By RP Staff, on Wed Jan 25, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET  As the nation celebrates the miraculous recovery of Congresswoman Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords, who was grievously wounded just over a year ago — and who has decided to retire from Congress today — The RP spoke to the Washington Times about Gabby’s legacy:
For Ms. Giffords, civility had been an issue well before the shooting.
Even before she won her seat in Congress, she was part of the inaugural class of the Aspen Institute’s leadership program, designed to foster better sharing and cooperation on ideas among elected officials.
One of her fellow classmates was Jonathan Miller, then the treasurer of Kentucky, who would go on to co-found No Labels, a group that pushes elected officials to move past partisanship and who said Ms. Giffords has become a symbol of “a return to civility and a return to developing relationships.”
“That’s what Gabby’s career is all about,” he said.
His group and Third Way, a progressive-leaning think tank, want to institutionalize the bipartisan State of the Union seating, which Third Way and some lawmakers came up with in the wake of the Tucson shooting.
“There was that very temporary surge [in civility], and it was quickly forgotten it seems,” Mr. Miller said. “But I think in that temporary surge there were a number of efforts that got their germination, including No Labels, that really have picked up a lot of steam and a lot of energy.”
Click here to read the full Washington Times article.
The RP additionally was quoted yesterday in the National Journal on last night’s bi-partisan seating at the State of the Union address, also a legacy of Giffords’ service:
Part of the push for bipartisan seating comes from independent groups like Third Way and No Labels, which took out a full-page ad in the New York Times earlier this month. But are they really expecting Republicans and Democrats sitting next to each other to solve partisan gridlock?
Last year’s State of the Union included bipartisan seating in response to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). But that didn’t exactly lay the groundwork for a productive and cooperative 2011.
“It won’t have any dramatic short-term effect,” admitted Jonathan Miller, a co-founder of No Labels and the former treasurer of Kentucky.
But, Miller said, if bipartisan seating gets institutionalized, it could make a difference. And he said that “it’s a signal to the public that [lawmakers] are taking their demand for less hyper-partisanship seriously.”
No Labels has also been tracking the announced bipartisan seating pairs.
Click here to read the full National Journal piece.
By Rod Jetton, on Mon Jan 23, 2012 at 9:30 AM ET  Rod Jetton: Rebuttal #2
[The RP’s Provocation; Artur Davis’ Rebuttal #1]
Jonathan has some great points on Tebow that I agree with. I’m an Evangelical Baptist preacher’s son, and I admit I have found myself rooting for Tebow this season.
There are two reasons I have become a Tebow fan:
First, he made games exciting. I am a Green Bay Packers fan and a huge Brett Favre fan. I loved rooting for Favre because he gave 100%, and you never knew what would happen. He sometimes lost, sometimes threw a pick, but more times than not, he did something unbelievable and won the game.
Tebow is like that too. Yes, he has some terrible throws, and makes some really bad plays, but you never know whats going to happen in a game. While it’s too early to compare him to Brett Favre, like Favre, he has won more than he has lost. He gives 100%, and his first year reminds me of when Favre first started for the Packers in 1992. Coaches, critics and fans all wondered if Favre, and his unconvential style, could ever produce consistent wins.
Well, we all know how that story ended. He worked hard improved and started having more good plays than bad and in 1995, 1996 and 1997 was the NFL MVP, including 2 Super Bowl apperances, one SB win, and one of the highest winning percentage of any quarterback in leauge history.
Read the rest of…
The RPs Debate Tim Tebow: Rod Jetton Rebuts
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jan 16, 2012 at 2:00 PM ET Martin Luther King, Jr in his own words.
Historic words that changed a nation and defined an movement one afternoon not too many years ago. Words were MLK Jr’s weaponry.
He proved that the pen can indeed sometimes be mightier than the sword (or gun, or burning cross or fire hose, as the case may be). But only if the words are borne of conviction, selected masterfully, and used in the service of a calling.
Which brings me to my oddest but personally important lessons from MLK Jr.
Years ago when I was in college I read somewhere that MLK Jr used to be caught reading the dictionary. He loved words…and saw early on the power and force verbal persuasion can have on a nation.
It encouraged me to “read” my dictionary. My old college Merriam-Webster dictionary, by the time I finished college, was the one book in my library that left no doubt that the owner had gotten his money’s worth.
Read the rest of…
John Y’s Musings from the Middle: What King Taught Me About Words
By Michael Steele, on Mon Jan 16, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET  The importance of Dr. King’s contributions cannot be over-stated or diminished by the lapse of time. His fight for the freedom, equality, and dignity of all races and peoples remains as important today as it was on April 4, 1968, the day he was killed.
So, as we reflect on this man of history, I hope we appreciate Dr. King’s courage, vision, strength, humanity, but most importantly, his perseverance.
Dr. King’s perseverance transformed him; it made him not just a legendary leader, it signals to us in these times the challenge remains to “take up the cause of freedom”.
Perseverance enabled Dr. King not only to achieve success, but to achieve his dream; a that dream that draws us even today; a dream that embodied the civil rights movement but importantly, a dream that created a legacy for future generations;
Dr. King’s efforts helped close a chapter in America’s history, a chapter which chronicled the burden of slavery and institutionalized discrimination. A chapter which imprinted segregated public accommodations and schools on the very soul of African American life.
