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:
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Jul 6, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
In a vote that has been closely scrutinized and anticipated here at The Recovering Politician — and discussed in detail in this column I published at The Huffington Post last week — the Presbyterian Church (USA) rejected a misguided proposal to divest from companies that do business with Israel. The razor thin margin 333-331 proves the adage that every vote does indeed matter.
A deeply divided Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on Thursday became the latest American church to shy away from divesting in companies that supply equipment to Israel to enforce its control in the occupied territories, after a passionate debate that stretched late into the evening and a vote that was nearly a tie.
The decision not to divest, the culmination of an eight-year process, was watched intensely by Christians, Jews and Palestinians in the United States and in the Middle East. It is likely to bring a sigh of relief to Jewish groups in Israel and the United States that lobbied Presbyterians against divestment, and to dismay the international movement known as B.D.S. — Boycott, Divest and Sanctions — which advocates using economic leverage to pressure Israel to return occupied land to the Palestinians.
By a vote of 333 to 331, with two abstentions, the church’s General Assembly voted at its biennial meeting in Pittsburgh to toss out the divestment measure and replace it with a resolution to encourage “positive investment” in the occupied territories. The results were so close that, when posted electronically in front of the convention, they evoked a collective gasp. After two and a half hours of passionate debate, the replacement resolution to invest in the territories passed more easily, 369 to 290, with eight abstentions.
Presbyterians in favor of divestment said that their church could not in good conscience hold stock in companies that they said perpetuate an unjust occupation and undermine the search for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But opponents said that divestment would unfairly vilify Israel, and accomplish little but further polarization.
This is great news for justice, peace, and the historic alliance among Jews and Presbyterians. The close vote, however, confirms that much work needs to be done in educating American liberals about the extraordinary liberal democracy that is Israel.
If you’re scoring the Supreme Court’s Solomonic ruling on immigration, consider this counter-intuitive result: liberals who would be expected to cheer a ruling that wipes out much of Arizona’s controversial law have sounded strangely conflicted, and from the New York Times to the New Republic, have described the surviving component that allows local law enforcement to determine the legal status of individuals lawfully in their custody as everything from the “centerpiece” of the statute to “its most controversial” element.
It’s an odd approach to a legal victory. Heretofore, the most vocal concerns around SB 1070 (and copycats like the Alabama version) have focused on the blunt-force impact restrictionist statutes have on prototypical undocumented residents and their families: these laws make no bones about a pretty harsh sounding goal, expelling illegal immigrants from communities by rendering them virtually uninhabitable if you lack valid legal status. For example, Section 3 of the Arizona law, which made it a misdemeanor to lack valid immigration documents, and Section5(c), which made it a misdemeanor for an illegal immigrant to even seek work, had the straightforward purpose of pressuring illegal immigrants to move. To more liberal critics of these measures, the so-called “self deportation” strategy exudes a racial ugliness at worst, and a mean-spiritedness at the least.
But it does not require either compassion or permissive liberalism to recoil at the idea of states solving their illegal immigrant dilemma by kicking the problem next door. Arizona’s toughness, over time, would have almost certainly scattered more of its undocumented population to Colorado, California, or Nevada than Mexico. That entirely legitimate policy instinct may well have influenced the conservative swing justices, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy, as much as the narrow legal doctrine of preemption that technically decided this case.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The Court’s Mixed Decision on Immigration
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jul 5, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Parental sacrifice and Independence Day.
Parents, like patriots, sacrifice. At our best we are role models for exemplary behavior in our children. But the other 100% of the time we are more of a mixed bag of admirable and unadmirable behavior. And the path to model parenting isn’t always obvious.
Last night I was with my wife and kids discussing some recent parental disappointments (mine mostly, of course), and I had a brilliant save.
“Ok. You all know how much we love you and try to do what we think is best, right? Well, a while back it became clear to your mom and me that we were raising you kids in ” too perfect and healthy a home environment” and it was hindering your development. You weren’t as resilient or adaptable or manipulative as other kids your age–and that had to change. So, your mother and I decided to create a slightly more dysfunctional home environment to balance your overall psychological development. And, happily for you two, it seems to be working. But it has been an incredible sacrifice on your mom and me. So, in the future when you feel your mom and me come up short as parents and aren’t doing our best, you now know why. We are doing it for your own good.
