Please sign the petition below to remove the statue of Jefferson Davis currently in Kentucky’s Capitol Rotunda, and replace it with a tribute to Muhammad Ali, “the Louisville Lip” and “the Greatest of All Time.”
I just heard from the Ali family: It is the Champ’s belief that Islam prohibits three-dimensional representations of living Muslims. Accordingly, I have adjusted the petition to call for a two-dimensional representation of Ali (a portrait, picture or mural) in lieu of a statue.
UPDATE (Tuesday, December 2, 2014)
In this interview with WHAS-TV’s Joe Arnold, Governor Steve Beshear endorses the idea of honoring Muhammad Ali in the State Capitol (although he disagrees with removing Davis). Arnold explores the idea further on his weekly show, “The Powers that Be.”
Click here to check out WDRB-TV’s Lawrence Smith’s coverage of the story.
And here’s my op-ed in Ali’s hometown paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal.
UPDATE (Saturday, June 4, 2016)
In the wake of the 2015 Charlestown tragedy, in which a Confederate flag-waving murderer united the nation against racism, all of the most powerful Kentucky policymakers — U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, Governor Matt Bevin, Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker Greg Stumbo — called for the removal of the Davis statue from the Rotunda. Today, as we commemorate last night’s passing of Muhammad Ali, there is no better moment to replace the symbol of Kentucky’s worst era with a tribute to The Greatest of All Time.
UPDATE (Wednesday, June 8, 2016):
Great piece by Lawrence Smith of WDRB-TV in Louisville on the petition drive to replace Jefferson Davis’ statue in the Capitol Rotunda with a tribute to Muhammad Ali.
UPDATE (Thursday, June 9, 2016):
Excellent piece on the petition drive by Jack Brammer that was featured on the front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Highlight of the article:
Miller said he has received a few “angry comments” on his call to honor Ali.
“One of them encouraged me to kill myself,” he said. “You can quote me that I have decided not to take their advice.”
UPDATE (Friday, June 10, 2016)
The petition drives continues to show the Big Mo(hammed): check out these stories from WKYU-FM public radio in Bowling Green and WKYT-TV, Channel 27 in Lexington:
UPDATE (Saturday, June 11, 2016):
Still not convinced? Check out this excerpt from today’s New York Times:
Insurance Executive: We don’t like Obamacare. Before Obama, our control over the health industry gave us great license to do everything we wanted to do in order to make big bucks. A person on one of our polices who gets really sick and expensive to cover? Throw them off. A child with a pre-existing condition who will cost more to insure over a lifetime? Deny her coverage. Can’t afford coverage? Sucks to be you.
We also became very adept at spending more on ourselves and our middle-men than spending on healthcare. Obama now isn’t letting us do that. We actually have to send rebates to the people we insure if we spend more on ourselves than on their health! And his purchasing cooperatives will make us compete with private insurers in cities and in some cases, entire states, in areas where we once had absolute monopolies, which will make us lower prices to be competitive. Yeah, we price out about 50 million people, but that’s free enterprise! Vote Romney!
Plutocrat: Obama will appoint Supreme Court Justices that will most certainly overturn Citizens United. My ability to anonymously fund Super PAC’s with unlimited dollars is my right because the Supreme Court says spending and speech are one in the same. Indeed, rich people are now much freer than everyday people. Let’s keep it that way. I spent $20 million helping Romney via my Super PAC; but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to tax cuts I will receive if Romney prevails. And some of my wealth will even trickle down to the lowly 47%, so everybody wins! Vote Romney!
Read the rest of… Greg Harris: Closing Argument for Mitt Romney — Views from his Base
Quite simply, one has to ask before pulling the lever: Do I want this man to be president?
Do I want my candidate to win, or simply the other man to lose?
I know when I voted for the president’s re-election that I would be getting a return to fair taxation, a continued drawdown of foreign wars, the rights of women respected fully, and a continuation of a recovery program that has taken us from hemorrhaging 700000 jobs a month to gaining thousands more.
Still, the right has vilified this man from jump street. Their stated top priority on his election day was not to help the country right itself after the failure of their rule, but to defeat the president. For four years they have stood in the way of growth for their own political ends. They have blocked every measure they could that would improve the economy and to top it off, they are now running a candidate without a single firm position other than, “I’m not the guy your radio tells you to hate.”
