LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — A statue depicting Johnny Cash departed Arkansas for Washington on Thursday, as state officials gave the bronze figure a send-off toward its new home at the U.S. Capitol.
A small crowd that included members of Cash's family gathered outside Arkansas' Capitol to watch as the statue — safely enclosed in a wooden crate in the back of a tractor trailer — began its journey. The eight- foot-tall statue is scheduled to be unveiled at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 24.
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A model of the statue of Johnny Cash that will be installed in the U.S. Capitol sits in Kevin Kresse's studio in Little Rock, Ark., on April 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
A crate holding a statue of Johnny Cash, destined for the U.S. Capitol, sits in the back of a tractor trailer parked outside the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
Artist Kevin Kresse, who sculpted a statue of Johnny Cash destined for the U.S. Capitol, speaks in front of a tractor trailer parked outside the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
A crowd gathers to watch a tractor trailer holding a statue of Johnny Cash, depart from the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
Artist Kevin Kresse, who sculpted a statue of Johnny Cash destined for the U.S. Capitol, laughs with Shimpfort Hardney, who will be driving the sculpture to Washington, outside the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
“Today is the day we're going to send Johnny to D.C.,” Shane Broadway, chairman of the Arkansas National Statuary Hall Steering Committee, said.
The Cash statue is the second new one Arkansas has sent to replace two existing ones representing the state at the U.S. Capitol. Another statue depicting civil rights leader Daisy Bates was unveiled at the Capitol earlier this year. Bates mentored the nine Black children who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
The two statues replace ones from Arkansas that had been at the Capitol for more than 100 years. The Legislature in 2019 voted to replace the two statues, which depicted little-known figures from the 18th and 19th centuries with Bates and Cash.
Cash was born in Kingsland, a tiny town about 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of Little Rock. He died in 2003 at age 71. His achievements include 90 million records sold worldwide spanning country, rock, blues, folk and gospel. He was among the few artists inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“I think a trip to DC, it is worth you going just to see these two monuments,” Secretary of State John Thurston said.
The Cash statue depicts the singer with a guitar slung across his back and a Bible in his hand. Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse, who was selected to create the statue, has sculpted other musical figures from Arkansas such as Al Green, Glen Campbell and Levon Helm.
Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the singer's last name, Kresse said he was looking forward to the moment once the statue is installed and unveiled to the public.
“The pressure inside my bottle has reduced and when he's inside the Capitol safely put together then I can fully take a deep breath,” Kresse told reporters.
A model of the statue of Johnny Cash that will be installed in the U.S. Capitol sits in Kevin Kresse's studio in Little Rock, Ark., on April 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
A crate holding a statue of Johnny Cash, destined for the U.S. Capitol, sits in the back of a tractor trailer parked outside the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
Artist Kevin Kresse, who sculpted a statue of Johnny Cash destined for the U.S. Capitol, speaks in front of a tractor trailer parked outside the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
A crowd gathers to watch a tractor trailer holding a statue of Johnny Cash, depart from the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
Artist Kevin Kresse, who sculpted a statue of Johnny Cash destined for the U.S. Capitol, laughs with Shimpfort Hardney, who will be driving the sculpture to Washington, outside the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo)
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both pushing Tuesday to energize key constituencies that their allies worry might be slipping away. The vice president is looking to reach Black men and the former president is focusing on women.
Harris will appear at a town hall-style event in Detroit hosted by the morning radio program “The Breakfast Club,” featuring Charlamagne Tha God. Trump, meanwhile, will tape a Fox News Channel town hall featuring an all-female audience moderated by host Harris Faulkner.
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz unveiled his ticket’s plan to improve the lives of rural Americans. It’s yet another sign that in a razor-tight race, each side is trying to cut into the other’s margins while shoring up traditional areas of strength.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, Trump sat down for a discussion at the Economic Club of Chicago.
Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
Here’s the latest:
Former President Barack Obama plans to join Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz in Wisconsin next week for the kickoff for in-person early voting in the battleground state.
Walz, the governor of neighboring Minnesota, and Obama have scheduled a rally in Wisconsin’s liberal capital city of Madison on Oct. 22. That is the first day that Wisconsin voters can cast ballots in person at designated polling locations ahead of Election Day. Absentee ballots started being sent to voters in late September and, as of Monday, about 240,000 had been returned.
Wisconsin is a “blue wall” state, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, and is key to Vice President Kamala Harris’ victory strategy.
Obama is the only presidential candidate in the past six elections who has won Wisconsin by more than a percentage point.
