The only "nut" is the "wacko" Van Jones who is now distancing himself from his own documented views like the phony he is. Hiss apology is an apology from a child rapist. It doesn't count for anything. As for SF values, the last time I was on the streets of SF staying at one of the most well known hotels I witnessed in broad daylight a woman squatting between two cars to relieve her bowels. The nearby cop handed her some toilet paper and left it at that. That sums up the culture of San Fran. Like Jones the woman is for me and others who still use indoor private toilets, an icon of San Fran where man is fast turning back into beast through the consensus of mentally ill individuals congregating in a small area. I won't be back to SF for a long long time, I can watch animals defecate at the Zoo and the parking is easier. Needless to say almost anyone having anything to do with SF politics can be dismissed as mentally deficient or mentally ill. I will stop short of giving an expose of the private life and toilet habits of the author of the above article, but just witness Nancy P. whose ability to construct a sentence is also on par with what one finds at a Zoo or at best a pre-school. Have you no shame or no self-image? Have a nice day! :-)

"I won't be back to SF for a long long time"

And THAT just makes my day!

Have any of you read about STORM? This organzation was founded by Van Jones, read it... and even if you hadnt seen the other videos, this is enough reason for him not to be allowed into goverment in the USA

http://www.capitalresearch.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/stormsummation.pdf

As for Obamas Czars, they all need to be approved by congress before they are allowed to help the president in his work in the USA. Too many radicals in this compliment of Czars.

What's weird about it? There is more than that petition. Here he is in 2002 heading up a committee that was demanding congressional inquiries in The Bush admin's response to 9/11:

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/van-jones-linked-to-9-11-truther.html

(the document is on that site)

There is plenty of video of him calling Republicans "assholes" (over and over) and making racist statements about how only white kids shoot up schools. He marched on behalf of a cop killer, and he was arrested at the Rodney King riots.

That and what the hell does he know about environmental science or where is his experience that gives him the acumen to handle a $30 billion budget of taxpayer money?

Oh wait . . nothing "fishy" here . . .

Tim,

Let me be gentle, most of the views held by the residents of San Francisco are considered "weird" by the vast majority of the country. I've spent a lot of time in your city when I was dating a guy there. I enjoyed it. Yeah it's crazy, yeah there's oddballs everywhere, that's what I like about SF. Do I want these people making key decisions for the country? Hell no! I enjoy the fringe of society, I enjoy people doing their own thing, but you all are crazy and should not be making national policy. Look at the CA budget deficit, what about CA should the nation emulate exactly?

Tim -

Wake up -- Van Jones will not have his job in a week, and it will be the President who fires him. You can blame weird Republicans if you want, but last time I checked the President seemed pretty unconcerned with Republicans of any type, and wacko right wingers don't have the authority to fire one of the Presidents' appointed "Czars".

And Obama will only fire him if he deserves firing.

Watch this space and if you have any integrity at all, after the firing (or "reassigment") you will print an apology for calling people who criticized Van Jones "wackos" -- because the President is going to give him the ultimate criticism, a firing -- and this will confirm that nobody vetted this guy, and as soon as the Administration learned about his past, they agreed with conservative critics and fired the guy. Plain and simple, and it won't hunt to somehow say the Republican critics are wackos but the Democrats who fire the guy are something different. The reality is Van Jones deserves both the criticism, and the firing, that he is going to get as soon as Monday (slow news day, holiday).

Defending someone like this that even the President is not going to defend beyond midweek should truly cause you to be concerned that you have lost your objectivity.

People who think a birth certificate needs to be shown are "wingnuts", but a government official who thinks the government killed 5,000 innocent Americans in the World Trade Center is "normal"?

You are living proof of a lack of objectivity that is beyond the pale, and beyond your President.

Let Obama do his job without pressuring him to keep someone like this who he is clearly going to let go, as quietly as possible, re-assigned to Gnome Alaska, or something like that.

If that happens, and you don't say you were wrong, you aren't a journalist.

