By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Apr 10, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
An historic week for equality in my old (conservative) Kentucky home…
Despite the fact that a recently released 2012 poll showed that support for marriage equality among Kentucky voters dramatically trailed the national average at an embarrassing 33% approval clip (although, I imagine that has ticked higher in the intervening few months), leading statewide elected officials are courageously coming forward to endorse marriage equality.
Early yesterday LEO Weekly magazine’s Joe Sonka broke the news that Kentucky’s Lt. Governor, Jerry Abramson, became the first active statewide official to endorse marriage equality.
Within a few hours, state Auditor Adam Edelen bravely took the plunge as well. Edelen declared his support for marriage equality because:
“I believe equal protection of the law and equality of opportunity are central to the American experiment and they ought to apply to every American.”
(And let’s give Joe Sonka some mad props for his simple, but groundbreaking questioning. Tweet at the dirty liberal columnist: @JoeSonka)
But most of all, please join me in expressing our support and gratitude to Auditor Adam Edelen for his courageous public statement by signing on to this petition below:
Thanks Auditor Edelen for Supporting Marriage Equality!
In the Spotlight: Goal of No Labels is to get lawmakers to stop fighting
By Jonathan Miller
Democrats and Republicans in Washington can’t seem to agree on much these days, but four members of Illinois’ congressional delegation are working to change that by joining No Labels’ fast-growing group of Congressional Problem Solvers. The group — first announced just two months ago with a dozen members — now features 55 members who are meeting regularly to build trust across the aisle.
Reps. Rodney Davis, Adam Kinzinger, Dan Lipinski and Cheri Bustos are part of something unprecedented. Ask any member of Congress and they will tell you that before the advent of the Problem Solvers, there was literally no forum where rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans could actually meet together to discuss solutions. It’s a shocking revelation and a big reason why dysfunction has dominated D.C.
With Democrats controlling the U.S. Senate and Republicans controlling the U.S. House of Representatives, no one can get everything they want. Our Problem Solvers recognize that they have to find a way to work together or else they will get nothing done
In linking up with No Labels, the Illinois representatives are helping supercharge a movement that is growing by the day. I helped launch No Labels in December 2010 as a group of Democrats, Republicans and independents dedicated to a new politics of problem solving. Today, we have hundreds of thousands of grassroots supporters across the country. We have a growing presence on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by the emerging Problem Solvers. And we have a serious government reform agenda that is gaining traction.
In fact, the Senate passed a budget for the first time in four years last month thanks in large part to a measure that No Labels created and pushed relentlessly. We have an idea in our Make Congress Work! action plan called No Budget, No Pay that is as simple as it sounds: Members of Congress don’t get paid if they don’t pass a budget on time.
A modified version of No Budget, No Pay passed as part of the debt ceiling extension bill in February, and clearly compelled Congress to get serious about timely budgets.
We’re just getting started. On April 16, I’ll be flying the No Labels flag alongside an exciting lineup of speakers at the “Returning Civility to Our Public Discourse” Symposium at Bradley University in Peoria. The event is open to everyone. In the meantime, you can visit NoLabels.org to learn more about how regular citizens can get our leaders to stop fighting and start fixing America’s problems.
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Apr 9, 2013 at 9:00 AM ET
In this morning’s LEO Weekly magazine, Joe Sonka breaks the news that Kentucky’s Lt. Governor, Jerry Abramson, has become the first active statewide official to endorse marriage equality.
“I don’t believe government should judge which adults can and which cannot make a loving, life-long commitment to each other. That’s why both Madeline and I support marriage equality for all adults.”
Mazel Tov to a real mensch, and a true leader for Kentucky.
Please join me in expressing our support and gratitude to Lt. Gov. Abramson for his courageous public statement by signing on to this petition below:
Thanks Lt. Gov. Abramson for Supporting Marriage Equality
Now that supporters of growing industrial hemp have the groundwork laid in Kentucky, a bipartisan group of officials is now turning to Washington to get the go-ahead to grow the crop.