Will you reward them?
Will you elect a man who has presented no ideas?
Will you hand power back to those who have so recently and so fully abused it?
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Oct 29, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Another day traveling by air.
Another day with mild to modest frustration with a major airline.
The major airlines seem more and more to remind me of a old school ma’arm, just waiting to slap you on the wrist for something inconsequential.
Mostly because they enjoy doing it…
And another day, thankfully, salvaged by Southwest.
The new cool substitute teacher that all the students love. And all the school marmy teachers hate. ; )
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In SouCal airports you see a lot of people who look like celebrities, carry themselves like a celebrity , and who want to be confused for a celebrity–but who are not a celebrity.
I think it’s fun.
The fun part for me is staring at them awestruck and looking like, carrying myself like and wanting to be confused for one of their fans.
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It smells good in California.
Even in the airport.
Clean.
It’s like people here shower two or three times a day.
Or use some sort of New Age magnetic device that repels dirt and dust and prevents perspiration.
It’s not quite human.
Like a fresh fruity well-toned Droid who just finished another colon cleanse.
I somehow worry that people I say hi too will suspect I don’t smell like one of them and know I’m not from here.
The low level humming from my iPhone from the Black Crowes isn’t helping any either
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It’s a dog’s life —not!
Remember the bleak saying about every down-and-outer getting their moment, “Every dog has it’s day”? I doubt that gets used in SoCal.
As I pulled out of the airport into San Diego last night the one thing I noticed over….and over…. and, yes, over again…was the privileged life that dogs lead out here.
At least one in three people I saw out last night in a suburb near downtown San Diego were walking their well-groomed, poised and, frankly, self-confident dog(s). Not in a cutesy or ostentatious way, like Paris Hilton carrying a tiny lap dog in her purse as a sort of panting accoutrement. Rather it was a normal person finally acting like the “dog’s best friend” we’ve always promised to be but—as any dog you know will tell you—have not lived up to.
And that attention and connection with their human shows, too—shows in the way SoCal dogs carry themselves and interact with other dogs—and even humans. They have a carriage about them which says, “Welcome to my town. Notice my owner. Pretty cool guy, huh?” It’s like the dogs are as self-conscious of who is walking them as their owners are about impressing others with their choice and type and breed of dog.
It’s darn near like the dogs out her are treated as a separate but co-equal species to humans. When you see a person and their dog on a chain walking, it’s not like back home. It’s like a couple out to get ice cream. Sure, the human appears to have control of the leash, but I suspect if you look closely it’s some sort of mutual canine-human leash that lets the two co-equal species stay together but without holding hands, or paws.
Oh, and dogs aren’t left outside here when their human pet goes into a store. No hitching post for these darlings. The dog walks in with every right to be there as anybody else. And seems a little impatient because there isn’t a larger canine section.
And as much as I hate to admit it, these dogs can be intimidating to people visiting from out of town. A strong-and-silent type pit bull was in Rite Aid last night with a cute young couple for a walk. The dog was well-manicured and obviously a female because it had a little bow in the corner of its well-coiffed mane. She began sniffing me—not like other dogs…but slyly as if by accident— and I instantly felt self-conscious when the dog looked up at me with these soft but probing and judgmental eyes. Although my new domesticated pit bull acquaintance didn’t say these exact words out loud, she was clearly thinking “You’re not from around here, are you? What….what kind of –whatever it is that you are….are you? And don’t even think about cutting in front of us in line. I’ll bite you and humiliate you in front of everyone. I’m still a dog, you know. Are we clear?”
I nodded affirmatively to the dog. I recovered my bearings long enough to realize something wasn’t quite right and mumbled, “Nice bow.”
The dog’s head whipped around as if to say, “What was that?!” “What?” I said. “I didn’t say anything.” The human owners looked oddly at me.
I offered, “Sorry. I wasn’t talking to you.”
It was the first time in a very long time that I felt like Junior from Hee-Haw stammering for something to say and knowing it would not be something appropriate or helpful. So I just kept quiet. And let this dog have its day. Like it does everyday in SoCal.
