Let’s start with the good news before going right to the crazy.

Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president and CEO of the NAACP has named Van Jones as a recipient of the civil rights organization’s highest NAACP Image Award for 2010—The President’s Award.

Van Jones is an American treasure.

He is quite simply one of the few Americans in recent years to have generated powerful new ideas that are creating more jobs here.
He wrote the national bestseller, “The Green Collar Economy,” which provided the definitive blueprint for retooling American industry to create pathways out of poverty and generate a national economic recovery. He was a driving force behind passage of the 2007 Green Jobs Act. In fact, Van’s ideas have helped lead to the creation of tens of thousands of jobs across the industrial Midwest and throughout the nation’s decaying urban and rural areas.

Van Jones also may be the most misunderstood man in America.

He resigned from the White House last year after some sought to discredit him for missteps, such as political statements made years ago. However, we can never afford to forget that a defining trait of our country is our collective capacity to practice forgiveness and celebrate redemption. This is a nation built on second chances.

His appointment as President Obama’s “green jobs” czar occurred early on—and his tenure experienced a death by a thousand right wing cuts and resigned/was tossed under the bus (you make the call), for a controversial past. The smear machine worked.

Jones, who joined the administration in March as special adviser for green jobs at the CEQ, had issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition in 2004 from the group 911Truth.org that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war” and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

His one-time involvement with the Bay Area radical group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), which had Marxist roots, had also become an issue. And on Saturday his advocacy on behalf of death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of shooting a Philadelphia police officer in 1981, threatened to develop into a fresh point of controversy.

But what has earned Jones the NAACP President’s Award is is present contributions to society, not what he has already apologized for in the past:

Through Green for All, and others organizations, Van Jones continues to work for an American economy that can thrive again—a nation whose prosperity reaches beyond Wall Street to Main Street and back streets. A country where jobs in installation, manufacturing and construction flourish again—to upgrade our homes to conserve energy, create solar panels, build electric cars, and manufacture wind turbines and smart batteries.

Furthermore, Van is working to make sure that our country does not lose out to India, China or Germany in the green industrial race. His vision gives us a fighting chance to reclaim something we lost years ago, back when steel was king. In those days, blue-collar workers could support their families with their wages, and our nation was not the world’s leading debtor. Van’s vision, in short, is a vision for America restored to its place as the definitive world economic leader.

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With that in mind, it was interesting to see this tripe land in my inbox from Coral Ridge Ministries pimping its outlandish TV show that includes Van Jones in a less-than-celebratory, fact-based manner.  Unleash the crazy below the fold…

Radical Nature of Obama’s White House “Czars” Exposed in Nationwide TV Special to Air Sun., Feb. 28

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL (February 23, 2010)

Obama’s appointees are “bent on socialist policies; there’s really no other way to describe it,” stated Robert Knight, Coral Ridge Ministries’ Washington, D.C., Correspondent and author of the explosive new book, Radical Rulers: The White House Elites Who Are Pushing America Toward Socialism.

The roster of White House radicals profiled on the TV special include:

* Carol Browner, the President’s “Climate change czar,” found to be a member of the Socialist International.

* Van Jones, formerly the President’s “Green Jobs Czar,” responsible for finding ways people could be employed through alternative energy development. Jones resigned after revelations that he was a self-avowed Communist.

* Kevin Jennings, the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, appointed “Safe Schools Czar” in the Department of Education. Jennings advocates a radical homosexual agenda that includes instructing public school students to accept homosexuality.

“Barack Obama has surrounded himself with probably the most radical group of advisors of any previous administration in American history,” said Dr. Gary Cass, President of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, on the broadcast.

The TV special looks at other radicals commissioned by the current administration to bring “change” to America—individuals like Chai Feldblum, a law professor, lesbian activist, and advocate of polygamous marriage, nominated to serve as an Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner.

Feldblum announced at a 2004 seminar a “strategic plan” to bring about the gay agenda in the workplace this way: “It requires the statement that ‘gay sex is morally good.’... The idea is we want to change the American workplace and we want to revolutionize social norms.”

“The real disaster with President Obama is the fact that the public has absolutely no say- so in what’s happening [with appointees]. This is completely unprecedented,” said Janice Shaw Crouse, executive director of The Beverly LaHaye Institute and a guest on the TV special. Obama’s czars “require no Senate confirmation, and nobody knows who is being appointed. They are appointed under the radar.”

Program host Dr. Jerry Newcombe asks Knight on the broadcast if he believed Americans had any idea about Obama’s radical agenda, now evident in the nature of his appointees.

“Surveys show that Americans have changed their views of Obama,” Knight said. “The people who once believed that he was a centrist, a moderate, a bargainer who could bring parties together, now believe that he’s a divisive, leftist, big government, big spending President, and they don’t like what he’s doing.”

Knight’s brand new book, Radical Rulers, is available at www.radicalrulers.org.

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INTERVIEW REQUESTS

Coral Ridge Ministries is a Christian media outreach founded by the late Dr. D. James Kennedy. Its programming reaches a national television, radio, and Internet audience at

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