Jonathan Miller, the former state treasurer and a member of the industrial hemp commission, said the request could be made of the Obama Administration before June. Those who will likely play a role include Republican Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and Democratic Congressman John Yarmuth of Louisville.
“In the next few weeks or so, sometime this spring, we’re gonna go up — Commissioner (Comer), a couple of the board members possibly myself. We’re going to gather with our bipartisan delegation,” Miller said. “Sen. Paul and Congressman Yarmuth are playing the point and start meetings with Obama administration officials. The thing with hemp it is an issue that it involves a lot of different agencies. At the center is the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency. They’re the ones who will be making the ultimate decisions.”
But Miller said those are not the only agencies with an interest in industrial hemp. He said the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Energy are all interested in the crop, which could mean more avenues for the group to seek support for a federal waiver.
“Getting (the agencies) together on the same page is going to be our critical element,” Miller said. “It might take some time, but I’m confident from what I’m hearing from my friends in Washington that there is a lot of interest from a lot of important people that want to legalize hemp. Or at least it allow states like Kentucky that have a waiver to be able to do it on their own.”
…
And Miller said he supports legalizing marijuana, but that does not mean everyone who supports hemp on the commission also supports marijuana.
“I support legalizing marijuana. I came around after Gatewood Galbraith died, and I dedicated a few months to looking at his critical issue and I realized that he was right, but other hemp supporters like Commissioner Comer aren’t for legalizing marijuana,” Miller said. “Hemp and marijuana are very different.”
The Pew Research Center shows that for the first time a majority of Americans favor legalizing the use of marijuana. And that Miller said is good news for proponents of legalizing industrial hemp.
“The fact that there is a majority of Americans out there supporting legalizing marijuana. There is probably a super super majority of Americans that support legalizing hemp,” Miller said.
And Miller said that super majority could be the political difference for passing the law in the United States.
“President Obama has the opportunity without taking the risk of angering all the people who are opposed to marijuana legalization and appeasing those of us who support both by legalizing hemp or at least allowing states to do a waiver,” he said.
Former Democratic Party Chairman and state treasurer Jonathan Miller was a Judd adviser and confidant. He says party infighting helped push the Hollywood actress out of the race and that Grimes may be the only option left.
Miller dropped by Noise and Notes to share the frustrations of the behind the scenes Judd candidacy and if McConnell can still be beaten.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Apr 5, 2013 at 4:00 PM ET
I’m so pleased to report that legislation honoring Shemp Howard (née Samuel Horwitz), the most overlooked member of the comedy troupe, The Three Stooges, has now officially become a law in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Shemp has deserved this honor for decades, and I for one am thrilled to death that a proud Jewish exemplar is finally getting the recognition he so truly deserves.
Mazel Tov, Shemp!!!
UPDATE 4:30
So it turns out that the legislation that has officially become law is not “Shemp” legislation, but “hemp” legislation.
(Which is also pretty damn awesome. Read my piece upon the bill’s passage in the General Assembly.)
But my apologies to the Howard family and the entire American Jewish community for my reading mistake.
Here is the update on the hemp legislation from the Courier-Journal:
Gov. Steve Beshear will allow legislation permitting hemp production in Kentucky to become law without his signature, and now supporters of the measure say they plan to turn their attention toward Washington in hopes of knocking down federal barriers to the crop.
The bill will officially become law at the end of the day Saturday but will have no real effect until the federal government takes action to declassify hemp as an illegal drug or to grant Kentucky a waiver that would allow people to start growing the plant, which is native to Kentucky.
“We’re going to be figuring out a strategy about going to Washington and trying to get a waiver or trying to get them to lift the ban,” said state Rep. Paul Hornback, the primary sponsor of the bill.
Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, of Tompkinsville, a key proponent of the legislation, said he plans to talk next week with U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth about how to move forward to obtain federal permission to grow the crop. “I hope farmers can start putting seeds in the ground next spring.”