Read the rest of… John Y’s Musings from the Middle: Travels to SoCal
(While this closing argument might approach the civility line, it certainly is bi-partisan (or anti-partisan), and it was too funny to pass up. Besides, we love Jim Pence, who blogs at Hillbilly Report. – eds)
My fellow Americans. This has been a long and trying campaign and I’m sure you’ve noticed that I intend to screw you if I’m elected.
My opponent has said time and time again he intends to screw you to.
Screwing 314,653,649 people is a big job and we’re asking, along with your vote, you send us any left over Viagra you might have and in turn we’ll send you a coupon for a extra large tube of K-Y Jelly.
I am asking for your vote and look forward to screwing you. God bless you and God bless America.
By Artur Davis, on Mon Oct 29, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
If it turns out the life of Barack Obama’s presidency is measured in months, left-leaning analysts will agonize over what went so wrong. Their explanations will range from confusion over how a stunningly gifted orator never mastered the greatest national pulpit, to consternation about the intransigence of Republicans and the eruption of the Tea Party, to sober hand-wringing about the intractable nature of 21st Century democracy.
But the mourning will not match the genuine misery and perplexity many Americans feel regarding the state of the nation. For all the explanations of how Obama has fallen short of his promise, the simplest one is in the discontent of those 23 million plus individuals who are under or unemployed, some for such long stretches that they have fallen through the cracks of the government’s official statistics. These men and women are the source of a national fury over why things are the way they are, and they and the Americans who know them have proved resistant to deflecting responsibility or changing the subject.
To be sure, as his defenders never cease to point out, Obama was greeted with the debris of a national calamity. The country seemed to be teetering on the edge of depression for stretches in late 2008 and early 2009, a casualty of a Washington environment that privileged and made unaccountable the giant government sponsored housing enterprises and a reckless Wall Street culture that took the risk out of lending for the mortgagor. But rather than tackle the crisis with single-mindedness, Obama veered off in too many scattered directions: a stimulus whose legacy is a slew of poor returns on investments in alternative energy and uncompleted construction projects, a partisan healthcare law that drained off a year of the administration’s efforts, a massive overhaul of the carbon producing economy that was too unwieldy for even many Democrats to embrace, a financial industry bill that has not stopped excessive leveraging in the capital markets. The portfolio is one that Obama and his allies have strained to explain, much less justify.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: A Closing Argument for Mitt Romney
By Ronald J. Granieri, on Sun Oct 28, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
As the late night comics and cable screaming heads continue to mock and skewer the small percentage of undecided voters who will tip the balance in next week’s presidential election — How can someone be so stupid as to not be able to tell the difference between the two candidates? — I learned that one of the smartest people I’ve ever met is among this derided consitituency.
Ron Granieri is a graduate of Harvard College, earned his PhD in History from the University of Chicago, and has served as a professor at an Ivy League university. Moreover, as a precocious college student — who happened to be my roommate — Ron’s near photographic memory would enable him to beat me at Trivial Pursuit without ever allowing me a turn.
I’ve asked Ron to share with the RP Nation the path of a Reagan acoloyte who became frustrated with the far right turn of the GOP, only to be later disenchanted with the promise of the Obama Administration.
Because it will be voters like Ron who could ultimately determine our next President.
When The RP approached me the other day to ask me to join in the round table of “closing statements” for one candidate or another in the presidential election, it forced me to confront something I have tried to avoid for many months.
We have all seen the skits and made the jokes about undecided voters. Saturday Night Live mocked them for being ignorant. [Watch the video at the bottom of this post — in which an undecided voter asks whether French kissing could lead to pregnancy.] The brilliant Steven Colbert recently took it even further, comparing the elusive undecided voter to Jodie Foster’s epically (if unintentionally) hilarious backcountry wild child, Nell.
I have enjoyed a few chuckles at these images myself. But deep down I have been hiding a shameful secret: I am one of them.
I never thought it would come to this.
Ron’s childhood idol
I have always been politically curious, going back to my childhood when I talked politics with my extremely political father. I can remember telling him I thought President Nixon should resign during the summer of 1974 (I was 7). By the time I was in high school in the early 1980s, I had become, following in the intellectual footsteps of my childhood idol, William F. Buckley, Jr., an enthusiastic conservative. My father, who admired Buckley in spite of rather than because of his ideology, was not completely happy about that, but he respected my positions, and we had some wonderfully spirited arguments. When the Georgetown School of Foreign Service application requested an essay outlining the one international problem I would most like to address in my future career, I wrote a perfervid essay on the need to combat international communism. No copy of the essay survives from that pre-word processing age, unless it is in a Georgetown archive somewhere, but I well remember being proud of calling communism “an international gangrene that threatens the health and safety of every society it touches.” I wonder what the folks at the Walsh School thought of it. I don’t know if it helped or not, but I did get in, even if I ended up going somewhere else.