Well,maybe if Van Jones hadn't spent the last 10 yrs worshipping at the Church of Karl Marx's Dick and whining 'racism' every time somebody sneezed,he wouldn't be in this mess....cry me a river

Sir,

You say the right wing nuts are slamming Mr. Jones, and I say the left wingnuts are continuously defending people who are fringe, extremist individuals who have no business in top government positions. Many of these "Czars" could not even pass the most basic security clearance. It makes President Obama appear foolish and uninformed for appointing one after another persons with questionable ethics or integrity, or those who quite opendly disdain America. The Democrats chose a candidate who sneered at providing any of the normal background details of his life, as asked of other presidential candidates, leaving him wide open for all the "right wing nut" distractions, which are actually honest questions.

If a Republican president had brought aboard this motley crew of tax cheaters and otherwise extreme whack jobs, I would have been the first to be livid and demand that more suitable candidates be presented. President Obama is sadly treating our government as his personal club where he brings his buddies in to oversee things without any oversight on them. Instead of being advised by the cabinet members who must be confirmed, these people just take over in the supposed "transparent" administration. The president will damage the Democratic party beyond repair before he's done.

Not being able to recognize van jones for the kook that he is more or less brands you as a kook yourself.

Tim...with respect get a grip huh? Van Jones called himself a communist, Van Jones claimed the White Folk's are pumping polution into black neighborhoods, Van Jones signed the truthers petition. Starting to see a pattern here???

Mr Jones might be an icon in SF, but he is not well received in the rest of the country. Why, because he is a racist dickhead who can't control himself. Perhaps he should return to California and preach to the nut cases that return Ms. Pelosi to office over and over again. That and 40 billion dollars and you folks will be able to afford the socialist government you created. Geez

Soo, 911truthers are whack jobs? Read the "911 timeline". You may have some questions about the official story of what happened that day.

Van Jones protesting in 1999 to free Black Panther and cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/10/09/MN91787.DTL

If San Francisco is that far out, then why are people clamoring over one another to live and visit here?

There are communists and then there are communists. I think we all despise those sectarian leftists, like Carlos Petroni and Todd Chretien, who think they're Lenin and are angling to position their leftist political party to dominate the opposition without any plan as to how to take on the capitalists.

Then there are communists like many of us who do not worship at the temple of the free market, who see an activist role for government in reconciling power imbalances.

Most all Americans unite in hating the former, while perhaps half of Americans show some sympathy to the economic position of the latter. In fact, significantly more Americans voted for an interventionist economic policy over the past four years than voted the other way.

But we're faced with a curious development, where a dwindling segment of the American electorate is demanding a do-over on the last election, refusing to acknowledge the outcomes and deal with the consequences. There is an intersection between those individuals and many who revere "southern culture," which is short hand for endlessly refighting the civil war by honoring the losing side on the territory of the winners.

Just as one does not see Germans who had family in the Waffen SS celebrating that culture on the streets of Dresden today, the only way to deal with those who do not accept the outcomes of the Civil War and the 2006 and 2008 elections is with increasingly stern levels of coercion, because that is the definition of terrorism.

Van Jones is another progressive celebrity, and by choosing that path, he has always risked the perils involved with such a high profile. Ella Baker chose a different path, one more grounded and centered, and might hot have shown such a high profile, but did the day to day work that moved things forward.

Its all about tradeoffs.

-marc

Well Van Jones resigned tonight. For better or for worse - it's over.

And Tim - your pathological obsession with Gavin Newsom has become far more alarming than humorous. You really believe he asked his ex-wife to speak up on behalf of him so he could maintain an aura of dependability about this subject? What are you going to do when he's out of office - continue to stalk him and his new wife? This subject has NOTHING to do with Gavin Newsom.

And the people have spoken!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let's take a look at the rest of the ignorant radical czars--one by one...

This administration is a pathetic, woeful joke.

Come on stupid people, Tim said it so it must be true, not sure what it was, too long to read, but god dam it, Tim said it, then it must be true (did i say that already?)

Seems VJ himself is a right wing nut. He went after himself and forced himself to resign. The bastard.

But I'm with Pete: You keep on blogging hard, I need the amusement.