Hemp fiber, oil and seed have a variety of uses and can be used in products including clothing and fuel. Hornback said the market for hemp products in the United States is more than $400 million annually, which he expects to increase if cultivation resumes in the country.
Hornback and Comer argued that as one of the first states to allow hemp farming, Kentucky could attract processors they speculate could employ hundreds. Opponents have been concerned that legal hemp would complicate efforts to spot illegal marijuana plants. The two are identical in appearance, but hemp has a fraction of marijuana’s intoxicating ingredient THC.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Apr 5, 2013 at 7:30 AM ET
Last night, the RP appeared on Current TV’s “The Young Turls” with Cenk Uygar to discuss his column from yesterday, “The Ashley Judd ‘Rape Comment’ That Just Won’t Go Away.”
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Apr 4, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET
My dad and I circa 1968
On this day in which we remember the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., we re-run this piece — in which the RP honored King, his father, and contributing RP Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s father — that first appeared at The Recovering Politician on April 4, 2011.
Today — as on every April 4 — as the nation commemorates the anniversary of one of the worst days in our history; as some of us celebrate the anniversary of the greatest speech of the 20th Century; my mind is on my father. And my memory focuses on a winter day in the mid 1970s, sitting shotgun in his tiny, tinny, navy blue Pinto.
I can still remember my father’s smile that day.
He didn’t smile that often. His usual expression was somber, serious—squinting toward some imperceptible horizon. He was famously perpetually lost in thought: an all-consuming inner debate, an hourly wrestling match between intellect and emotion. When he did occasion a smile, it was almost always of the taut, pursed “Nice to see you” variety.
But on occasion, his lips would part wide, his green eyes would dance in an energetic mix of chutzpah and child-like glee. Usually, it was because of something my sister or I had said or done.
But this day, this was a smile of self-contented pride. Through the smoky haze of my breath floating in the cold, dense air, I could see my father beaming from the driver’s seat, pointing at the AM radio, whispering words of deep satisfaction with a slow and steady nod of his head and that unfamiliar wide-open smile: “That’s my line…Yep, I wrote that one too…They’re using all my best ones.”
He preempted my typically hyper-curious question-and-answer session with a way-out-of-character boast: The new mayor had asked him—my dad!—to help pen his first, inaugural address. And my hero had drafted all of the lines that the radio was replaying.
This was about the time when our father-son chats had drifted from the Reds and the Wildcats to politics and doing what was right. My dad was never going to run for office. Perhaps he knew that a liberal Jew couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in 1970s Kentucky. But I think it was more because he was less interested in the performance of politics than in its preparation. Just as Degas focused on his dancers before and after they went on stage—the stretching, the yawning, the meditation—my father loved to study, and better yet, help prepare, the ingredients of a masterful political oration: A fistful of prose; a pinch of poetry; a smidgen of hyperbole; a dollop of humor; a dash of grace. When properly mixed, such words could propel a campaign, lance an enemy, or best yet, inspire a public to wrest itself from apathetic lethargy and change the world.
Now, for the first time, I realized that my father was in the middle of the action. And I was so damn proud.
– – –
Click above to watch my eulogy for my father
My dad’s passion for words struck me most clearly when I prepared his eulogy. For the past two years of his illness, I’d finally become acquainted with the real Robert Miller, stripped down of the mythology, taken off my childhood pedestal. And I was able to love the real human being more genuinely than ever before. The eulogy would be my final payment in return for his decades of one-sided devotion: Using the craft he had lovingly and laboriously helped me develop, I would weave prose and poetry, the Bible and Shakespeare, anecdotes and memories, to honor my fallen hero. In his final weeks of consciousness, he turned down my offer to share the speech with him. I will never know whether that was due to his refusal to acknowledge the inevitable, or his final act of passing the torch: The student was now the author.