In college I became one of the most visible conservatives on campus, editing Harvard’s monthly conservative student paper, the Salient. It culminated in my being featured in a full page of the graduation issue of the Crimson in 1989, as one of a handful of notable graduates of my class. That article, I discovered, is still available online, but when I think of it I think of the yellowing clipping that my mother framed and hung on the wall in what used to be my bedroom in Niagara Falls.
Graduation Day: Ron at far left, The RP, second from right
I had opinions on everything back then. Some of them I still hold; some I do not. A few of them make me shake my head in affectionate embarrassment for a young man who was awfully full of himself. Nevertheless, I had a pretty clear sense of where I stood on things; I voted in every election I could, and my votes followed those convictions. It was not always easy to be the most conservative person in the room (an experience that followed me from college to graduate school to at least the start of my academic career). But it worked well thanks to lots of good friends and plenty of mutual good will and respect for differences.
In 88, Ron supported Bush 41, but teen hooligans made him a sleeping billboard for the liberal Dukakis
Gradually, however, my sense of having a clear political home began to shift. Part of it was seven years living in the wonderful state of South Carolina, birthplace of both Steven Colbert and Strom Thurmond. In the final years of the last century and the early years of this one, I saw a Republican party that became increasingly focused on issues that did not appeal to me. On the local level I saw a rising tide of anti-intellectualism, anti-urbanism, and nativism. The national party displayed those traits as well, but mostly became fixated on slashing taxes, and too often responded to serious discussions about how to provide enough revenue for existing programs with vaguely neo-Confederate rhetoric about shrinking government disconnected from political reality. It was the party of the suburbs, of the Sun Belt and the Evangelicals. None of those traits much appealed to me, an Italian-Irish Catholic intellectual from a Rust Belt industrial town who prefers Alexander Hamilton to Thomas Jefferson and believes the Good Guys indisputably won The War of the Rebellion. The Cold War conservatism that I had embraced so closely, with its sense of national purpose, was dying out, and the new individualized Right was leaving me cold.
I remember well the moment when I really felt that things were slipping away. It was in spring 2000, on the eve of the South Carolina primary. I answered the phone and it was someone from the George W. Bush campaign team taking a poll. She was very pleasant, asked me if I had decided whether to vote for Bush or John McCain, and I admitted I was thinking it over. She then launched into a critique of McCain that trumpeted Bush’s plans for immediate tax cuts that would give the budget surplus back to the voters. I responded that I liked a lot of things about Governor Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” which I took to mean conservatism based not simply on individualism but which included a sense of shared community responsibility. At the same time, I told her I did not really think that it made sense to rush to cut taxes when we still had a national debt in the trillions. (This was even before Afghanistan, Iraq, Medicare Part D and TARP, of course.)
An embarrassed pause followed. Then she curtly thanked me for my comments and hung up.
I should have taken that as a clear sign of where the Bush campaign stood and where my concerns fit into that agenda. But breaking up is hard to do. Even as I felt increasingly alienated from the GOP, it continued to get my votes. At least, that is, until 2008, when my frustration with the party and where it had led the country moved me to turn my back on them and vote for Barack Obama.
There, I said it. College friends may need a moment. I’ll wait. I recommend deep breaths.
Read the rest of… Ron Granieri: I’m An Undecided Voter — And Yes, I Know How Babies Are Made
By Jonathan Miller, on Sun Oct 28, 2012 at 8:15 AM ET
Despite being a proud, progressive Obama supporter, I frankly found the Lexington Herald-Leader‘s decision to run a minority view editorial on the presidential race refreshing. Allowing your readers to have both sides and then decide on their own is a good policy, one that is at the core of The Recovering Politician.
However, I am confused by a statement made within the minority editorial (linked here) that said Publisher Rufus Friday “chose not to use his power as publisher to overrule the majority.”
