Anchorage and Fairbanks around the end of the month. If you're around I'll happily buy you a beer or something else 12-hour-rule appropriate.

[daddy]

Charlie, Would love to share a brew at Moose's Tooth or wherever. I'll say nothing about Duke:) I'm on a trip near months end, but can I go to your Charlie Martin cite to get an E-mail addy?

[whitehall]

Clarice,

I'll keep beating my head against the wall thank you. I've a non-political day job so I can say what is needed in thought space, as I have for 35 years, including before Barbara Boxer when she represented my part of Marin County. The smart politicians will eventually follow.

Look for an article in American Thinker in a week or two on the subject.