It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Saturday morning (link won’t work until then) when the blackout expires.

The core question of the column:

So why is Jones gone, while the likes of Tim Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, and Charlie Rangel, to name just a few, are still footloose, fancy-free, and federally employed?

Bonus point:

All of that said, the fact remains that Van Jones has from all appearances not recently committed a crime, has apparently paid his societal penance for his past crimes, and has not committed an error of commission or omission during his brief tenure that would have justified a forced “resignation.” Shoot, if you look around at others in the administration like John Holdren, Zeke the Bleak Emanuel, Carol Browner, Eric Holder, and others, you could probably make a good argument that Jones’ beliefs are in the mainstream of Obama administration and Democratic congressional political thought.

Allah at Hot Air nails one aspect of Obama’s POS (Pretty Obstinate Speech) last night:

“Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing,” says the guy who’s committed to doing nothing about social security, Medicare, and the mind-bogglingly enormous deficits that promise fiscal catastrophe in the years ahead while he saddles America with yet another red-ink-bleeding government program. Note well: He’s actually promoting a plan that will lead to health-care rationing as a way to prolong Americans’ lives. We’re living your dream, Orwell.

The still of the vid at Hot Air captures what looks to be our Punk President at the height of a sizzling seethe.

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Several years ago, a guy named Joe Wilson was the hero of the press when he falsely and serially claimed that now-proven truth-teller George W. Bush was lying when he said that ”The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

As we now know from the Butler report, the “16 words” were true, and doubly so.

Last night a congressman named Joe Wilson lost control and rudely called the President Obama a liar (according to the News York Times, he said “You lie!”

He was wrong to have done so when he did, and should be sorry about losing control.

He can’t possibly be sorry about what he said because the claim that Obama made — that health care “reform” as currently envisioned in the legislation that is known would not cover illiegal immigrants — is objectively false.

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As to whether Congressman Wilson shouted “You Lie!” or “Liar,” Obama has told so many lies about health care “reform” legislation alone that quibbling about which word Wilson used is a distinction without a difference.

As Doug Ross has succinctly pointed out, for Barack Obama to be telling the truth, you have to believe that each and every one of the following are all lying:

• The Congressional Budget Office (in five different instances).
• Senator Robert Menendez and .
• La Raza.
• Obama himself, in previous years, in several ways, not the least of which is his previous video-captured support for a single-payer system.

I would also add to Doug’s list, in reference to the lie that abortion coverage is not in health care “reform” legislation”:

• Every pro-life organization and publication that I’m aware of that has read various versions of proposed legislation says it is.
• The Associated Press says it is.
• Roughly one dozen Democratic congresspersons on Matt Drudge’s list of supposed health care “reform” opponents in essence acknowledged in a June 25 letter that abortion coverage is in proposed legislation as it currently exists.

Update: Michelle Malkin –

But it was Obama who said himself in the speech: “If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out.”

That’s what Joe Wilson was doing, wasn’t it?

Indeed, for this and many other reasons, the Left, its Punk President, and its Gangster Government can put its manufactured outrage where the sun doesn’t shine.

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From Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media (HT Powerline), historical context around his Ella Baker Freedom Center.

Ousted “green jobs czar,” 9/11 Truther and 9/11 “Deserver” Van Jones named the Center after someone who “was so pro-Communist that she attacked Hubert Humphrey and other liberal anti-Communists as ultra reactionaries. Known as the “grandmother of SNCC (the laughably misnamed Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee),” Baker was aligned with those in the movement who were trying to push the organization to the far left.”

Well, look at the bright side: At least he didn’t name the Center after Stokely Carmichael or H. Rap Brown.

Jack Webb Schools Barry on America (From Tom — This can be seen partially as a response to the POS [Pretty Obstinate Speech] Obama foisted on a joint session of Congress tonight):

That’s a fact, Jack.

The Obama administration and its car-czar group appear to be intent on teaching someone who got in their way a brutal lesson.

If there’s another way to interpret what is going on involving the “Old Chrysler,” the company’s first-lien secured lenders, and the US Treasury, I want to know what it is.

