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:
Last weekend, on my last day in St. Louis before moving to NYC, I co-hosted a free 3-on-3 basketball tournament and community fair in North St. Louis. The event is in its sixth year; I started it during my first state Senate campaign in 2006, and it eventually attracted several thousand people each year. Dozens of businesses sponsor the event, which features a traveling health clinic, free school supplies, and brand-new bicycles and iPods for the winning teams in each age group.
North St. Louis is struggling. It’s about 95% black, and unemployment among men in their 20s approaches 50% in many neighborhoods. Parts of it resemble the Detroit that you see on the news or the Baltimore on The Wire, but people forget that families live there. It’s a community fighting to regain its lost glory – ironically, the days of segregation, when black doctors, lawyers, teachers, principals, and morticians lived among the laborers and housekeepers, in larger homes but in close proximity.
The first couple years of the tournament, people weren’t sure about me. Who is this white guy coming up in our neighborhood? Just another politician sniffing around for votes, making more promises? Using us for a photo-op? Well, he can dribble…but we’ve been fooled before. Remember that Schoemehl boy, when he first ran for Mayor…then turned around and closed City Hospital?
The next few years, people began to see that my commitment was genuine. As the group of city charter schools I’d co-founded a decade earlier grew to 3000 students, people noted my involvement. Others saw the legislative work I did on behalf of incarcerated fathers struggling to pay child support.
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Aug 15, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET
If there’s anything that unites Americans more during this summer of our discontent, it is that we all hate politics. Politics have moved beyond simple ugly sport; politics almost brought our country to its economic knees.
That’s why starting today, and going through this Friday, we are challenging the rest of the country to join us in a Politics-Free Week. For seven full days during the doldrums of August, we’ll take on the latest controversies in sports, film, fashion, parenting — anything but politics.
If you needed yet another reason to hate politics…
A political firestorm erupted in the tiny rural hamlet of Fancy Farm, Kentucky, last weekend when a scandalous speech delivered by Governor Steve Beshear received universal approbation from political insiders and the capital press corps.
One wag opined that the governor “may have stepped onto a political land mine.”
Another mocked Beshear’s “bizarre choice of oratory on the state’s biggest political stage.”
Maybe this brief of hiatus will recharge us for an ugly fall filled with supercommittees and presidential campaign bickering. Maybe it will provide us a slight window of sanity to remember what is truly important.
Or maybe, just maybe, we’ll be like George Costanza, in that episode of Seinfeld in which he takes a temporary vow of abstinence, and his previously sex-obsessed brain opens up to deep social, cultural and scientific awareness.
Check in often during this week of political abstinence. See how your politically-obsessed mind can open up to new possibilities. While we can’t promise a Costanza-like transformation, at least you’ll get some temporary relief. And maybe you won’t hate politics so much when Labor Day rolls around.
Oh, and consistent with this theme, our Weekly Web Gems will not focus on “The Politics of…” the various subject matter categories. Instead, with a salute to my cousin, Steve (or should I say Maurice?), we will concentrate on the much more important subject of “The Pompatus of…” love and other subjects.
Before we dive into a Politics Free Week (check out our cool new banner above), the RP got in a few last minute political interviews in the Northwest and Great White North media.
Oregon Live interviewed him about the super-committee tasked with helping to fix the country’s debt problems:
“There was an adult conversation missing” from the debt ceiling debate, said Jonathan Miller, a co-founder of the group No Labels, which wants to restore bipartisanship. The public agrees, according to polls. But with elections approaching and positions fixed, Miller asks, “Will the pressures be too great to present a bi-partisan agreement?”
And later, the RP engaged in his regular gig with CTV News, Canada’s CNN. This occasion, he commented on the weekend’s Iowa straw poll, and other developments in the GOP presidential primary.
By Robert Kahne, RP Staff, on Fri Aug 12, 2011 at 1:30 PM ET
Ben Wyatt, a man much like me.
The guy to the left is Ben Wyatt (played by Adam Scott), a character from my favorite show on television, Parks and Recreation. (Sorry, Community, I think you’ve been unseated). Ben Wyatt arrived on the show at the end of the second season as a hard hearted Indiana state financial auditor. He arrives in the mythical town of Pawnee in order to clean up the city’s financial mess. During most of his second season appearances, he clashes with the lovely Amy Poehler, who plays my perfect mate–Leslie Knope. However, by the end of the show’s third season, he has lightened up quite a bit, and is dating Leslie.
