By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jun 18, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
We all say this almost weekly when describing to others what it’s like to live in Louisville.
“It’s a great place to live and raise a family” I’ve said over 3000 times. And meant it each time.
Sure, it’s not “edgiest… city”, or “fastest growing city” or “fastest dying city” or any of the other more thrilling adjectives that would be more conducive to a burst of adrenaline.
But Louisville isn’t where people move to for an adrenaline rush. It’s where people move to after the they’ve tried the “adrenaline rush” cities and found them wanting.
They’ve learned the hard way that a uniquely “livable city” was what they were really looking for all along…and just didn’t know it. At least that’s my story. And I know it’s a common one.
Louisville is not a city full of cheap external thrills. Rather it is a city that allows us to become our better selves internally.
Congrats Louisville. On being great –in fact, the best–at being a good place to live.
I’d put it this way: LA, NY, Chicago, Dallas, New Orleans, Philly, Cindy, Indy, Atlanta and Nashville are all fun cities to date. But Louisville is the city that you are going to want to marry.
By Jason Grill, on Mon Jun 18, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET  President Clinton and his New Democrat “DLC” policies of the 1990s are what President Obama’s team need to be embracing, not running from.
President Clinton is one of the most effective allies for President Obama and he should brush off the recent remarks.
Clinton is a huge net positive for Obama on anything economic or job creation related. President Obama should not make the same mistake Al Gore made in 2000.
The more Obama is seen with Clinton the better he will do in key swing states and overall in the 2012 election.
(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from Politico’s Arena)
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jun 18, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET  JYB Sr., JYB Jr. and JYB III circa 1972 This Father’s Day I received an unexpected almost magical gift at 11pm on the plane ride home from a family vacation. While clearing out old stored documents on my laptop I found a story written by my grandfather, John Y Brown Sr, whose name I carry, reflecting on the meaning of being a father to his youngest daughter, Pam Brown.
It’s titled “A Life too Short: Pam’s Impossible Dream.”
It is a sad and tragic story….but it is also a celebration of the love of a doting and devoted father for his endearing and adoring youngest daughter.
Pam died at the age of 28 trying –along with her newlywed husband and one other—to be the first persons to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon. It was a quixotic adventure that ended tragically and probably, more than any other single event, defined or redefined my father’s family.
Pam had a flair for the dramatic and in her short life had a distinguished career in theater and television. Actor’s Theatre in Louisville has a portrait of Pam on display (mentioned in my grandfather’s story) –just outside of the theatre that bears her name.
I remember when the balloon went down in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And when some two weeks later when the search parties gave up looking for the bodies. We never talked a lot about it as a family. I suppose it was too painful.
But in my grandfather’s case it appears it was so painful he had to write about it. My grandfather was a thoughtful, kind and thoroughly good man. But not a man who spoke easily about feelings. That all changed for me last night (as I’m sure it changed for other family members when they read or will read this story) as I stumbled across his heartfelt reflection of his relationship with his youngest daughter and her tragic death. It’s a photocopy of the booklet he created– typed out with pictures and some portions written in his own hand when he was about 80 years old.
My grandfather was a man I knew, respected and loved –but didn’t know as well as I wanted to. I’d never glimpsed his most human or fragile side. A side all fathers and grandfathers have. It was a wonderful Father’s Day gift.
From a man who died on Father’s Day 27 years ago yesterday.
By Michael Steele, on Mon Jun 18, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET 
To the dads and soon-to-be dads: Let’s admit it — Father’s Day is one of those “holidays” that even dads are laid back about. In fact, as a young man I never thought much about actually being a father; well at least to the extent that I was planning to become a priest. So, as my stepdad moved from moment to moment in my life, it did not occur to me that he was planting little seeds of information, inspiration and wisdom that I would one day come to rely on in raising my two sons.
What I have discovered for many dads is those moments we have with our children seem to come and go faster and faster leaving little time or room to fully appreciate that our “little ones” are becoming a “young adults” — that is, until you tell her she’s not going out dressed like that; or you demand that your son shave that “mess” off his face.
It’s true at times it may have seemed as if your dad was trying to plan things for you; he really wasn’t. OK, he was (it’s in our nature), but it’s only because as Shakespeare once observed, “It is a wise father that knows his own child.”
Very often it’s hard to appreciate that our journey from infancy to adulthood was as scary for our parents as it was for us. And for many dads, whose role in the home has become the butt of sitcom humor or stereotyped to the point of irrelevancy, that journey remains one of great joy, anticipation and trepidation because, despite the knocks he takes (and sometimes inflicts on himself), he still wants to protect you; and, ultimately, to help you become you. It is, for a dad, a part of the process of letting go.
But what every father knows more than anything else is that being a dad is not about the biological link to a child or about asserting authority over that child or even being a friend, but rather about raising your child to respect and to love him or herself and others. It is about the kind of person that child will be someday.
Read the rest of…
Michael Steele: Lessons From My Father
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jun 15, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET  They’re baaaack…..
Like all consumer savvy Americans, I love a bargain…and up to a point enjoy hunting for good bargains.
But –on Sunday’s especially–I sometimes feel stuck in a labyrinth of coupons, rebates, sky miles, reward points, and special seasonal sales.