Readers may recall that in early May, the car-czar group, in what columnist Michael Barone accurately characterized as “an episode of Gangster Government,” bullied those same lenders into accepting payment well below that to which they were entitled. At the time, attorney Tom Lauria, representing a group of what he called “non-TARP lenders,” told Detroit talk host Frank Beckmann that his group was willing to accept 50% payment of their claims (despite their entitlement under contract law to 100%) to avoid forcing Chrysler to liquidate.

The government had already convinced Chrysler’s first-lien TARP lenders (so named because these lenders are among those forced by Hank Paulson in October 2008 at figurative gunpoint to accept government “investment”) to settle for 29%. Treasury and Barack Obama’s car-czar group insisted that the non-TARP lenders do the same, in the interest of giving unsecured creditors, principally the United Auto Workers union’s health care trust (whose rights under contract law were junior to those of the secured lenders) a bigger share, much of which was converted into stock of “new Chrysler.” Under what Lauria described to Beckmann as an atmosphere of direct threats and intimidation, most of the holdouts buckled. After unsuccessful court appeals, the deal giving secured lenders $2.0 billion of the $6.9 billion involved went through.

Secured creditors’ claims stayed in the “Old Chrysler,” which was stripped of most of its value. The ownership structure of “New Chrysler” that emerged turned out to be the following, according to this September 4 Bloomberg report – U.S. Government — 9.85%; Fiat Motors — 20%; Canadian government — 2.46%; the UAW’s health care trust — 67.69%. Secured creditors have no stake in “New Chrysler.”

An inherent assumption in all of this was that “Old Chrylser” would not repay the government bailout money that was “lent” to it, as described in this CNNMoney.com item from early May (“Chrysler LLC” is “Old Chrysler; “New Chrysler” did not yet exist):

Chrysler LLC will not repay U.S. taxpayers more than $7 billion in bailout money it received earlier this year and as part of its bankruptcy filing.

This revelation was buried within Chrysler’s bankruptcy filings last week and confirmed by the Obama administration Tuesday. The filings included a list of business assumptions from one of the company’s key financial advisors in the bankruptcy case.

Some of the main assumptions listed by Robert Manzo of Capstone Advisory Group were that the Treasury would forgive a $4 billion bridge loan given to Chrysler in the closing days of the Bush administration, a $300 million fee on that loan, and the $3.2 billion in financing approved last week by the Obama administration to fund Chrysler’s operations during bankruptcy.

An Obama administration official confirmed Tuesday that Chrysler won’t be repaying the loans ….

“Old Chrysler” is still in bankruptcy, and in the process of liquidating. The proceeds from that liquidation, up to $2 billion, are supposed to go to the secured lenders first.

But guess what? The same Bloomberg article by Linda Sandler and Erik Larson referenced earlier tells us that the government apparently now wants the $3-billion plus in bankruptcy financing back (bolds are mine):

The U.S. Treasury has sent the bankrupt remains of Chrysler LLC a default notice, saying the company failed to pay back a loan due June 30.

Treasury sent the notice of default on Aug. 13, said old Chrysler, now known as Old Carco LLC, in a bankruptcy court filing today. The U.S. government lent Old Carco $3.34 billion to complete its bankruptcy, according to the filing.

Old Carco said it was negotiating with Treasury to “address” the default. The best assets of the old company were sold to a group led by SpA. Old Carco has now reported an $11.8 billion loss on the Fiat sale, leading to a net loss of $10.2 billion in June, court records show.

The company’s private creditors, who lent Chrysler $6.9 billion and expected to get about $2 billion back from the Fiat sale, might get nothing if the Treasury demanded payment of its loans, said the lawyer for a group of creditors who tried to block the Fiat deal earlier this year.

“Having stripped Chrysler’s first lien lenders of $5 billion in connection with the sham sale of Chrysler’s assets to a shell corporation, Treasury is now trying to make it difficult for the lenders to recover any of their losses from the scraps that were left behind,” said Thomas Lauria, who represented the group, in an e-mail today.

Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly declined to comment.

‘Nothing at All’

“Neither Chrysler nor the government could have expected the loan would actually be repaid that quickly,” said Lynn LoPucki, who teaches bankruptcy law at the University of California, Los Angeles and Harvard.