A chapter in which the foundation of America—freedom and equality—was rocked by water hoses, police dogs and racism.
However, Dr. King also knew that this movement towards civil rights would open a new chapter for America—a chapter we are still writing today; a chapter steeped in hope, opportunity and true equality.
But, for many this new chapter, which reflects America’s journey from slavery to emancipation; from Jim Crow to affirmative action also, belies an accomplished agenda.
The illiterate, the suffering, the addicted, the homeless—they demand more from our generation than nice words or one more government program.
What they demand, and what you and I must provide is an opportunity to heal and to teach, to turn dreams into reality and hope into action for the kid growing up on the streets instead of in a home; for the family struggling to make ends meet; for the teacher mired in paperwork while her students are mired in a failing school.
Thurgood Marshall once said, that “none of us has gotten where we are solely by pulling ourselves up from our bootstraps. We got here because somebody bent down and helped us.”
Read the rest of…
Michael Steele: Dr. King’s Perseverance
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jan 16, 2012 at 12:30 PM ET  What has been our greatest act honoring MLK?
A fair question to ask ourselves today.
In 1984, I had the privilege of studying abroad with a group of 500 other students. We spent 4 days and 3 nights in Capetown, South Africa. Nelson Mandela, an anti-Apartheid activist, was in prison and we were taught that he’d surely die there.
Apartheid policy, South Africa’s legal segregation, ensured that the 20% of the population that was white would keep the 80% that were non-white in subjugation.
But that didn’t happen. Apartheid was on a collision course with history. Nelson Mandela not only left prison but in 1994 was elected the first black president of South Africa.
But in 1984 things were very different. Of the 500 students in the program only 4 visited a “Township,” an impoverished urban area where non-white workers were housed.
I was one of them….and encouraged the other three to join me in a taxi ride through a nearby Township. I wasn’t being a martyr. I was mostly curious. My heart went out to the non-whites in South Africa who weren’t allowed to walk on city streets after midnight.
I had given half my cheeseburger the night before to a black man who asked for it–but wasn’t allowed in the diner at that time of night. I felt like I’d traveled back in time 20 years….but wanted mostly to understand.
The cab driver drove us through the Township offering commentary about how the men were bused in from hours away and would stay for several weeks at a time. The scraps from cows (tongue, nose, unwanted parts) were sold on the streets as flies were swatted away unsuccessfully.
I brought a book by MLK with me that day–a collection of his thoughts and quotes. I’m not sure why. Before leaving the Township, I asked the cab driver to slow down. Several men looked inside the cab curious about the 4 young white boys inside. I rolled down the window and handed one the MLK book on civil disobedience and waved good-bye.
The cab driver warned me that was dangerous to do and I shouldn’t have done that. He was an Africaaner. A race with slightly more rights than blacks but still significantly inferior rights to whites.
I doubt the book ever got read becoming a source of inspiration. Who knows? But I’m proud of my act….not really a brave act but a small but caring act showing I was engaged…..and in response to a system we all knew was untenable.
I was not rebelling or meddling where I shouldn’t. I was trying in some very small and almost insignificant way to help —that was personal to me. Of course, the book I gave didn’t matter in the scheme of things….but mattered to me. It was something I could do at that moment. And I did it. And 27 years later, it stands out to me as the personal act that most honored MLK. A great man we honor today.
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Jan 16, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET  My dad and I circa 1968 On this day of celebration of the life 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, King, RFK & The Greatest Speech of the 20th Century
By RP Staff, on Wed Jan 11, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Contributing RP Jason Atkinson was featured this week in a television piece commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Tucson tragedy that left six people dead and critically injured Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Giffors, who has miraculously recovered, was a fellow classmate of Jason’s (and The RP – pictured behind Giffords) in the inaugural class of the Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellows program.
From KDRV News Watch 12:
The tragedy in Tuscon that took the lives of six people and injured many more, resonated with Americans across the country.
For one state lawmaker, it was his friend Gabrielle Giffords who fought to stay alive that morning and has been recovering ever since.
State Senator Jason Atkinson studied along side Giffords for two years. The two developed a friendship which broke through their political barriers.
Sunday he looked back on that morning and said there are lessons to be learned.
January 8, 2011 Senator Atkinson received a phone call telling him to turn on the television.
“Between watching television and being on the phone with friends we just couldn’t believe what had happened,” said Senator Jason Atkinson.
His colleague and good friend Gabrielle Giffords was shot and many others in the same condition.
“I was worried about Gabby and that terrible injury,” said Atkinson.
Click here for the full story.
By RP Nation, on Tue Jan 10, 2012 at 12:30 PM ET Last Friday, we posted dedicated from the RP Nation to the recently diseased, one-of-a-kind politician, Gatewood Galbraith. This one came in late, but it was so lovely that we wanted to share it.
