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:
Mitt Romney’s venture into education policy this week was overdue, but bold in the right places. It was a striking improvement from his previous blend of clichés about local control and hints that the Education Department might be eliminated altogether.
The conventional wisdom is that the Obama Administration has all but swept education reform off the table with its own maneuvering toward the center on the issue. The reality, though, is that the White House has mixed instances of toughness—incentivizing states to embrace charter schools, defending mass firings of teachers in underperforming Rhode Island districts—with a conventional Democratic resistance to merit based pay, vouchers, or any revamping of state tenure laws. It is a record that has won bipartisan plaudits from reformers, but not one that has made much headway in alleviating the festering mediocrity that marks many of our public schools, and that careens into outright disgrace in most inner city venues.
In fact, success under the Obama model would look remarkably similar to the landscape that prevails in education today: a scattering of high profile innovations in either deep pocketed big cities, or states that already have a strong reform culture, with the prospects of individual children turning largely on the vagaries of location and local leadership. Not surprisingly, the politically influential teachers unions have grumbled about the current agenda, but they have adjusted to it as an incremental set of half measures that they can fend off state by state.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Romney’s Education Gambit
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed May 30, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Father and teen daughter conversation.
Daughter: Dad, I’m going to visit a friend today I haven’t seen in a year and we are going to lunch and shopping at the mall for the afternoon. Could I please have some money….like….$20?
Father: $20?! For lunch–and some window shopping? Where are you planning on eating? You don’t really need to buy anything at the mall. How about, oh, $5.
Daughter: Dad…
Father: How about this. I’ll make it $10 because I’m an amazing dad. Deal?
Daughter: Make it $20 because I’m an amazing daughter. Deal?
By Jason Grill, on Wed May 30, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
Politics and sports are two things that incite strong emotions in nearly every individual in this country, but they should very rarely converge. Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee announced there would be an upcoming hearing about bounties in professional football and other major sports as a result of recent allegations that the New Orleans Saints employed a system in which players would receive extra cash for hits that hurt high-profile opponents.
Are they serious? Well, yes they are. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) wants to examine whether a federal law should make bounty systems a crime. This week reports have surfaced that the IRS is now poking around and monitoring the situation about the payments that were made to players. The dominos are beginning to fall and political grandstanding has already begun. I am not a pollster, but if I had to guess I would assume more Americans are concerned with their pocket books and the economy right now than on professional sports bounty programs. Shockingly, I know I am going out on a limb here. Seriously though, Congress should only involve itself in sports-related matters on very rare occasions. One of those is sports gambling.
The Final Four [took place] in New Orleans with four historically good programs. More than six million people filled out NCAA tournament brackets on ESPN.com alone. Last month the Super Bowl game garnered the prize as the highest-rated television show in United States history with an estimated 111 million people watching.
Reports have shown that nearly half of all American adults make some sort of wager on the Super Bowl. The time has come for Congress to open its eyes when it comes to sports gambling.
Read the rest of… Jason Grill: Come on, Congress — Sports Gambling, Not Bounties
While I’ve gone to great lengths to keep this website a forum for ideas, and not a personal forum, I should say something about the various stories regarding my political future in Virginia, the state that has been my primary home since late December 2010. The short of it is this: I don’t know and am nowhere near deciding. If I were to run, it would be as a Republican. And I am in the process of changing my voter registration from Alabama to Virginia, a development which likely does represent a closing of one chapter and perhaps the opening of another.
As to the horse-race question that animated parts of the blogosphere, it is true that people whose judgment I value have asked me to weigh the prospect of running in one of the Northern Virginia congressional districts in 2014 or 2016, or alternatively, for a seat in the Virginia legislature in 2015. If that sounds imprecise, it’s a function of how uncertain political opportunities can be—and if that sounds expedient, never lose sight of the fact that politics is not wishfulness, it’s the execution of a long, draining process to win votes and help and relationships while your adversaries are working just as hard to tear down the ground you build.
I by no means underestimate the difficulty of putting together a campaign again, especially in a community to which I have no long-standing ties. I have a mountain of details to learn about this northern slice of Virginia and its aspirations, and given the many times I have advised would-be candidates to have a platform and a reason for serving, as opposed to a desire to hold an office, that learning curve is one I would take seriously.
