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 Sep 1, 2011 at 3:00 PM ET
The Politics of Speed
It is really not looking good for Saab as the company that owns them: Swedish Automobile NV posted a $220 million second quarter loss. It is not likely that Saab will be kept afloat much longer. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
You may not have heard yet, but Formula 1 is finally making a return to America! The inaugural race has been pushed back, but the official premiere date is Nov. 18, 2012. The first race will be at the still under-construction Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. [The Austin Chronicle]
Here is an interesting story that asserts that if Dick Cheney had his way the Detroit Three would be no more. This is apparently stated by Cheney himself in his new memoir. [Detroit Free Press]
The Chevy Camaro is the most popular car on Facebook with 1.8 million fans. [Facebook]
Smaller, smaller, smaller. Auto makers are churning out more compact cars to meet demand for lower prices and better gas mileage. [Associated Press]
Apparently, the RP’s great radio face is in high demand. He was interviewed today by MyTechnologyLawyer radio about the debt crisis, the No Labels philosophy, and his hopes for future bipartisanship.
There’s something unnervingly genuine about Jason Atkinson. Unnerving because he’s a politician – once a member of the Oregon House of Representatives, today a member of its Senate, in between a determined but failed candidate for governor – but he doesn’t sound anything like one.
His speech lacks curated sound bites, and he tends to talk about solving problems, rather than who’s to blame for them.
This could be subjective. I met Mr. Atkinson only once; we had several conversations over four days this summer at the Aspen Global Leadership Network’s ACT II conference. (The AGLN paid for my travel and accommodations.)
He is an Oregonian, and I’m an East Coaster, far more comfortable with irony than sincerity.
But with all the blather on cable news, what explains his reasons for practicing politics in a time of intense partisanship like this?
“I used to tell people that I was the guy who actually believed the commencement speech,” he says.
Atkinson, a Republican, has taken some stands considered controversial in Oregon political circles; by his account, that’s at least in part because he thinks of public service before politics. For a long time, these were important but mostly invisible battles guys like him waged in their hearts and souls – or in the proverbial back rooms where political deals are cut.
That changed, for Atkinson, in January, when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) of Arizona was shot at a “town hall” style meeting. Atkinson knew Ms. Giffords – the two had been in the inaugural class of the ALGN’s Rodel Fellowship in Public Service.
Let me damn Cornel West with some praise that is hardly faint: the Princeton philosopher writes with the lift of poetry even when he is describing something as unsentimental as the nature of American power. He also has the virtue of barbed honesty and has never let the lure of traveling among political princes and celebrities restrain his candor.
Not surprisingly, those traits–candor and grace–explain why his essay in the New York Times on August 25, 2011, “Dr. King Weeps From His Grave”, has touched nerves in all manner of places.
West’s critique is best captured in one scathing, beautiful sentence: “the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30 year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned”.
Dr. Cornel West
These are arrows aimed at Republicans from Ronald Reagan to John Boehner for the contraction they have forced in the social contract, and at Democrats from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, who in West’s view have left that contract too thinly defended and have done their own damage by trying too hard to sample conservative rhetoric on deficit reduction and taxes. To put a crescendo on the point, West, an early Obama supporter, calls the “age of Obama” a time that has “fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy”.
West is absolutely right about this much: the season of our first African American chief executive has most certainly not reshaped the foundations of our politics in the way that a million plus freezing bodies aligned on the National Mall on January 20, 2009 imagined it would. More Americans self-describe as conservative today, and fewer call themselves liberals, than on the day Obama shattered his glass ceiling, and the net effect is a nation that by roughly two to one leans right rather than left. That is not exactly, in West’s words, a place that sustains a “radical democratic vision.”
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: King Would Have Understood Obama’s Civility
By Ronald J. Granieri, on Wed Aug 31, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET
The media are full these days of stories discussing the relative value of education. Some detail the political fights in various states, such as Texas and California, over funding and control of state universities, while others discuss the failure of universities in general to educate “academically adrift” students, or the pernicious effects of the tenure system on higher education. Central to many of these discussions are attempts to evaluate education, or individual educators, on the basis of measurable quantities—student scores on standardized tests or average salaries upon graduation on the one hand, number of refereed publications or hours taught on the other.
Frankly, I find these discussions both depressing and unenlightening. Attempts to quantify the value of an education strike me as irrelevant at best and pernicious at worst.
Part of my objection is practical. Any quantitative measure of education is susceptible to interpretation and manipulation (literally, if one follows the growing scandal in the Atlanta public schools over cheating on standardized tests). Even if honestly gathered, such data may still not tell us what we think we want to know. Do the GPAs or the starting salaries of graduates really tell us whether those graduates received good educations, or do they just tell us about the relative success of those graduates to manage the practical aspects of life? Should we be surprised that Engineering majors make more on average than English majors? Do the number of refereed publications or the numbers of credit hours taught tell us whether a professor is an effective educator?
Read the rest of… Ron Granieri: On the Tyranny of the Measurable
By Robert Kahne, RP Staff, on Tue Aug 30, 2011 at 3:30 PM ET
The Politics of Film
Hunter S Thompson books have been adapted into films by Johnny Depp before, to great acclaim. Coming soon is The Rum Diary, which was written by Thompson before he went too crazy, and I think this film has a good chance to be really fun and good. Check out the trailer. [The Movie Blog]
Am I too old to love comic books? I really hope not. After watching 3 years of films building up to Marvel’s The Avengers, we now officially have a poster. I’m excited, and you should be too. [IFC]
Now that the Harry Potter series is over and the Twilight films are all in the can, we need a new Young Adult Fiction series to win over our hearts and minds. Hunger Games seeks to do just that. Check out the trailer, featuring Jennifer Lawrence heavily. [Film Junk]
Oldboy is a Korean revenge flick which is incredibly violent and very intense. It is definitely not a movie that everyone can stomach. However, for the people who like those kinds of films, it is a classic. Spike Lee plans on adapting it into English, and has tapped Josh Brolin to play the lead. This is very excited, if you ask me. [The Guardian]
Lars Von Trier managed to get himself kicked out of the Cannes film festival earlier this year because he said he sympathized with Hitler. Even after that, his film, Melancholia, managed to win a few awards. If a film can come back from that, it must be pretty good. Experts say that this film will do for Kirsten Dunst what Brokeback Mountain did for Heath Ledger. Check out the trailer. [/Film]
The film The Artist is a movie set during the silent film era–and pays homage to that era by actually being a silent film. This film has generated a lot of positive buzz, but it remains to be seen if a film without any talking can win awards this year. Check out the trailer to see what you think [LA Times]
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