To "Wake Up Redmond"

Well written, but Tim is not a journalist. This is based on what they report(as a newspaper) or more important, don't report.

Not to mention his terrible spelling and grammar.

Jeesh, Tim, it looks like the right wingers are trolling the internet for everyone mentioning anything about Van Jones and then cutting and pasting. I feel compelled to leave you a comment that your views are entirely reasoned and fair. It is truly amazing that red-baiting still has some kind of parlance - long after communism has died and gone. The evidence that the right is way off base in their attacks on Mr. Jones lie in what he has been doing for the last 10 years - namely, raising money from philanthropic foundations (funded by wealthy capitalists) to run IRS designated 501(c)3 organizations (the Ella Baker Center and Green For All). His catapult into the public eye has been due to his skills as a thinker, writer, strategist and orator. He influences people of influence, hardly small cells of plotting communists. In the end, I am not surprised at the vehemence of his attackers - what disturbs me is how easily it has been to lull the mainstream media into becoming a spectator instead of a truth seeker.

We see again a propaganda technique at work here that was perfected during the Reagan regime, where the phrase "The American People" is used to describe little more than fringe right wing lunatics and their corporate sponsors.

Remember "Get the guvmint off of the people's backs?" All that meant was to lower taxes and to hinder access to abortions and to monitor the bedrooms for homosexual sex.

-marc

Also Willie Brown piled in on Van Jones (no doubt payback for Van Jones' criticism of the police commission under Brown) - see Brown interviewed on CBS 5 in their Sept 4 piece on Van Jones (linked from later article.)

Whoa, I was away for the labor day weekend and I come back to discover that the rightwingosphere has discovered my modest post on Van Jones.

For starters, all this San Francisco-bashing amuses me. A city that tries to be tolerant, that supports same-sex marriage and universal health care, is hardly on the "fringe." I think that title belongs to the folks who listen to Glenn Beck.

I'm sorry Jones resigned. I'm sorry the Obama administration couldn't stand up and say to Beck and the others that McCarthyism isn't okay.

Yeah, Jones said that white-owned companies have been dumping poison in black communities. That's absolutely, certifiably, true. He called the Republicans "assholes;" read some of the posts above.

He signed a petition questioning what the Bush Administration said about 9/11. Come on, people: The conspiracy nuts are not the only ones who think there are a lot of real questions about the government's version of what happened that day.

(See http://www.sfbg.com/39/25/cover_conspiracy.html)

What happened here is that a guy who is pretty much in the mainstream of progressive thought (and NOT a communist) got drummed out of office by some red-baiting wingnuts. And Obama couldn't stand up and stop it.

That's not encouraging.

Willie Brown supported Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006, so like Guilfoyle, he's going to sing the tune according to the piper who pays him, like a rat in a cage pushing a bar for more cocaine.

The only reason why the right wing is getting its panties into a bunch over the lightest of 9/11"conspiracy" theories, that the US Government under Bush and Cheney did not take any steps to stop the attacks because of practically unlimited political and economic upsides that indeed ensued, is because there might be a kernel to the prospect.

The notion that the USG took affirmative steps to orchestrate the attacks is ludicrous, however these individuals currently have no compunctions about sending the equivalent number of Americans to six times the number of 9/11 casualties to their preventable deaths each year under the health insurance regime, so I'd not seriously question a political calculus that values the PATRIOT Act, the profitable Iraq and AFPAK wars over 3,000 dead Americans.

They've killed before, are killing now and will kill again, and they will take steps to marginalize any claims in the media which demonstrate this pattern because they're making too damn much money running the system into the ground.

-marc

Jones has as much business being in the government as say, John Ashcroft or some equally crazy right wing idiot.

Anyone who thinks Mumia is innocent other than a person who has read about it from the kooky left in passing twenty years ago, is an idiot and a menace.

It's odd that since Reagan the right has had all manner of religious moron in appointed public office, as well as randian or neo-con kooks running things, the democrats used to in general not have the same type of kooks. Obama seems to want to change that.

Also dude seems as well qualified as Bush's horse trainer FEMA director who was doing a "hell of a job."