By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jun 19, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
Check out this letter from a bi-partisan coalition of Congressmen:
Dear Colleague:
Every year, U.S. retailers sell over $300 million worth of products containing hemp seeds and fibers. Hemp finds its way into more than 25,000 different products around the world, from lotions to protein bars to auto parts to fuel.
But because of outdated laws preventing the growth and cultivation of industrial hemp in the United States, American farmers can’t grow hemp. It’s all imported. What’s more, our institutions of higher education can’t even grow or cultivate hemp for research purposes.
Our bipartisan amendment is simple: It allows colleges and universities to grow and cultivate industrial hemp for academic and agricultural research purposes. It only applies in states where industrial hemp growth and cultivation is already legal.
Hemp is not marijuana. Our amendment defines industrial hemp as a product containing less than 0.3 percent THC. At this concentration, and even at much higher concentrations, it is physically impossible to use hemp as a drug.
From Colorado to Kentucky to Oregon, voters across the country have made it clear that they believe industrial hemp should be regulated as agricultural commodity, not a drug. At the very least, we should allow our universities—the greatest in the world—to research the potential benefits and downsides of this important agricultural resource.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Jun 14, 2013 at 1:59 PM ET
Morgan County Judge Executive Tim Conley with some dude named Bubba
Rebuilding West Liberty, an initiative aimed at reconstructing a small rural town nearly destroyed last year by horrific tornadoes, attended today the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) America annual meeting. Tim Conley, the Morgan County Judge/Executive, told members of the CGI America Residential Energy Efficiency Working Group that affordable and energy efficient housing is a key to helping break the cycle of poverty. “Even before the devastating tornado fifteen months ago, many of our citizens could not afford to pay their utility bills. With this project we can demonstrate to all of rural America the extraordinary economic value of sustainability and energy efficiency,” Conley said.
On March 2, 2012, the town of West Liberty, Kentucky suffered a massive tragedy. An EF3 tornado ripped through this community of about 3,400 residents, killing seven, devastating nearly 400 homes, businesses and government structures, and destroying much of the downtown area. While the disaster was an unprecedented crisis for the tiny community, it also represented an extraordinary opportunity to rebuild itself with a 21st century, lower-cost, sustainable infrastructure, and develop a path to create job-producing business opportunities, increasing the tax base and attract new residents to West Liberty. The community’s residents and leaders chose this bolder path. After a year of extensive discussions among key stakeholders and outside experts, the community completed a thorough visioning process to rebuild West Liberty in a thoughtful and sustainable manner, giving careful consideration to the need to preserve the region’s Appalachian heritage and resources.
The Rebuilding West Liberty Team (From L): Bobby Clark of the Midwest Clean Energy Enterprise; Poker player Jonathan Miller, Stacey Epperson of NextStep, and Morgan County Judge Tim Conley
In January 2013, the town issued a strategic report: Rebuilding West Liberty, Kentucky, outlining thirteen locally-inspired strategies that would make West Liberty not only a model for disaster-ravaged communities, but also for all of rural America. (Click here for a PDF-version of the full report.)
Judge Conley today provided insight on one of Rebuilding West Liberty’s most urgent stakeholder-inspired strategies and most critical needs: rebuilding roughly half of the 300 residential homes that were lost to the storm. The three year project includes a $27 million investment of equity, grants, debt and operating grants to complete the project in West Liberty, and Next Step® Network will scale innovations piloted for other disaster response efforts and affordable housing projects for factory-built homes across the nation.
Please join us in this critical initiative.
Sign the petition below, to take part in the grassroots coalition supporting the project:
Our new book, The Recovering Politician’s Twelve-Step Program to Survive Crisis, has hit the national zeitgiest, as it was today’s topic of discussion on HuffPost Live.
Huff Post Live’s Marc Lamont Hill talks with three of the book’s co-authors about politics, rhetoric, and their 12-step program for recovering politicians.
Originally aired on June 13, 2013
Guests:
Michael Steele @steele_michael (New York , NY) Former RNC Chairman
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO (Montclair, NJ) Assistant Professor in the Urban Policy Graduate Program at the New School; Former State Senator for Inner City St. Louis
Jonathan Miller @RecoveringPol (Chicago, IL) Former Kentucky State Treasurer; Editor of ‘The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis’
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jun 12, 2013 at 2:11 PM ET
Welcome to Episode Two of The Recovering Politician’s CRISIS TV, a weekly roundtable discussion of the highest profile national scandals, with expert analysis from those who’ve served in the arena and suffered through crises themselves.
SPOILER ALERT: Be prepared to laugh — these former pols tend not to take themselves too seriously.
CRISIS TV is hosted by The RP, former Kentucky State Treasurer Jonathan Miller.
This week’s guests include:
Rod Jetton, former Speaker of the House, state of Missouri
Jason Grill, former State Representative from Kansas City
Josh Bowen, Nationally renowned and published personal trainer
Click here to order
This week’s topic — Baseball and Performance Enhancing Drugs
The panelists discuss the nature of the scandal, what Major League Baseball and accused players such as Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriquez have done wrong, how they could have handled the crisis more effectively, and what advice they would share with the players and owners.