“What they must have intended was that the bankruptcy estate of old Chrysler would be at the mercy of the government. In the current negotiations, the government will decide how much, if anything, it will leave in the estate for other creditors of Chrysler — including the professionals working in the case. That can be nothing at all,” he said.

The new automaker run by Fiat, Chrysler Group LLC, would be unaffected by a Treasury demand for payment ….

A Google News search on “Chrysler Lauria” (not in quotes) shows no other press coverage of these developments other than Bloomberg’s Friday before a holiday weekend report. A similar search on “Chrysler default” has very few items. A Detroit Free Press article reporting the government’s default notice makes no mention of the potential disappearance of what secured lenders thought they would receive.

It would appear that both the TARP and non-TARP lenders will be equally affected if Treasury carries out what is from all appearances an outrageous $2 billion double-cross. But the compliant TARP lenders are big money-center banks who are at the tender mercies of Obama administration and other government regulators. Perhaps they’ve been told that going along with a complete washout is in their best long-term interest (“nice bank you have there; it would be a shame if something were to happen to it”).

The non-TARP lenders, on the other hand, as Lauria described them back in May, are “pensioneers, teachers’ credit unions, personal retiree accounts, retirement plans, college endowments.” If it occurs, a zero-out will likely devastate many of these people and entities. It’s hard not to think that from the government’s point of view, a wipeout would teach them, their uppity lawyer, and more importantly anyone else who might want to challenge the omnipotent Uncle Barack & Co., that there will be a terrible price to pay for standing in their way.

It’s hard to see how anyone knowing the facts and sordid circumstances of the Chrysler bankruptcy and its aftermath can defend buying a vehicle from “New Chrysler.”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Thomas Sowell nails Obama’s desperate attempt to save face tonight, before he even utters a word…

Listening to a liar

The most important thing about what anyone says are not the words themselves but the credibility of the person who says them.

The words of convicted swindler Bernie Madoff were apparently quite convincing to many people who were regarded as knowledgeable and sophisticated. If you go by words, you can be led into anything.

… One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess — for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

… If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next presidential election?

… If we do not believe that the president is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it. Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.

… There are lots of people in the Obama administration who want to do things that have not been done before — and to do them before the public realizes what is happening.

Read the whole thing here. It is brilliant as usual.

Camille Paglia mostly gets it about Obama’s school speech yesterday, with a larger point (bold is mine):

Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?

…. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president’s innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to “help” the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?

The “mostly” part is that the school speech was inappropriate in the first place. Those who point to a Reagan speech to kids in November 1988 as a counter-example forget that someone else had been elected the next president already, and that the Gipper’s work, with the help of Thatcher and Walesa and John Paul II, that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union less than a year later, was already done.

But Paglia’s bolded points are critical, and tie together. In general, government has no business being in the health care business, because as with virtually everything except the military, they screw it up. There is little doubt we’d be better off as a nation today if Medicare had never passed — is that $50 trillion-plus unfunded liability an unfortunate bug or a statist feature (forcing us to retain the program even when it’s bankrupting us)?.

But the people in this administration are especially pathetic. They can’t orchestrate a school speech without, in their determination to politicize and indoctrinate, botching it. They can’t run a simple auto-purchase rebate program without creating paperwork snafus and chronically late payments. They think that managing a “stimulus” project consists of putting up gaudy self-promotional highway signs (properly characterized as “the president’s marketing plan“) while absolutely nothing happens for weeks and weeks (see Reed Hartman Highway in the Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash for just one of many such examples).

Of course, government shouldn’t be in the business of rationing health care in the first place. But putting the largely incompetent ideologues in this administration in charge of rationing, especially given that authoritarian utilitarians like Zeke the Bleak Emanuel and John Holdren would be hanging around, is sheer madness.

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About the Obama birth certificate issue, I wrote on July 20 that:

I think that either the concerns being raised are valid — or that this is the Mother Of All Sucker-Punches, in which case the full release of proof, if ever deemed necessary, will be delivered when the crescendo hits its db peak to maximize embarrassment. I wish I knew which one it is.