And the question of party label in what remains a two team enterprise? That, too, is no light decision on my part: cutting ties with an Alabama Democratic Party that has weakened and lost faith with more and more Alabamians every year is one thing; leaving a national party that has been the home for my political values for two decades is quite another. My personal library is still full of books on John and Robert Kennedy, and I have rarely talked about politics without trying to capture the noble things they stood for. I have also not forgotten that in my early thirties, the Democratic Party managed to engineer the last run of robust growth and expanded social mobility that we have enjoyed; and when the party was doing that work, it felt inclusive, vibrant, and open-minded.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: A Response to Political Rumors
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue May 29, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
We love to highlight, at The Recovering Politician, the works and thoughts of our next generation of leaders, the Milleneal Generation.
Marina Keegan was certainly in that category. Just last week, she graduated from Yale University, with a job at the prestigious New Yorker waiting. Tragically, she was killed on Saturday in a car accident.
Here’s an except from her final article, “The Opposite of Loneliness”:
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.
It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.
Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.
This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.
But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”
By Patrick Derocher, on Tue May 29, 2012 at 12:30 PM ET
Will crucial independent voters turn out in next Tuesday's California primaries?
For the first time under a new procedure, California voters will be able to vote for anyone in their relevant primaries, regardless of party affiliation. Passed in 2010, Proposition 14 instituted non-partisan blanket primaries in which candidates of any party affiliation compete for a top-two runoff in the general election. Many believe that newly-empowered unaffiliated voters will be crucial to this process, but the question remains as to whether they will turn out. Groups like the Independent Voter Project are aiming to do just that. [Sacramento Bee]
They’re back. New Jersey’s most prominent bipartisan couple, Governor Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, seem to have gotten past a minor spat last fall, and created a “Seinfeld” parody together. It’s an old video, to be sure, but it’s worth noting for the bipartisan spirit. The video, filmed for the New Jersey Press Association’s Legislative Correspondents Club, consists largely of Booker foiling Christie’s attempts at outdoing the Mayor’s larger-than-life feats of strength and bravery. (Warning: there is Tebowing with a baby.) [Huffington Post]
If Wisconsin is a sign of things to come in November, we all have a lot to worry about. Democrats especially. As that state’s gubernatorial recall election fast approaches (also on June 5; keep your calendars open), incumbent Republican Scott Walker and his allies have massively outspent challenger Tom Barrett. (Though to be fair, Walker was not subject to the same fundraising limits as Barrett leasing up to the election.) In any event, both Walker and Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor who faced Walker in the 2010 election, have been aided by millions in outside funding, including $4.8 million from the Republican Governors Association and $4.4 million from labor groups who attacked Walker in support of Barret’s primary opponent, former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]
Sometimes, a state’s problem lies beyond partisan bickering and simply fall under the category of “poor choices.” Such is the case in Rhode Island, which effectively owns 38 Studios, a creator of video games. Or, as it were, a former creator of video games. In 2010, then-governor Donald Carcieri pushed for a major loan to 38 Studios, which former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curtis Schilling founded in 2006. The deal was unpopular with the public, and all three major gubernatorial candidates in 2010 opposed it. Now, after releasing precisely one game, 38 studios effectively went out of business last Thursday, taking 400 Rhode Islanders’ jobs, their health insurance, and $112 million in loan principal, interest, and fees with it. [CNN]
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue May 29, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
One more reason I love technology.
In the old days when you committed you were going to start a new diet you had to join a gym, buy some new work out clothes, get a heart rate watch, subscribe to an exercise magazine, and perhaps even hire a personal trainer.
Before failing at the diet and exercise plan.
But not anymore!
Thanks to the internet and smartphones, we can save time and money by bragging to our friends—and they pretending to believe us—that we are “committed” to making some major changes in our dietary lifestyle without having to spend hundreds of dollars on all these old school props.
All we have to do is download an “app” for our smartphone called “Lose It”
And then fail at the diet and exercise plan.
Sure, we’re still overweight but look at the time, money and energy we save!
Thanks technology!! You really do deliver! Despite having to put up with us too human humans.
(Caveat: Some people really have succeeded using this app. They must have either really wanted to lose weight or simply lacked the ability to be able to fool themselves.)
Blog this!