I am a lot like this guy. The character Ben was elected the mayor of a small town in Minnesota when he was 18 years old, and prompted ran the town’s finances into the ground. After being impeached (two months after he took office), he spent the rest of his professional career trying to clean up his name. He became a financial auditor, and the character has helped turn around several towns financially. However, his past always seems to find a way to haunt him–in an episode in the show, he is consistently hounded by Pawnee’s hilariously ridiculous media for his troubled past as a failed mayor.
In the show, Ben dates Leslie Knope. I wish I dated either Leslie Knope or Amy Poehler.
I am like Ben because when I was younger, I made a lot of silly mistakes also. I have always been pretty quick to absorb information, and I have always been very passionate about thing in which I believe. In high school and throughout much of college, I wielded my opinions like a big sword. I would argue until me and the other person were blue in the face, and I would never back down. I took to rhetoric pretty quick: while I fought a lot of arguments to a draw, I very rarely looked foolish or incorrect. I was thoroughly convinced that if I argued with people who thought differently than me that they would be converted to the way in which I think, or at least, that the people who saw us arguing would be swain to “my side.” I fought with feeling–and if the other person had the facts which disproved my arguments, I would just continue to repeat my opinions, just louder, and with more feeling. Ideology trumped everything to me–and anything that was right to my ideological faith was gospel. That was a really crappy thing to do. More than several people have taken me aside to tell me that they were offended by how much I hounded someone in a rhetorical tussle, and others found me to be offensive and thought my tone was overly mocking. They were right.
For the past several years, I have tried to make this right. In my last few years of undergraduate, I worked really hard to learn about different political ideologies and economic schools. I have tried to learn and understand their decision making frameworks, and how they think. When deciding to go to graduate school, I decided to go to policy school. There, I worked really hard to learn how to discover facts and utilize information in order to solve problems and draw conclusions. Like Ben Wyatt, after realizing that the way in which I had lived was flawed, I have tried to make things a bit more right.
In real life, however, Amy Poehler is married to this guy. She has made a huge mistake.
That’s not to say I don’t have a lot of opinions, still. But when I do decided to be vocal about them, I am sure to provide evidence or support for the things which I say. That’s super important. And whenever I am writing about something, I try to do my best to explain the other side of the coin. That’s why in this space, I’ve tried to give Austrians arguments to the debt ceiling crisis, and why I have tried to explain every side of the sustainability/consumption chain as completely as possible. I still screw up–a lot. I let my opinions get in the way when I see something that makes me really angry, but usually I recover pretty quickly and before I say TOO many stupid things, I get back to using data and information to back up my thoughts. To the people who are reading this: feel free to call me out about this. If you think I don’t do a good enough job of ensuring that facts and information are ingrained in what I say, write, and post–feel free to speak up! I want to be as good as I can about this, and help is always appreciate (well…help is usually appreciated :))
Plus, Ben Wyatt and I both part our hair in ridiculous ways, and enjoy wearing plaid shirts entirely too much. And we are typically the only people to laugh at our own jokes.
By Stephanie Doctrow, RP Staff, on Fri Aug 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET
So you say you don’t have a “math brain”? According to new research, there is such thing is an inherent number sense… and it’s something you’ve either got, or you don’t. [Time]
Curl up and relax… with your smartphone? [NY Times]
Contributing RP Eva Moskowitz received a major endorsement for her efforts to promote charter schools in New York City — from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.
Read here:
We write frequently about the charter-school wars in New York City because the battle touches so many aspects of the effort to give children from poor families the education necessary to escape their circumstances.
Today’s report has good news: Results released yesterday of test scores in the New York State Assessment Program showed that the most relentlessly attacked charter schools—Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success academies—have outperformed their public-school peers, often by a wide margin.
At all New York City’s public schools, 60% of third, fourth and fifth graders passed the math exam; at Harlem Success, 94% passed. In the state language arts exam, 49% from the city schools passed compared to 78% at the charters. The 94% pass rate for the academies’ black and Hispanic students surpassed the 73% pass rate for white students taking the exam in New York state.
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Thu Aug 11, 2011 at 3:00 PM ET
The Politics of Speed
Jalopnik has the story of a 20-year-old abandoned BMW dealership in Ontario, Canada with two mint-condition BMWs visible through the window. The whole place looks like it frozen in time. Very cool. [Jalopnik]
The CEO of General Motors recently bought up 10,000 more shares of GM stock after they took a 25% hit. [Autoblog]
Some sad news coming from Mazda, with the discontinuing of the RX-8 model, they are also putting their rotary engine program on hiatus. It’s doubtful that it will go away forever, but it’s still a bummer for piston-less engine fans. [Wards Auto]
Here are the weekly NASCAR power rankings from ESPN, featuring a big jump from Brad Keselowski after a win last weekend. [ESPN]
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