While the final draft reflected many varied influences, ranging from the Rabbis to the Boss (Springsteen), the words were my own. Except for one passage in which I quoted my father’s favorite memorial tribute: read by Senator Edward Kennedy at his brother, Robert’s funeral:
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
Read the rest of… My Father, RFK & the Greatest Speech of the 20th Century
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Apr 4, 2013 at 9:00 AM ET
It’s been more than a week since Ashley Judd announced that she would not be running against Mitch McConnell in 2014 for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky, but our celebrity-worshipping, click-hungry national media (and maybe a recovering politician or two) simply won’t let the story go away.
The latest entry is a piece from one of my favorite online news sources, The Atlantic Wire. (OK, I admit, it’s a “favorite” because a few years ago, it posted this piece about a Jeff Smithprison sex column published at this site, sending over 100,000 readers our way.)
This Monday, J.K. Trotter of the The Atlantic Wire, published a piece entitled “Was Ashley Judd’s Rape Comment Real?” (Sorry for the three day delay in responding to it — I just found it this morning in a Google search.)
For the uninitiated, here’s the background:
On March 9, Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post authored a piece entitled “Ashley Judd Senate Run: Actress, Activist Planning to Declare,” in the middle of which, appeared the following sentence:
Judd made her intentions clear at a private dinner last month at [philanthropist Christy] Brown’s Louisville home. Asked if she was tough enough to take on McConnell and the GOP national attack machine, Judd reportedly answered, “I have been raped twice, so I think I can handle Mitch McConnell.”
Judd’s apparently perverse comparison of a political campaign to rape spread like wildfire through the media, leading some to term Judd as the Democrat’s Todd Akin.
I was at that dinner and never heard that comment. I called a few of my fellow guests, and they hadn’t heard it either. I emailed Fineman; and after I didn’t hear back from him, I called a few reporters who’d been covering the race. No one was interested in my rebuttal. I considered writing my own piece, but determined that it would only add oxygen to a distracting fire while Judd was struggling to make her on whether or not to run.
Ultimately, a few days after Judd withdrew, The Daily Beast published my post mortem on the actress’ non-candidacy: “How Kentucky Democrats Duped the MSM and Helped Elbow Out Ashley Judd.” Exhibit A was the fictional “rape comment” story.
The problem is, it never happened. I was at that dinner and never heard her say anything remotely like that. What’s more, such a statement would have been completely inconsistent with the way I’ve heard Ashley discuss her horrifying experiences as the youthful victim of sexual assault—how they defined her in adulthood; how they propelled her to champion women’s empowerment across the globe.
I specifically did not call out Howard Fineman, because I didn’t blame him. I was 100% confident that someone told him this story, and it was that anonymous source who was either mistaken or lying, not Fineman. (Hence the headline of my piece.) I respect Fineman a great deal, and am always proud to see folks do so well who have strong Kentucky ties (Fineman went to law school and was a newspaper reporter in Louisville), especially if they are Jewish (there’s far too few of us in my old Kentucky home.)
That’s a pretty harsh charge leveled by a pretty biased source from inside a now pretty old-news story against Fineman, a decorated journalist (inside and out of Kentucky) who currently serves as Editorial Director at The Huffington Post, which closely tracked the preliminary movements of the Kentucky race.
Trotter then continued by reporting on an interview with Fineman:
“I doubled checked with my source, and I stand by the quote and the story,” Fineman told The Atlantic Wire over email. Fineman clarified that Judd didn’t announce this comment to the rest of the dinner’s guests, only his source.
“I don’t know who else heard it,” Fineman continued. “This [source] was a Judd supporter, by the way. The person told Judd what a tough and nasty campaigner McConnell was, and that is how Judd answered.” That could explain why Miller “never heard [Judd] say anything remotely like that,” in that Judd wasn’t speaking to everyone present when she said it.
