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Thursday, September 10, 2009

From Vanjo To JeJo To CaSun

Barry Hussein's radical ties just keeping oozing to the surface. As I have said all along, the people you hang with, call friends and mentors, say a lot about who you are. And we now see, those with eyes open, that Barry is a dangerous leftist radical from the ilk of the 60's devil spawns. And they are guiding the Chump and Chief.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/ny_tax_funded_ex_terrorist_ktSaBCwrr6MDK2gMz7xqhN
VAN Jones resigned as White House green-jobs czar after the public got a look at his history of radical activism, including his time building the so-called Apollo Alliance -- a coalition of left-wing interest groups unified around the green-jobs concept. But another, even more radical Jones (not related) is leading Apollo's New York state activities.
Jeff Jones was a domestic terrorist in the late '60s and a fugitive from justice throughout the '70s -- yet now he's a leader of an influential, taxpayer-funded group.
Jones was a fugitive from justice for 11 years. His own account at his Web site says: "As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son."
With Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers, Jones in 1969 co-founded the radical Weatherman, which orchestrated the violent "Days of Rage" riots in Chicago, and later undertook an anti-government bombing campaign. Three of its members died when a bomb they were constructing to attack Fort Dix accidentally detonated in Greenwich Village.
And Jones is still proud of his terrorist activities -- saying as recently as 2004: "To this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to try to do."
Now, Jones is back to revolutionary organizing -- but with taxpayers footing the bill. He's the director of the Apollo Alliance's New York affiliate and a consultant to the national group.
Apollo unifies the three most powerful elements of the political left -- environmental groups, labor unions and street organizers like ACORN -- and points them toward a common goal that enriches all of them under the banner of "green jobs." (Van Jones was an Apollo board member until he joined the White House staff.)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently credited Apollo with helping write the stimulus bill and getting it passed. Yet the stimulus' "green jobs" provisions funnel federal tax dollars to unions, green groups and community organizers -- that is, the organizations that make up Apollo.
Green jobs serve a political purpose, but not an economic one. The evidence from Spain and elsewhere is ample -- each green job created destroys more than two other jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Jeff Jones counts among his consulting clients (along with Apollo) a half-dozen state and local environmental groups and the Workforce Development Institute (WDI), a union-controlled organization ("developed in partnership with the NYS AFL-CIO," it says) that works with state and local government and universities.
WDI's mission is to support union influence on state and local governments. It gets state tax dollars to do it -- to the tune of $4.8 million in this year's Education, Labor and Family Assistance budget bill.
WDI is so tightly integrated with Apollo that it features a full page of Apollo information on its Web site (wdiny.org), which appears to be the primary Web presence of Apollo's New York branch. WDI encourages its members and program participants to attend Apollo Alliance events.
As a consultant to WDI, Jones is helping write the grant proposals for federal stimulus funds -- funds authorized in the bill Apollo helped write, presumably ensuring that taxpayer dollars end up in the hands of groups that share Apollo's political agenda.
Anyone should be entitled to spend his or her own money on political organizing, but Apollo and WDI are spending taxpayer dollars to organize a coalition of extreme environmentalists, labor unions and social-justice street organizers.
That's bad enough in itself, but to have the effort spearheaded by an unrepentant domestic terrorist is a true outrage.
Phil Kerpen is director of policy for Ameri cans for Prosperity. philkerpen.com
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/09/sunstein-flunks-gun-rights-test/
Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein, the president's embattled nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, misfired one time too many.
Mr. Sunstein has been assuring Second Amendment advocates, including key Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, that he strongly believes the Constitution protects an individual right to bear arms. In a July 14 letter clarifying his positions at the request of the senator, Mr. Sunstein wrote: "Your first question involved the Second Amendment. I strongly believe that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to possess and use guns for purposes of both hunting and self-defense. I agree with the Supreme Court's decision in the Heller case, clearly recognizing the individual right to have guns for hunting and self-defense. If confirmed, I would respect the Second Amendment and the individual right that it recognizes."
There's no wiggle room in that statement, and Mr. Chambliss dropped his hold on the nomination based on Mr. Sunstein's assurances. But it turns out that the professor has held a certain contempt for the very viewpoint he suddenly claims to espouse.
A videotape has surfaced of a lecture Mr. Sunstein gave at the University of Chicago on Oct. 23, 2007. Here is what he said: "My coming view is that the individual right to bear arms reflects the success of an extremely aggressive and resourceful social movement and has much less to do with good standard legal arguments than [it] appears." Discussing the anti-gun laws in the District of Columbia, he said a critic of such strict gun control would say that a "trigger lock interferes with his efforts at self-defense against criminals. What on Earth does that have to do with the Second Amendment as originally understood?"
Later in the lecture, Mr. Sunstein said, "My tentative suggestion is that the individual right to have guns as it's being conceptualized now is best taken as a contemporary creation and a reflection of current fears - not a reading of civic-centered founding debates."
Mr. Sunstein's overt hostility to the idea that the Constitution protects an individual right to bear arms, including for purposes of self-defense, is not something that should be welcomed from somebody whose job might entail weighing in on the value of anti-gun regulations. It also makes his more recent assurances that he is a Second Amendment stalwart seem rather disingenuous, at the very least.