The panelists discuss the lessons they learned from their own crises, detailed in the book they co-authored, The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis. Click here to order.
The Licking Valley Courier, a small town Eastern Kentucky weekly newspaper that doesn’t have an online version, had some clever words to share about the Rebuilding West Liberty initiative discussed on these virtual pages. Thanks to Miranda Cantrell, News Editor, we post the column of Publisher Earl Kinner in its entirety below:
Town’s rebuilding plan catches eye of Clinton Global Initiative
Some pleasant ironies in story about Judge Conley’s invitation to participate in international forum
Judge Conley holding a copy of the Courier
Not many readers, we suspect, will fail to detect a bit of pleasant irony underlying the news this week about Morgan County Judge Executive Tim Conley’s invitation to participate in an international forum established by former Democrat President Bill Clinton.
After a tornado last year devastated West Liberty, the town of 3,500 began an initiative called Rebuilding West Liberty, which was designed to not only help re-build the town but to make it more energy-efficient and serve as a model for other towns looking to create sustainability and entrepreneurship.
The initiative has caught the eye of national leaders, and Morgan County Judge Executive Tim Conley has been invited to attend the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Chicago on June 13 as a member of the Residential Energy Efficiency Working Group. This according to former Kentucky State Treasurer Jonathan Miller on his web site, The Recovering Politician. (Miller is a Democrat and Conley is a Republican).
After the tornado killed seven people and destroyed 400 homes, businesses, and government structures, the community began rebuilding with energy efficient and cost-effective techniques. At the conference Conley will provide insight on “rebuilding roughly half of the 300 residential homes that were lost to the storm,” Miller writes.
The solution West Liberty came up with was to construct “150 affordable, highly energy-efficient factory-built and site-built homes,” Miller reports. “The three-year project includes a $27 million investment of equity, grants, debt and operating grants to complete the project in West Liberty and scale innovations piloted for other disaster response efforts and affordable housing projects for factory-built homes across the nation.
Many will recall the bruising but unsuccessful effort by Democrat Party leaders (both at the local and state levels) to block Judge Conley’s bid for re-election to a second term in 2006. Thankfully, the world has moved on and the ironies called to mind by Miller’s story are pleasant to contemplate. To wit:
Jonathan Miller, a Democrat stalwart whose party virtually bet the farm trying to defeat Conley. A Harvard graduate from Louisville, Miller served as national director of Students for Gore in 1988 when Al Gore was running for President, later worked for Gore when he was Vice President in the Clinton Administration, and also served two terms as Kentucky State Treasurer, and later as Finance Secretary for Gov. Beshear.
Tim Conley is a County Judge and a graduate of Morgan County High School from Honeymoon Holler.
The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an initiative of the Clinton Foundation established by former Democrat President Bill Clinton, convenes global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. CGI Annual Meetings have brought together more than 150 heads of state, 20 Nobel Prize laureates, and hundreds of leading CEO’s, heads of foundations and NGOs, major philanthropists, and members of the media. To date CGI members have made more than 2,300 commitments designed “to improve the lives” of over 400 million people in more than 180 countries. When fully funded and implemented, these commitments will be valued at more than $73.1 billion. Clearly, the Clinton Global Initiative is no small potatoes.
As for Judge Conley’s invitation to speak at the CGI’s international forum in Chicago next week, congratulations to him. He’s one of our own and proof certain that country-bred common sense, sincerity, and competence trump lots of things, including partisan politics, and that’s as it should be.
Click here to join the great work being done by Rebuilding West Liberty.
By Jonathan Miller, on Sat Jun 8, 2013 at 12:36 PM ET
I was greeted this morning by a letter to the editor in my hometown paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader that repeated a variety of bizarre conspiracy theories (including the one where Bush and Cheney ordered the 9/11 attacks) and ended with this highly offensive line:
A continuation of 5,700-plus years of Jews buying their host country’s leadership in the name of a non-existing God of Abraham.
There’s no one who feels more strongly about the sacred nature of our First Amendment rights. I support anyone’s freedom to spew hateful, bigoted trash like this.
But there is no obligation on the part of the Lexington Herald-Leader to publish such offensiveness. Indeed, with all of the letters I imagine that fill their in boxes every day, I would imagine that they wouldn’t have room for such an blatant anti-Semitic rant.
I’m hopeful that we will hear an explanation or an apology soon from the paper’s leadership.
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 6, 2013 at 10:00 PM ET
Click here to purchase this week only for 99 cents
On tonight’s MSNBC “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews plugged The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis after a discussion with former RNC Chair Michael Steele, a co-author of the book.
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 6, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
Welcome to Episode One of The Recovering Politician’s CRISIS TV, a weekly roundtable discussion of the highest profile national scandals, with expert analysis from those who’ve served in the arena and suffered through crises themselves.
SPOILER ALERT: Be prepared to laugh — these former pols tend not to take themselves too seriously.
CRISIS TV is hosted by The RP, former Kentucky State Treasurer Jonathan Miller.
This week’s guests include:
Michael Steele, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee and former Lt. Governor of Maryland
Courtney Spritzer, co-founder, SOCIALFLYNY.com, a social media consulting firm.