I first met Gatewood Galbriath in early October 1994. He was speaking in Glasgow, Kentucky. I drove out with several of my friends, and we weren’t sure exactly who was speaking that night at the meeting we were attending. I don’t even remember who organized the meeting. But when I heard the speaker introduced as Gatewood, I thought, “Cool! The pot guy!”
I don’t remember exactly what Gatewood did speak about, but I remember hearing the great quote from him, concerning did his father’s generation hit the beaches of Normandy so he could urinate in a cup in order to get a job?
I approached Gatewood after his speech was over in order to shake his hand, which he quickly obliged me, with his toothy smile shining down on me. I knew I’d vote for him in next year’s race. Unfortunately, I couldn’t, because I missed the deadline to change my registration to Democrat.
Of course, Gatewood wasn’t finished in his quest for public office.
Five years later, I’m working for a community paper in Bullitt County. I received a tip to come to a meeting one rainy morning in Louisville. I replied I would come, but couldn’t report on it because it was out of our limits. Come anyway, I was told.
Again, Gatewood was the chief speaker. And once again, I approached him after the meeting and asked him if he would be stumping in my county anytime soon. He said he was hoping to attend the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot later that day. I told him if he did, I’d give him coverage that he was certainly unaccustomed to getting in the press, and he readily agreed.
After the meeting was over, we sat down for lunch. It so happened I was seated next to Gatewood. A mutual acquaintance told Gatewood to watch out, he was sitting next to a reporter, and he knew how those people loved to twist what he said. Gatewood looked up and said, “That’s OK, he was up-front with me. I can tell he’s one of the few honest ones left.”
Needless to say, that was one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever been paid.
As it happens, Gatewood wasn’t able to make the shoot, but I didn’t know that at the time. I had other things to do that day, and when I finally made it to the soggy shoot and couldn’t find Gatewood, I feared I missed him. I went to bed that night, deeply ashamed of myself, thinking I let him down.
Well, Gatewood and I never had our interview, but we would meet several other times. And each election I could, I dutifully cast a vote for the “Last Free Man.”
Farewell, Gatewood, you’re already missed.
By RP Nation, on Fri Jan 6, 2012 at 12:30 PM ET
 Betty Pace and Gatewood
R.I.P. GOOD FRIEND.
Gatewood was an author friend of mine and we had some good laughs together. I will miss him.
One time my daughter and I arrived in Dallas, Texas at our hotel. When finding out that we were from Kentucky, the doorman asked if we knew Gatewood.
“He’s a wonderful friend of mine,” the door man said.
He took his phone from his pocket and said,”Do you want to say hello to him?” I talked to Gatewood a few minutes. That made for wonderful service from this hotel while we were there.
 Betty and the bus' driver
Gatewood’s bus was fully equipped with beds, table and chairs, bathroom and home site living.
Many times Gatewood would jump out of his bus in the middle of town, shake hands with onlookers and supporters.
By RP Nation, on Fri Jan 6, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET Gatewood had asked me to run as his Lt Gov back in 2007, and for several weeks we had a great relationship and laughed and shared ideas but ultimately I couldn’t make it happen.
I felt terrible when I had to tell him, but Gatewood just smiled and said, “no problem brother”.
Needless to say, I have several great stories about Gatewood that I can share with you. But the one theme they all have is the constant love Gatewood had for people and Kentucky.
The first time I got to meet Gatewood was at Fancy Farm years back around 2006? He had a table set up on the Democrats’ side and had a pile of his autobiography books lying on the table.
I walked up and asked “how much for your book Gatewood?” He quickly spouted off something like “do you believe in the freedom of and that Government shouldn’t and constitution this..,” he spoke so fast that I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said but I liked the words that stood out the most so I simply replied, “Damn Right”! He stopped and looked at me and said “they’re free, take one and let me sign it for you, brother”.
We talked for some time about Wille Nelson, and I shared with him the times I hung out on the movie set with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson, during the remake of the classic movie “Stage Coach.” (My father was Waylon’s double.) I could tell he was skeptical at first, until I told him how Willie was very funny and comical, and you don’t see that when he plays music. During one scene where Willie (Doc Holliday’s character) has to deliver the baby that the pregnant Lisa Crosby’s character (Yes, she had recently shot JR on Dallas) is having, he says: “I have to take a look down there now,” and as he reaches between her legs, he suddenly pulls a rabbit out of his sleeve and holds it up and declares, “I believe it’s a boy.” Even the director was rolling on the floor.
We talked about how tough it is win an election without money, and that was why he decided to finally write his autobiography and to give it to anyone in the political arena so they would get to know the real Gatewood, not just some legalize marijuana caricature.
He really had a good idea to promote himself and much better than just some 30 second commercial. About that time a preppy fellow walked over and as he was eyeing the books there was something about his demeanor and when he asked Gatewood “how much for your book”, dryly Gatewood replied, “Fifteen Bucks”! Gatewood sure could call them!
During Governor Beshear’s 1st inauguration, Gatewood and I sat together, and as the Governor was being sworn in, I asked Gatewood what it would feel like to him to be up there instead. Gatewood started beaming with that Gatewood grin and said, “Marksberry, if I ever win the lottery, look out”!
We miss you brother and we promise to keep your spirit alive!
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