All I know is that all those Wall Street financail hot shots who had a role in causing the financial crises (and market meltdown) in 2008 had to turn up again somewhere after many lost their jobs.
I believe they now run the rebate/coupon programs for our leading merchandise chains and are employing the same financial slight of hand to my coupon/rebate decisions.
It’s just a gut feeling. But a pretty strong one.
Maybe there is a new service that can shop for those of us too dumb to figure out what deals are really good ones and which ones aren’t. Or at least please put out a new Dummies book on how to take advantage of these great deals. I just hate that it’s got so complicated to buy good products at competitive prices. It’s more about scissors, mailing addresses and online comparative shopping than feeling a melon for bruises at the grocery. I miss the old fashioned tangible stuff.
Can’t you financial wizards find something else to do. ; )
By Michael Steele, on Fri Jun 15, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET Courtesy of Politico:
 Spotted: Comedian Pauly Shore and former RNC chairman Michael Steele grabbing lunch at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington on Wednesday. Shore is in D.C. to film “Paulytics: Pauly Shore Goes to Washington,” a Showtime special airing in November.
They ordered a cheeseburger, a beef dog, chili cheese fries and regular fries along with a Sprite and bottled water, according to a spokeswoman for Ben’s, who said they stayed for about an hour and a half. The pair also went shopping together according to Twitter reports.
For any Shore fans out there, he’ll be back in town on June 30, taping more footage for his show at the 9:30 Club.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jun 14, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET Nothing gets my morning off to a good start better than being tailgated for 3/4 of a mile.
Geez.
Never been tailgated so closely for so long.
It felt like part reckless driving; part sexual assault.
Well, it just makes such good sense, though. By tailgating me by seeming millimeters, my friend arrived nearly 0.2 seconds earlier at Starbucks, which apparently was very important to him.
And here’s the beauty part. I was in front of him at Starbucks. And moved ahead very slowly in line.
He got the point.
By Krystal Ball, on Thu Jun 14, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET This is a lengthy read but well worth it. Life in one of the poorest counties in the country. [The American Prospect]
By Artur Davis, on Thu Jun 14, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Zoltan Hajnal and Taeku Lee have written an unintentionally distressing account of what they envision American politics will look like in the multi-ethnic, no-one race-in the-majority by 2040 future: highly factional, replete with what they call “narrow casting to different voters”, and loaded up with niche issues that are designed to widen coalitions without simultaneously splintering them. It sounds like the polar opposite of Barack Obama’s coming out party in the Boston Garden in 2004, with its lofty sketches of a politics that avoided racial cleavages and appealed to some common ground.
Interestingly, Hajnal and Lee don’t view it as distressing. They speculate that there is actually a virtue in this kind of politics, in that it would supplant the alternative of one racialized party matched against one white, homogeneous one. It is also striking that they describe their approach of “tightly packaged appeals to targeted [minority] electorates” as a strategic novelty, when it is anything but: even a cursory glance of modern politics yields, on the right, Richard Nixon’s cultivation of Catholics and white ethics, George W. Bush’s deploying of an anti gay marriage initiative to shift black votes in Ohio in 2004; and of course, what Hajnal and Lee describe is a fair rendition of the current Democratic pattern of wedge politics from the left: courting Hispanics with opposition to restrictive local immigration laws, blacks with protective rhetoric about voter ID requirements and, increasingly, with defenses of affirmative action in higher education (an issue the conservative dominated Supreme Court has committed to revisit in the next term).
 Click here to review/purchase book I can cite any number of arguments from both ends of the spectrum why more of the above is hardly a political panacea. From the liberal perspective, there is a quality of cheap symbolism that is really studied avoidance of more contentious ground like African American poverty or citizenship status for illegal immigrants. On the right, policy minded conservatives might lament that the temptation for the GOP to wield gay marriage and perhaps abortion to offset the Democrats’ advantage with blacks and Latinos is at the expense of more substantive initiatives on education and entrepreneurship.
My gut reaction is that the two authors end up in such a curious place—treating old fashioned racial interest group politics as cutting edge and prescribing more of it despite the obvious costs—because they are trying to make sense of a not widely known phenomenon that their research uncovered: the surprisingly high levels of disengagement from among ethnic minorities from both parties. Their data suggests, for example, that among Asian Americans and Latinos, a majority don’t vote, and almost sixty percent of both groups are independent or don’t identify with either party; even within the monolithically Democratic black community, roughly a third express reservations that their interests are not adequately articulated by Democrats or Republicans.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Two Visions of the Multi-Racial Future
By Jeff Smith, on Wed Jun 13, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET This is the most lucid explanation I’ve read of the absurdity of politics these days, from Mark Barabak of the Los Angeles Times:
Comes now the startling news that in 1996, Barack Obama, then a candidate for the Illinois state Senate, became a card-carrying Socialist.
The so-called proof was offered Thursday by the Washington Times, which linked to a National Review Online account involving the community organization ACORN, the Wisconsin Historical Society and something called the New Party.
This, on top of previous “revelations” that Obama is not a natural-born American citizen, is secretly gay and a closet Muslim will surely ensure his defeat in November.
Except none of those statements are true and few, save Donald Trump and the rabid Obama haters of the world, pay much attention to rumors that have eddied for years in the dark, dank corners of the Internet and other gathering holes of the conspiracy-minded.
Click here to read the entire piece.
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