We may be closer to finding out which one it is (“Judge orders trial on eligibility issue”). The judge involved, who “tentatively scheduled a trial for Jan. 26, 2010,” is David O. Carter, a United States District Court Judge for the Central District of California.

Delicious fact of the day: Judge Carter is a Clinton appointee.

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As has been the case for quite a while, Fox News wiped the floor with the other three cable news channels on the Friday before Labor Day. The big news is that Glenn Beck’s 5 PM show led the Fox parade by a mile, not only overall, but also in the 25-54 demographic.

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Yet another reason why the United Nations can’t be taken seriously (and shouldn’t have been by George W. Bush in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War) — “UN Declares Fidel Castro the “World Hero of Solidarity.”

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In advance of the ObamaCare speech tonight, I guess it’s time to bring back the June questions nobody would answer a while ago about a so-called public option insurance arrangement “competing” with private companies who already provide it. The questions illustrate just how absurd and unfair out of the gate the whole idea is.

Here they are:

1. Will the “public plan” pay income and other taxes like the companies who run private plans must? (Example: Aetna alone incurred $790 million in income tax expenses in calendar 2008, and over $3.5 billion in the past four years. The company’s most recent 10-K indicates that this expense is almost entirely related to its Health Care and Group Insurance.)
2. What will anyone do to keep the “public plan” from taking advantage of other unfair breaks, which could at least include general government absorption of administrative costs, sales-tax exemptions, property-tax exemptions, “public service” advertising, and much more?
3. Will the “public plan” be just as vulnerable to class-action and no-limit malpractice lawsuits as private plans currently are?
4. If the answers to Question 1, 2, or 3 are “no” or “I don’t know,” how can you possibly claim to know that the “public plan’s” competition against private plans will be conducted on a level playing field?

The dirty little secret that doesn’t survive five seconds of scrutiny is that “public option” isn’t about “competition,” it’s about elimination of private health insurance coverage under rules of the game that are so obviously unfair it’s amazing that anyone can take the blather about it seriously.

From Lockport, NY:

September 7

It was a fiery crash Aug. 29 that could have taken a life.

But Niagara County Sheriff’s Deputy Roger Schreader broke a window and pulled a trapped woman from her vehicle and to safety. He said he was “just at the right spot at the right time.”

“I was lucky. I was a minute away. If I was anyplace else, five minutes away, it would have been a different outcome,” said Schreader, who also happens to be the recently appointed Cambria Volunteer Fire chief.

Charlene Cescon, 45, of Lockport, had stopped at 5:30 a. m. for an iced tea on her way to her job as activities director at Bristol Village Retirement Community in Amherst. At 5:45 a. m. on South Transit Road near Rapids Road, her Ford Escape was hit head on by a Jeep, which crossed the center median. The Jeep’s driver, Gary Miles, 29, of Gardenwood Drive, Lockport, has been charged with driving while intoxicated.

“I don’t believe in luck. [Schreader] was there for a reason,” said Cescon’s cousin, Terry Roberts. “He acted swiftly and professionally and knew what to do. I’m so grateful he was there. Thank God.

“He saved her life, and so did the nurses [who also stopped on the scene].”

Roberts spoke for Cescon on Thursday, as she had trouble breathing while recovering from her injuries in Erie County Medical Center. Her injuries included a large head laceration and six broken ribs. She underwent surgery Friday on her right heel and ankle, which will need plates and pins, and she is expected to spend another week and a half in the hospital.

Jamielee Reynolds of Newfane, a nurse’s aide from Brothers of Mercy in Clarence, was also on her way to work and saw the accident unfold.

“Of course I stopped. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I didn’t,” she said.

And right behind her were two other passers-by who felt the same, David E. Smith of Lockport and Kelly Duffy, a contract nurse from Lockport who works in Medina.

All three were searching for something to break a window to get Cescon out of her vehicle.

“[Smith] was doing everything he could and it just would not break. He even wrapped a blanket around a chair. We were even throwing things,” said Duffy. “I felt so helpless. I had nightmares about it. It got engulfed so fast. I was looking for burns when she got pulled out. It was just seconds. It just haunts me,” Duffy said.