Fineman admitted that his report was ambiguous about Judd’s delivery of the quote. “It was not in an event-wide moment, I don’t think, but I didn’t say it was,” he said. “The wording in the piece is ambiguous, though, and for that I apologize.”
Kudos to Fineman for apologizing. Too few people on any side of the political arena take responsibility when they’ve made a mistake, even a small one.
But his admission reveals a deep, underlying problem of today’s politics.
As the national media slurped up any tiny drop of news or gossip to slake its unquenchable thirst for Ashley Judd stories, it seized on a “quote,” attested to by only one anonymous source, made not in a televised debate (a la Akin), or at a public event (such as George Allen’s Macaca moment), or even before a group of people at a private forum (see Mitt Romney’s 47% line), but rather in an intimate one-on-one conversation.
For the reasons I outlined above, I still don’t think Judd made that comment — my assumption is that the anonymous source (who is probably a friend of mine, since it was a small dinner) mis-remembered it.
But even if she did, do we now hold public figures to such scrutiny that an off-color line whispered between two intimates can be seized as fodder for a national scandal? If we held all of our leaders to that exacting standard, where there is no zone of privacy, will there be anyone left to lead us?
Further, in this age of cell-phone cameras and tiny digital recorders, if there is no tangible proof, shouldn’t there be some journalistic standard that you need more than just the testimony of one anonymous source to publish something of substance, particularly something this controversial?
Ultimately, this affair is not about Judd’s candidacy; as I argued in The Daily Beast, I don’t believe any of these antics ultimately drove her from the race.
However, it does say a great deal about an endemic problem with our political system, and particularly news coverage of its players. It’s high time that the journalism community reflects on the rapidly changing dynamics of the new media, and develops a set of self-governing, ethical standards to ensure fairness, accuracy and context.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Apr 3, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET
While we are admitted Nate Silver fan-boys here at The Recovering Politician, our favorite pollsters have to be Public Policy Polling’s Tom Jensen and Jim Williams. First came their poll that showed Congressional approval below that of Brussles sprouts and barely above root canals. Now comes their national survey about popular conspiracy theories (h/t Jim Higdon):
– 37% of voters believe global warming is a hoax, 51% do not. Republicans say global warming is a hoax by a 58-25 margin, Democrats disagree 11-77, and Independents are more split at 41-51. 61% of Romney voters believe global warming is a hoax
– 6% of voters believe Osama bin Laden is still alive
– 21% of voters say a UFO crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 and the US government covered it up. More Romney voters (27%) than Obama voters (16%) believe in a UFO coverup
– 28% of voters believe secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order. A plurality of Romney voters (38%) believe in the New World Order compared to 35% who don’t
– 28% of voters believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. 36% of Romney voters believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, 41% do not
– 20% of voters believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, 51% do not
– 7% of voters think the moon landing was faked
– 13% of voters think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, including 22% of Romney voters
– Voters are split 44%-45% on whether Bush intentionally misled about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. 72% of Democrats think Bush lied about WMDs, Independents agree 48-45, just 13% of Republicans think so
– 29% of voters believe aliens exist
– 14% of voters say the CIA was instrumental in creating the crack cocaine epidemic in America’s inner cities in the 1980’s
– 9% of voters think the government adds fluoride to our water supply for sinister reasons (not just dental health)
– 4% of voters say they believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power
– 51% of voters say a larger conspiracy was at work in the JFK assassination, just 25% say Oswald acted alone
– 14% of voters believe in Bigfoot
– 15% of voters say the government or the media adds mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals (the so-called Tinfoil Hat crowd)
– 5% believe exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons
– 15% of voters think the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry “invent” new diseases to make money
– Just 5% of voters believe that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966
– 11% of voters believe the US government allowed 9/11 to happen, 78% do not agree
Frankly, I do believe that Oswald did not act alone, although I find Oliver Ston-ian “the government did it” theorists to be way off.
And of course, I know that Paul is dead. Cuckoo-catchoo!