I’m confused because just a few inches below the editorial sits the editorial board policy which states that “Herald-Leader editorials are the consensus of the editorial board” of which the publisher is but one of 5 members.
Does the publisher always reserve the right to overrule the other 4 members? If so, will that be disclosed in the circumstance that he does? Is this a new policy or is this just the first time I was aware of it?If anyone knows the answers, please comment below. Thanks!
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Oct 26, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Warning! I now know what Hell looks like—and I am never carrying a rolled mat. It could be a sign of my future.
I recently walked in on a hot yoga class breaking up. I didn’t know what it was at the time and my mind went into overdrive, trying to figure out what these people were doing. They were stripped down as far as they could be in public, sweat was excreting from ever pore in their body, they looked pained and exhausted and dispirited and some even were moaning with exhaustion. They appeared to be part of a group exercise that morning in Hades rolling the Sisyphus stone together up a hill.
I figured they were on some sort of smoke break from Hell. Except none were smoking….and actually looked pretty healthy.
But they all carried these eerie looking rolled devices (see below). It looked like a rolled mat but apparently is for self-flagellation and required packing for the Underworld. Do not be caught carrying one of these in public! And avoid others who do!
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Oct 26, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
As you may have noticed, we are only 11 days away from what some call the most important presidential election of our era.
OK, they say that every 4 years…but it is certainly clear that the American people are being offered two highly contrasting visions of the nation’s future.
This week, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are offering their closing arguments to the American people — summations of why they have earned your vote.
That’s why we are dedicating a week at The Recovering Politician to Campaign 2012: The Closing Argument. Over the course of the week, a dozen of our contributors — of course, representing both sides of the aisle — will be making their own summations for the candidate of their choice.
And you can, too. We are calling on the RP Nation to join in as well. Send us a closing argument for your presidential candidate — Obama, Romney, or a 3rd party candidate if you prefer. If it is only a paragraph or two — or just one strongly worded sentence — feel free to leave it in the comments section below. If it is longer — up to a maximum of 1000 words — you can email it to Staff@TheRecoveringPolitician.com. To ensure its publication, please send it to us by Noon, Thursday, November 1.
And who knows, maybe a campaign staffer picks up your ideas, shares it with the candidate, and you will have changed the course of American history. Or perhaps you just get a kick sharing your thoughts with thousands of other readers across the country.
The eulogies for George McGovern, who just died at 90, have taken a predictable form: plaudits from the left for his inspirational effect on a class of aspiring liberal politicos combined with an acknowledgment that he was a singularly ineffective, disastrous candidate whom the same left never needed or cared to rehabilitate. To be sure, the evidence of McGovern’s incompetence and irrelevance is a narrative that Democratic analysts have had their own reasons to spin over the last two generations. It can’t possibly be, so the conventional wisdom goes, that a 49 state loser who spectacularly blundered the selection of a running mate and who is still synonymous with epic loss, was much more than an incidental character in a decade of unusual turbulence. And if McGovern’s legacy is just ineptitude, it is easier to dismiss him as a blip, an anomaly, in the liberal tradition.
But the theory of McGovern as a woeful bumbler has always shortchanged two features of the South Dakotan: the first is the novelty of the liberalism that McGovern helped foist on the Democratic Party in the early seventies, and the second is its durability in a party that putatively disowned him while absorbing most of his ideological sensibilities.
To grasp the novelty, it’s worth noting what post-war liberalism was prior to McGovern’s insurgency: a populist sounding, rhetorically lofty politics that had a transactional, anything but radical reality at its core. Adlai Stevenson was more of a trimmer on school desegregation than Eisenhower era Republicans. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pursued conventionally growth oriented economic policies with tax cuts and balanced or near balanced budgets at the centerpiece. The Great Society’s vaunted anti-poverty initiatives were invariably complements to urban political machinery, as Geoffrey Kabaservice documents in his work on the erosion of moderate Republicans, “Rule and Ruin”. Hubert Humphrey disavowed interpretations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that endorsed mandatory hiring goals for minorities. And on foreign policy, the liberal vision was enamored enough of American power that Robert Kennedy’s announcement of his presidential candidacy styled the campaign as a contest to claim the “moral leadership of the planet”, even while pledging to wind down the conflict in Vietnam.
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