Author: Randy Slovacek

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George Clooney on “selling the Obama administration”

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“I’m disillusioned by the people who are disillusioned by Obama, quite honestly, I am.

Democrats eat their own. Democrats find the singular issues and go, “Well, I didn’t get everything I wanted.”

I’m a firm believer in sticking by and sticking up for the people whom you’ve elected.

If (Obama) was a Republican running, because Republicans are better at this, they’d be selling him as the guy who stopped 400,000 jobs a month from leaving the country.

 They’d be selling him as the guy who saved the auto industry.

 If they had the beliefs, they’d be selling him as the guy who got rid of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” who got Osama bin Laden.

You could be selling this as a very successful three years.”

– George Clooney

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Exxon Mobil hits new low in LGBT history

The Texas-based company, which is No. 2 on the Fortune 500 and has more than 80,000 employees worldwide, last week became the first business to ever receive a negative score on the Human Rights Campaign’s annual Corporate Equality Index.

Exxon Mobil failed to meet any of the criteria for the 2012 Index, and had points deducted for engaging in activities that undermine LGBT equality. As a result, the company received a score of minus-25 from HRC.

Before Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999, Mobil offered domestic partnership benefits and had an employment nondiscrimination policy that included sexual orientation. However, ExxonMobil did away with both the benefits and the policy after the merger, and has repeatedly resisted shareholder efforts to amend the policy to protect gay employees.

The 2012 Index marks the first year HRC has handed out negative scores, and Exxon Mobil was the only company to receive one.

“For over a decade, HRC has urged Exxon Mobil to re-evaluate its employment practices and policies regarding LGBT employees,” HRC spokesman Paul Guequierre said. “They continue to give us, and the entire LGBT community, the cold shoulder.”

Exxon Mobil was one of three companies to receive the 25-point deduction for undermining LGBT equality on the 2012 Index. The other two were New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. and Milwaukee-based Foley & Lardner LLP.
(via Dallas Voice)

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Mississippi Republican Mayor comes out of the closet

Mississippi’s Southaven Mayor Greg Davis admitted publicly for the first time in an interview with The Commercial Appeal that he is gay and has struggled to keep the issue from affecting his public life as mayor of Mississippi’s third-largest city.

“At this point in my life and in my career, while I have tried to maintain separation between my personal and public life, it is obvious that this can no longer remain the case,” Davis said Thursday afternoon at his Southaven home. “While I have performed my job as mayor, in my opinion, as a very conservative, progressive individual — and still continue to be a very conservative individual — I think that it is important that I discuss the struggles I have had over the last few years when I came to the realization that I am gay.”

In 2008, Davis, a Republican, ran unsuccessfully for Congress on a conservative, family-values platform.

He is currently under investigation for improper charges to both his city-issued and personal credit cards.

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Rick Perry: TEXAS MONTHLY’s “Bum Steer of the Year”

From Texas Monthly: As most readers know, every January TEXAS MONTHLY picks a Bum Steer of the Year, an honor conferred on whatever individual we feel has been responsible for the biggest screw-up, gaffe, fumble, stumble, train wreck, or humiliation of the past twelve months. This year our Bum Steer of the Year is Governor Rick Perry.

We’d had our differences with Perry, about whom senior executive editor Paul Burka wrote, back in May: “He excels at consolidating and maintaining power but not at using it to move Texas forward.” But now that the Texas-mocking Yankee press was approaching, what Texan did not want to circle the wagons?

Then came that peculiar speech in New Hampshire, the one where he rambled about tomcats and buried gold, deployed more hand gestures and facial expressions than Ron Washington during a two-out rally, and finally finished by embracing a bottle of maple syrup.

The end came swiftly, in a matter of seconds. Fifty-three of them, to be exact: the time it took the governor to go from trying in vain to name the third agency of government he would shutter as president to giving up and muttering—in a phrase that will surely go down, should his campaign expire, as its perfect epitaph—“Oops.” In that moment all our resistance melted away, and we rushed, shaking our heads in disbelief, into the arms of our unquestionable 2012 Bum Steer of the Year. We didn’t want to, but we had to.

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Ad spending for the Iowa caucuses

The top campaign ad spending in Iowa to date for the upcoming Iowa caucus:

1. Rick Perry $4.3 million
2. Restore Our Future (pro-Mitt Romney group) $2.7 million
3. Make Us Great Again (pro-Rick Perry group) $1.3 million
4. Ron Paul $1.3 million
5. Mitt Romney $536,000
6. Newt Gingrich $233,000
7. Red White and Blue Fund (pro-Rick Santorum group) $200,000.

Some more perspective on Mitt Romney’s TV ad spending: Romney’s actual campaign has barely spent over $1 million. Four years ago at this SAME POINT in the campaign, Romney had already spent more than $10 million on the air…

What a difference a Supreme Court decision makes.
(stats via MSNBC)