Hey, it got a laugh from the kids.
And seemed fitting for the 4th of July. In addition to celebrating our national sovereignty today, we should Declaring Independence from perfect parenting, too.
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jul 5, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET
One of the many thousand reasons why I am glad to be a recovering politician and not a real politician anymore is that I no longer have to hide one of my favorite passions: playing tournament poker. Back in the days when I represented the constituents of a Bible Belt state, I’d have to play incognito, never at a nearby riverboat casino where I could be recognized, and certainly not in a public, highly publicized event like the greatest poker event around the globe — the World Series of Poker, held annually at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas.
But that’s all history, so this Independence Day, I freed myself to check off an item on my bucket list, and I entered the $1000 no-limit Texas hold ’em four day event, featuring more than 3,500 of the world’s best poker players.
I arrived in Las Vegas Tuesday night with two goals in mind:
First, I wanted to have a “respectable” finish. For me, that meant to try to survive until Day 2 of the four day tournament. Second, I wanted to wear the new No Labels hat that was ordered especially for these purposes.
(If you are new to this site, and/or not are familiar with the national grassroots political movement I co-founded, click here.)
Even if I never appeared on ESPN’s TV coverage, at least I’d get a good picture for the Web site.
On Wednesday (July 4), the two goals intersected. The No Labels hat had arrived via UPS in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, but my hotel would not accept delivery until Thursday AM. So I HAD to get to Day 2 of the tourney to play with my new hat and give our booming movement a little publicity.
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jul 5, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
Recent reports have some speculating — most prominently his widow — that the late PLO President Yasir Arafat may have died from illicit poisoning.
Larry Ben-David (NOT the Israeli version of Larry David) argues in The Times of Israel that the claim is a distraction from the clear probability that Arafat died of AIDS:
Less romantic and mythical, however, is the more likely cause of Arafat’s death – AIDS.
Arafat’s sexual proclivities have been an open secret for years. The former head of Rumanian intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa , disclosed in his book “Red Horizons,” that one of his officers reported, “the ‘Fedayee’ [Arafat’s code name] is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He’s playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena.”
In an in-depth 1976 biography of Arafat, writer Thomas Kiernan chronicled the life of a young Arafat in Cairo. When Arafat discovered his girlfriend, Jinan al-Oraby, was friendly with the daughters of the Harkabis, an Egyptian Jewish family, he arranged for the murder of their father. When Jinan expressed sorrow for her friends, “Yasser went into a rage… he proceeded to beat me, tearing my clothes off…he threw himself on me… He tried to penetrate me, but he could not do so. This made him even more irrational.”
Kiernan also relates Arafat’s relationship with a boy, Ahmed, whose parents ended up on the Israeli side of the border after the 1948 war. An associate of Arafat’s related, “Yasser tried to get the boy to publicly denounce his parents…Yasser really loved the boy. He was delicate, sensitive, like a flower. He was very much a part of Yasser’s inner circle – four of five boys who lived in the same place, and well, you can imagine what I mean.”
Kiernan continued: Arafat held a “kind of formal hearing for the boy” because of his refusal to denounce his parents. “Arafat sobbed and sobbed as [a young associate] proceeded to castrate the boy. The next day the boy was dead.”
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Jul 4, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Sometimes the only way to fit in is to simply be yourself.
Just went to truck stop to fill up. I notice when I’m inside a truck stop I try to act a little more manly. I stand up taller, scowl a little, and try to look like I know how to chew tobacco and operate a two way radio.
And never, ever buy a bottled Starbucks latte. And I even believe I may fool some people.
But today I walked into restroom and caught a glimpse of myself wearing a pressed button-down shirt, khaki slacks and dress shoes with tassels. I’m not sure I’m really fooling anyone after all.
I can either try harder to fit in or just accept I never will and just be myself. And buy the Starbucks latte.
Blog this!