Click here to order, this week only, for 99 cents
This week’s topic — the Obama Administration’s IRS scandal.
The panelists discuss where all of the President’s men (and women) have gone wrong, how they could have handled the crisis more effectively, and what advice they would share with the White House.
The panelists discuss the lessons they learned from their own crises, detailed in the book they co-authored, The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis. Click here to order, this week only, for only 99 cents.
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Jun 3, 2013 at 4:06 PM ET
Great piece about our exciting Rebuilding West Liberty initiative (Read more about it here) from WYMT’s Michelle Heron:
To city leaders, the honor is huge compared to the devastation an EF3 tornado left in its wake more than one year ago.
“We’re hoping that the visibility will bring a whole lot of new investment into West Liberty to help us realize our ambitious goal,” Former Kentucky State Treasurer Jonathan Miller said.
The town of West Liberty will be recognized next week in Chicago by former President Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative for a project called Rebuilding West Liberty.
“But several months ago, the community got together and decided we want to rebuild the community in a strategic way, to rebuild it better than they found it,” Miller added.
Judge Executive Time Conley says the project focuses on a number of strategies to make the town stronger, not just in a physical way, but also in energy efficiency.
“We want to make sure the homes and buildings we’re building are very high energy efficient buildings that can help us not only conserve energy but show how Appalachian towns can be built to a phase that is business friendly and economically friendly,” Conley said.
The three year project also includes a fiber optic system and downtown Wi-Fi hub paid for by a variety of grants.
“Hopefully not only would the town thrive and jobs be created, it can serve as a model for other disaster ravaged towns or for the rest of rural America,” Miller said.
President Clinton is not a stranger to the mountains; he made a stop in Hazard back in 1999 during a four day tour to encourage businesses to invest in rural communities.
“This tragedy is an opportunity to rebuild ourselves in a new way,” Miller said.
A way that puts West Liberty back on the map.
The Clinton Global Initiative meeting takes place June 13-14th.
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu May 30, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
Rebuilding West Liberty, an Eastern Kentucky community initiative aimed at reconstructing a small rural town nearly destroyed last year by horrific tornadoes to be a 21st Century model for sustainability and entrepreneurship, today announced that Tim Conley, the Morgan County Judge/Executive helping to lead this effort, will attend the Clinton Global Initiative America (CGI America) meeting June 13th and 14th in Chicago. Judge Conley will participate as a member of the Residential Energy Efficiency Working Group (one of twelve working groups convening at CGI America) to share Rebuild West Liberty’s Residential Energy Efficiency Project.
On March 2, 2012, the town of West Liberty, Kentucky suffered a massive tragedy. An EF3 tornado ripped through this community of about 3,400 residents, killing seven, devastating nearly 400 homes, businesses and government structures, and destroying much of the downtown area. While the disaster was an unprecedented crisis for the tiny community, it also represented an extraordinary opportunity: to rebuild itself with a 21st century, lower-cost, sustainable infrastructure, and develop a path to create job‐producing business opportunities, increasing the tax base and attract new residents to West Liberty.
The community’s residents and leaders chose this bolder path. After a year of extensive discussions among key stakeholders and outside experts, the community completed a thorough visioning process to rebuild West Liberty in a thoughtful and sustainable manner, giving careful consideration to the need to preserve the region’s Appalachian heritage and resources.
In January 2013, the town issued a strategic report: Rebuilding West Liberty, Kentucky, outlining thirteen locally-inspired strategies that would make West Liberty not only a model for disaster-ravaged communities, but also for all of rural America. (Click here for a PDF-version of the full report.)
Judge Conley will provide insight on one of Rebuilding West Liberty’s most urgent stakeholder-inspired strategies and most critical needs: rebuilding roughly half of the 300 residential homes that were lost to the storm. To meet this dire need, Rebuilding West Liberty has committed to the construction and development of 150 affordable, highly energy-efficient factory-built and site-built homes. The three year project includes a $27 million investment of equity, grants, debt and operating grants to complete the project in West Liberty and scale innovations piloted for other disaster response efforts and affordable housing projects for factory-built homes across the nation.
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Please join us in this critical initiative.
Sign the petition below, to take part in the grassroots coalition supporting the project:
About CGI America
The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, convenes global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Established in June 2011 by President Bill Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative America (CGI America) addresses economic recovery in the United States. CGI America brings together leaders in business, government, and civil society to generate and implement commitments to create jobs, stimulate economic growth, foster innovation, and support workforce development in the United States. Since its first meeting, CGI America participants have made more than 211 commitments valued at $13.6 billion when fully funded and implemented. To learn more, visit cgiamerica.org.
CGI also convenes an Annual Meeting, which brings together global leaders to take action and create positive social change, CGI University (CGI U), which brings together undergraduate and graduate students to address pressing challenges in their community or around the world, and, this year, CGI Latin America, which will bring together Latin American leaders to identify, harness, and strengthen ways to improve the livelihoods of people in Latin America and around the world. For more information, visit clintonglobalinitiative.org and follow us on Twitter @ClintonGlobal and Facebook at facebook.com/clintonglobalinitiative.