“If it were not for [Schreader], she wouldn’t be alive today. He didn’t think twice. He sprayed the fire extinguisher to bring the flames back a little,” Duffy said.

Schreader, a deputy for the past six years and the Cambria fire chief since June said, “When you work midnights you live with your flashlight, so I just grabbed my flashlight. I just got my fire extinguisher out of the trunk and punched out the window with my flashlight. Knocked down the fire a bit with my extinguisher and reached in the window a bit. By luck it just opened right up.”

“I don’t care what kind of injuries you have. We’ve got to get her out of the vehicle before she gets hurt,” Schreader said. “You do what you have to do and get her out as fast as you can.

“The newer style cars are made of plastic and do burn a lot hotter and a lot faster. A few minutes later [Cescon's] passenger compartment was consumed in flames. Our little fire extinguishers we do carry are not going to put out a car fire.”

Duffy said she plans to get a hammer so she can be ready for a future emergency and said she attended to Cescon on the scene with her medical bag until the ambulance arrived, and even checked out her condition at ECMC afterward.

“It was weighing on my heart and my mind for days. It was all so surreal. It seems like forever, but it was just minutes,” Duffy said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Okay, lip-synching on TV was not the high point of Del Shannon’s career, but at least he sold something (in fact, quite a bit).

Mary Jo Kilroy’s version of “Runaway” isn’t selling anyone on anything.

First, courtesy of Hourglass 1941 (HT Jawa Report), Mary Jo Kilroy runs away from questions about health care legislation:

As HG1941, who is thankfully turning into MJK’s worst nightmare, notes: “Funny how the crowd shrinks when the White House isn’t stacking the deck or the Unions aren’t involved.”

Now, it’s Del, with the requisite 1950s-1960s bouncing bevy of beauties:

Del’s version of “Runaway” is vastly superior, and sincere.

(Apologies for the vid quality; the original was an old Real Player file. Also, a warning: If you’re sane, sitting through the whole vid may cause your head to explode.)

At a rally in Oakland on the night after the 9/11 attacks, Van Jones (at about the 4:38 mark; HT to NewsBusters.org commenter Merkava) addresses a far-far-left audience:

Text of Van Jones remarks:

• “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.”
• “We’ve got something stronger than bombs, we have solidarity. That dream of revolutionary change is stronger than bombs.”

That second item sounds a bit like someone who occupies the White House, doesn’t it?

No wonder Jones resigned just after midnight on Sunday, mere hours after Powerline spilled the beans about what Jones said at this event.

Also, at about the 3:05 mark, someone who may have been the inspiration for Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright’s sermon (at 2:10 through 2:45 of the video at the link) the next Sunday, talked of “chickens comin’ home to roost.” Imagine that.

Other video lowlights (statements made by others):

• (0:33) “…. use this time to show that we’re really upset about all the violence that is goin’ down not only in New York, but also the violence goin’ down around the world, and that the United States was founded on this kind of terrorism, and it still continues today.”
• (1:10) “We also want to be angry, and allow ourselves to feel that anger and that rage for those stolen lives. We want to also understand though, that those lives were lost because of our government’s inhumane foreign policy. And we should be angry, we should be p***ed off, that what our government does around rest of the world that leads us not to be safe here. That’s what we should be angry at ….”
• (4:10) “But when we knew what those places represented, we were kind of also glad that there’s a place called the Pentagon where, where, military strategies which have killed millions of people around the face of the world (unintelligible). We know, to see that place burnin’, there was some satisfaction to it.”

From the Cry Me a River Dept. at the San Fran Chronicle comes a noteworthy assertion (bold is mine):

The middle-of-the-night resignation Sunday of longtime Bay Area activist Van Jones as a White House environmental adviser left many progressives angry at the Obama administration for buckling to conservative criticism of Jones’ controversial past comments and actions.

…. Supporters say the administration surely knew his background when they appointed Jones, the first African American to write a best-selling environmental book, as special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In fact, agents interviewed at least one of his former supervisors in San Francisco – Eva Paterson – when the FBI vetted his appointment.

