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 Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Thu Apr 5, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
The Politics of Pigskin
Disgraced former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams allegedly implored his players during a speech to inflict injuries to 49ers players. Stick a fork in him. [Yahoo! Sports]
Joe Flacco thinks he is the best QB in the NFL. Not sure how you say that with a straight face. [ESPN]
The 49ers will not play the Raiders this preseason. Probably for the best. [NBC]
Nike unveiled their new NFL uniform designs this week. [Sports Illustrated]
The all-time QB bust Ryan Leaf was arrested this week. The charges were for both burglary and drugs. [CougCenter]
Upon release Leaf was promptly arrested again. [NFL.com]
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Apr 5, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Life advice at 11:30pm on a Monday when no one has asked for it.
Wishing I knew more answers at this point in life but glad I have so many left to try to figure out.
It’s nice to go through life feeling you have the answers to most everything important question and that those answers need not be questioned.
It’s secure and seductive.
And there are parts of life that aren’t complicated and where plain truths are all we need to know—and simply stick to them.
But life, to me, is a mystery and we can only see through a glass, darkly for now. But we should, in my view, look and think and imagine anyway.
If I hold all the same opinions at age 50 that I had at age 25, I can’t help but feel that I haven’t asked enough of myself. And if I hold the same opinions at age 75 I held at 25,
I’m afraid I’ll feel I learned nothing in this life. And maybe even insulted God by not paying closer attention.
Does this mean go buy some self-help books or CDs? If you want. Maybe take a course. Or talk to a friend who you haven’t met yet because they are too different and may challenge your beliefs.
Or do what I’m doing now, watch and listen to The Who’s “The Seeker”. And pretend you are being deep when you are really just relaxing and unwinding. And maybe preparing to imagine something new.
Whatever you choose. I do recommend being a seeker. It’s not as scary as it seems. Each day is as mysterious as it is predictable. You can come up with rambling Facebook posts. And, best of all, the music is awesome! ; )
At the risk of reading tea leaves from two justices, the ever pivotal Anthony Kennedy and the magisterial but cautious John Roberts, the game seems up on the health insurance mandate.
In casual parlance, they seemed to get it—the “it” being that a government with the power to compel a consumer to enter a market is as omnipotent economically as it wants to be. That government is not only theoretically free to pursue a range of things it won’t do, from making Prius purchasing, Iphone carrying, broccoli eaters of all of us—but, as Kennedy especially seemed to intuit, its also capable of doing something more realistic and more substantial, which is collapsing the zone of economic autonomy to almost nothing, in the name of making the economy look the way government thinks it should.
David Brooks, in his latest column in the NY Times, puts the mandate in the familiar context of the Obama Administration’s penchant for centralized bureaucracies, and he is certainly right about that. Given its druthers, and more votes in Congress, the president would have almost certainly followed that trend into a full scale public option that would have arguably refashioned healthcare delivery along the lines of the fraying, cost-exploding model that is Medicare. For good measure, this White House would have done the same with cap-and-trade and the market for carbon emissions, and they have certainly run the same play in the context of the Dodd-Frank reform by carving out an aggressive new regulator for consumer financial products.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The Mandate’s Very Bad Day
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Apr 4, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Much ado about nothing.
This entire episode with Jason Russell (founder of Invisible Children) crusading to make international criminal Joseph Kony famous…has been misunderstood and blown way out of proportion.
At first I, too, was stunned to read that Mr Russell was discovered near San Diego running naked in the streets, shouting nonsensically, pacing, slapping the sidewalk and interfering with traffic.
But I kept reading.
Russell is a graduate of USC (University of Southern California).
I attended USC for over a year back in the early 80’s before returning home to Louisville (and Bellarmine College).
The kind of behavior exhibited by Mr Russell was NOT abnormal for many USC students and now seems perfectly sensible to me once it has been place in its proper context.
Sure, trying to make Joseph Kony famous can make anyone a little crazy. But trying to survive the social, cultural, economic and academic pressures at USC will lead even the strong among us to regularly meltdown publicly in the Southern California area.
Jason Russell wasn’t mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted from the success of having millions of supporters cheering him to capture the world’s most infamous criminal.
He was probably merely having a flashback from his freshman hazing at USC.
They’ve seen the polling – they can read the writing on the wall. Demographics are destiny: young people overwhelmingly (2:1) support gay marriage. Middle-aged people (45-65) and mixed; seniors against.
So the process of generational replacement over the next decade will just continue moving the center further and further left on this issue. (The last issue I can remember with a generational split this stark is polling on interracial marriage around the time of Loving v. Virginia – ’67-68.) Clearly, Republicans are wise to begin what will be a long retreat from their rhetoric around this issue.
And as POLITICO notes this morning, some smart Republicans are also beginning to take the longer view on immigration. Alienating young people and Latinos in a country that will be increasingly dominated by them in coming decades is a huge political loser.
Unfortunately for Republicans, small symbolic steps won’t enough to sway many folks this fall. Undoing the damage from this year’s nasty primary (and the forces that led to it) is a multi-cycle proposition.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Apr 4, 2012 at 7:00 AM 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… The RP: My Father, RFK, and the Greatest Speech of the 20th Century
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Apr 3, 2012 at 1:00 PM ET
My friend Billy Reed — who happens to also be the dean of Kentucky’s sportswriters — wrote an incredible piece on Kentucky basketball last week for Si.com prior to the UK/UofL showdown. I share it with you here to demonstrate the kind of writing I aspire to — someday:
Outside my home here in Louisville, all hell is breaking loose. Insults and predictions are dropping like bombs. Rational people are fleeing bars and restaurants in search of sanctuary. Offices have become battlegrounds, families are being torn apart, and minor events such as weddings are being reorganized. I now know what Edward R. Murrow must have felt like when he was reporting about the siege of London during World War II.
In more than a half century of covering basketball in Kentucky, I thought I had just about seen it all. Heck, even though I was just a kid in 1955, I remember the flag over the state capital building in Frankfort being lowered to half-mast because Georgia Tech had ended the Kentucky Wildcats’ 129-game home winning streak (still the national record). That was my first clue that basketball wasn’t just a game in my native state.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t prepared for the madness that surrounds me this week. I guess I always knew that Kentucky and Louisville would someday meet in the Final Four. But I never dreamed that it would cause all serious work in the Commonwealth to grind to a virtual standstill. I never dreamed that Anthony Davis’ brow would get more radio and TV time than anything since Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier for the first time in 1971.
To put it into context, this is Super Bowl week in Kentucky. Even folks who only have a casual interest in hoops — yes, we do have some of those — are suddenly expressing opinions and making bets and generally acting like fools.
Naturally, the national media has been in town this week, trying to ferret out basketball crazies to interview. This makes me nervous because when they find somebody like the guy who has the UK logo in his glass eye, it doesn’t exactly reflect well on us. But we can’t deny the obvious. You may have heard about the two senior citizens in Georgetown, Ky., ages 69 and 72, who almost came to blows arguing about Louisville and Kentucky during their dialysis treatment.
Blog this!
They’ve seen the polling – they can read the writing on the wall. Demographics are destiny: young people overwhelmingly (2:1) support gay marriage. Middle-aged people (45-65) and mixed; seniors against.
