June 10, 2009

Jon Voight Calls Obama a “False Prophet”

Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nohodamon/2913473897/" target="new">NoHoDamon</a> used under a Creative Commons license.

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Jon Voight is a brilliant character actor. More than that, he shares responsiblity for Angelina Jolie, for which we are all eternally grateful. But he’s also a committed conservative, a diehard Israel booster, and a guy who’s not afraid to let you know it. His most recent role as arch-villian Jonas Hodges (a comically evil version of Erik Prince) on the Fox show 24 is just another acting job, of course, but may not be that far off from reality. The Midnight Cowboy was a featured speaker at Tuesday’s Senate House Dinner, a GOP fundraiser, where he held forth before party luminaries like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. Needless to say, he’s not a fan of our new president.

From the UK’s Daily Mail:

He said: ‘It was amazing to me how the media and the young generation were taken in by Obama’s false haloistic presence… Obama as a candidate portrayed himself as a moderate, but turned out to be wildly radical.”

… With an audience that included Vice President candidate Sarah Palin and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Voight said: ‘We were the great power of good for the world and we were the liberators of the entire world. We are becoming a weak nation.

‘Obama really thinks he is the soft-spoken Julius Caesar. Republicans need to find their way back to power to free the nation from “this Obama oppression”.’

Naming various Democrats, he said they can be blamed for the ‘downfall of this country’.

 

And when it comes to former President Bush, Voight has nothing but warm and fuzzies. Bush was simply a victim of a liberal conspiracy. Says Voight:

“The Democrats fulfilled their mission to paint President Bush as a war-monger and once they were able to reach all the youth in colleges and on the internet with this lie, painting him as ‘the evil one’, never giving him credit for keeping our country safe, once they had established that is was easy to bring in ‘the one’ as Oprah Winfrey crowned him.”

As for Palin, she was a bit friendler towards of Obama, saying, “He’s a very nice man… but pay attention to his policies.” For footage of Voight’s tirade, click here.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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