…. “He was swift-boated,” said Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink and a San Franciscan who has known Jones for 15 years. She spoke to him recently and said he was “very conflicted” about whether to resign.

Of course, “the administration” knew. Valerie Jarrett knew. Michelle Obama and Joe Biden knew (“Jones’ selection also was propelled by powerful patrons, who included the first lady and the vice president”; HT RipClawe at Narbosa.com). The presumption has to be that Barack Obama knew.

Oh, and here’s a memo to Old Medea Benjamin, who along with the Old Media Establishment couldn’t prevent the American military victory in Iraq under George W. Bush: Thanks for demonstrating once again that the real definition of “swift-boating” is “telling the truth about liberals and far-leftists.”

And in case you missed it over the weekend, Van Jones said that we deserved the 9/11 attacks (“It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.”) — on 9/12/2001.

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Oh, do you remember that 7-page, 63-item questionnaire all Obama appointees were supposed to have completed as part of the vetting process? Van Jones didn’t do one. Note that the FBI interviewed at least one person in connection with vetting Jones. This would indicate that the FBI did their normal investigative thing with Jones.

One of the purposes of such an investigation is to ensure that people, even in entry-level jobs, as noted here, are “reliable, trustworthy, of good conduct and character, and of complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.”

As if even needed, this is more evidence that Valerie Jarrett, Joe Biden, and Michelle Obama knew. The presumption has to be that Barack Obama knew about Van Jones, and from all appearances was, and still is, okey-dokey with him. The only reason he had to go is that he was getting in the way.

Yes, I’m repeating the following sentence …. In case you missed it over the weekend, Van Jones said that we deserved the 9/11 attacks (“The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City”) – on 9/12/2001.

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Michelle Malkin has done a review of the latest czar model, Ron Bloom.

Bloom has “no actual, specialized experience in manufacturing,” but does have experience “running struggling companies into the ground and exploiting their workers.”

Tom Maguire has much more — He wonders whether “Mr. Bloom is interested in promoting manufacturing jobs, or unionized manufacturing jobs.” I don’t.

We’re in the very best of hands (/sarc).

What’s also weird about all of this is that Bloom appointment was known two weeks ago, yet the Cincinnati Enquirer treated Obama’s announcement of the appointment at a Labor Day labor union picnic on Friday as if it were some kind of noteworthy “breaking” news.

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Can’t believe it, and can’t make it up — “Read the bill? It might not help.” Money quote: “But reading actual legislative text is often the least productive way to learn what’s actually in a bill.”

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Meanwhile, in the Fannie Mae debacle …. (brace yourself) …. taxpayers are paying the legal bills of looting executives like Frank Raines.

The “resignation” shortly after midnight on Sunday morning of President Obama’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones has generally been seen as a convenient holiday weekend move.

By Friday, after White House Secretary Robert Gibbs would only say that he still was a part of the administration, it was obvious that Jones’s resignation was only a matter of time. The 9/11 truther and other evidence accumulated by Glenn Beck, Gateway Pundit, WorldNetDaily, and others was simply overwhelming.

But it seems to me that it would have been more convenient had the White House waited until early Sunday afternoon to announce Jones’s resignation. Given the establishment media’s near blackout of his past statements and actions, it’s likely that the Sunday morning network talk shows would have avoided Jones completely, or would have given the topic very short shrift. A Sunday afternoon resignation would have been much more invisible — except for something that came out on Saturday evening.

I believe that Jones’s resignation may have been moved up by 12 hours or so. That’s because on Saturday evening, Scott Johnson at Powerline presented proof that roughly 40 hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, avowed Communist Jones publicly declared that the U.S. deserved what happened. I’m not kidding.

Jones’s statements are the functional equivalents of Jeremiah Wright’s outrageous “America’s chickens coming home to roost” rant at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (y’know, the church Obama attended for almost two decades while managing to hear nothing inflammatory from Pastor “G__ D___ America“). They need to be more widely known.

Here they are, as reported by a far left web site early in the morning on Wednesday, September 13, 2001, covering an event in Oakland held on the evening of September 12:

Let’s repeat: “The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City.”

++++++++++++++++++

UPDATE: At the end of the video posted here (HT to NewsBusters commenter Merkava), Jones says, “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.” This is either a different statement made the same evening, or the statement IndyBay quoted incorrectly. It is arguably more extreme than what IndyBay quoted.

++++++++++++++++++

Keep in mind that Jones (in the original IndyBay quote) had to be referring to either the first Gulf War or no-fly-zone incidents, as the war to remove Saddam Hussein did not begin until 2003.

Charleston Daily Mail blogger Don Surber had this reaction to Powerline’s post a short time later: “(This is) the smoking gun that will either bring down Van Jones or Barack Obama. It is President Obama’s choice.” That choice was obvious.

From a White House media strategy standpoint, Jones’s dead-of-night resignation unfortunately ensured that he would be a topic of conversation Sunday morning, but it minimized the chance of Powerline’s bombshell becoming part of the conversation. Sure, David Axelrod had to go through the discomfort of laughably claiming that “this was Van Jones’ own decision.” That’s a mere occupational annoyance. Given the chattering class’s reluctance all along to tell viewers the full truth about Jones, his resignation gave them an opening to change the topic from “What did he say and do?” to “Whose fault is it?” (meanie bloggers, talkers, and Republicans, not necessarily in that order) and “How will this hurt the administration?” (of course, in their view and with their weeks of help, not much). No additional information about Jones himself was necessary to fuel that discussion.

The White House did the best it could with a bad situation suddenly made much worse by Powerline, and the media met the White House’s see-no-new-evil wishes/expectations. Mission accomplished: Few people know that Jones believed, and still presumably does (in the context of everything else, why shouldn’t we?), that America deserved the 9/11 attacks. You can make book that the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the rest of the establishment press will ignore what you’ve seen here.

One thing we don’t know is how aware of Jones’s “deserver” views Obama’s close left-hand adviser Valerie Jarrett was when she made this statement in mid-August:

So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House.

If we’re to believe Jarrett’s boast, the answer is “very.”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

This post is a BizzyBlog Labor Day tradition.

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From the US Department of Labor’s web site (Update, Sept. 2010: New link to archive.org page):

The History of Labor Day
Labor Day: How it Came About; What it Means

“Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country,” said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. “All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day…is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

Founder of Labor Day

More than 100 years after the first Labor Day observance, there is still some doubt as to who first proposed the holiday for workers.

Some records show that Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, was first in suggesting a day to honor those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.”

But Peter McGuire’s place in Labor Day history has not gone unchallenged. Many believe that Matthew Maguire, a machinist, not Peter McGuire, founded the holiday. Recent research seems to support the contention that Matthew Maguire, later the secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, N.J., proposed the holiday in 1882 while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York. What is clear is that the Central Labor Union adopted a Labor Day proposal and appointed a committee to plan a demonstration and picnic.

The First Labor Day

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Labor Day Legislation

Through the years the nation gave increasing emphasis to Labor Day. The first governmental recognition came through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. From them developed the movement to secure state legislation. The first state bill was introduced into the New York legislature, but the first to become law was passed by Oregon on February 21, 1887. During the year four more states — Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — created the Labor Day holiday by legislative enactment. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1894, 23 other states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28 of that year, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.

A Nationwide Holiday

The form that the observance and celebration of Labor Day should take were outlined in the first proposal of the holiday — a street parade to exhibit to the public “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations” of the community, followed by a festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families. This became the pattern for the celebrations of Labor Day. Speeches by prominent men and women were introduced later, as more emphasis was placed upon the economic and civic significance of the holiday. Still later, by a resolution of the American Federation of Labor convention of 1909, the Sunday preceding Labor Day was adopted as Labor Sunday and dedicated to the spiritual and educational aspects of the labor movement.

The character of the Labor Day celebration has undergone a change in recent years, especially in large industrial centers where mass displays and huge parades have proved a problem. This change, however, is more a shift in emphasis and medium of expression. Labor Day addresses by leading union officials, industrialists, educators, clerics and government officials are given wide coverage in newspapers, radio, and television.

The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.