On the day before the 2012 election, Obama held a rally in Madison that attracted about 18,000 people. Another Obama rally in October of that year drew about 30,000 people.
Donald Trump is once again claiming that there was a peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election, despite the fact that his supporters violently stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6 after he refused to accept his loss.
And he is claiming that there was “love and peace” in the crowd, even as those who descended on the Capitol smashed windows, rammed through doors and clashed violently with police, leaving more than 100 injured.
“It was a peaceful transition of power,” Trump said at a Chicago Economic Club event.
The friendly audience responded with boos when his interviewer tried to dispute him.
Trump also repeated several other falsehoods in his response.
He claimed that “not one of those people had a gun” and that “Nobody was killed,” except Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter who was shot and killed by police.
In fact, five people died in the riot and its immediate aftermath, including Brian Sicknick, a police officer. Four additional officers who responded to the riot killed themselves in the following weeks and months.
A slew of rioters were carrying weapons, including firearms, knives, brass knuckle gloves, a pitchfork, a hatchet, a sledgehammer and a bow. They also used makeshift weapons, including flagpoles, a table leg, hockey stick and crutch, to attack officers. One rioter has been charged with climbing scaffolding and firing a gun in the air during the melee.
Trump also claimed that “a lot of strange things happened” and that rioters were waved into the building.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said in a memo that the allegation that “our officers helped the rioters and acted as ‘tour guides’” is “outrageous and false.” Manger said police were completely overwhelmed and outnumbered, and in many cases resorted to de-escalation tactics to try to persuade rioters to leave the building.
While there were cases where police retreated or stepped aside, there is no evidence that any rioter was “ushered” into the building.
Donald Trump won’t say whether he’s spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin since he left office.
But he says doing so would be good for the country.
“I don’t comment on that,” he said at an event before the Chicago Economic Club. “But I will tell you that if I did it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing and not a bad thing in terms of a country.”
Journalist Bob Woodward reported in his new book, “War,” that Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Putin since leaving office and secretly sent the Russian president COVID-19 test machines during the height of the pandemic.”
Trump spokesperson Steve Cheung called the reporting false. Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl that Woodward is “a storyteller. A bad one. And he’s lost his marbles.”
Donald Trump is defending his support for high tariffs as an economic cure-all as he speaks before members of the Economic Club of Chicago.
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff,’” Trump tells Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, who is interviewing him at the event. Micklethwait has repeatedly pressed Trump on warnings from economists that the costs of high tariffs will be passed along to American consumers, raising prices.
But Trump isn’t budging.
“It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong,” he says, to laughs.
The Economic Club of Chicago describes its membership as “a curated composition of business and civic leaders.”
Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday will unveil his ticket’s plans to improve the lives of rural voters, as Vice President Kamala Harris looks to cut into former President Donald Trump’s support.
The Harris-Walz plan includes a focus on improving rural health care, such as plans to recruit 10,000 new health care professionals in rural and tribal areas through scholarships, loan forgiveness and new grant programs, as well as economic and agricultural policy priorities. The plan was detailed to The Associated Press by a senior campaign official on the condition of anonymity ahead of its official release on Tuesday.
It marks a concerted effort by the Democratic campaign to make a dent in the historically Trump-leaning voting bloc in the closing three weeks before Election Day. Trump carried rural voters by a nearly two-to-one margin in 2020, according to AP VoteCast. In the closely contested race, both Democrats and Republicans are reaching out beyond their historic bases in hopes of winning over a sliver of voters that could ultimately prove decisive.
Walz is set to announce the plan during a stop in rural Lawrence County in western Pennsylvania, one of the marquee battlegrounds of the 2024 contest. He is also starring in a new radio ad for the campaign highlighting his roots in a small town of 400 people and his time coaching football, while attacking Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has sued CNN over its recent report that he made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board. He made the announcement Tuesday and calls the reporting reckless and defamatory.
The lawsuit comes less than four weeks after a report that led many of his fellow GOP elected officials and candidates to distance themselves from Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign. That includes GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
CNN declined to comment on the lawsuit. Robinson is also suing a man who alleges Robinson frequented a porn shop decades ago.
A Georgia judge has ruled county election officials must certify election results by the deadline set in law and cannot exclude any group of votes from certification even if they suspect error or fraud.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that “no election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance.” While they have the right to inspect the conduct of an election and to review related documents, he wrote, “any delay in receiving such information is not a basis for refusing to certify the election results or abstaining from doing so.”
Georgia law says county election superintendents, which are multimember boards in most counties, “shall” certify election results by 5 p.m. on the Monday after an election — or the Tuesday if Monday is a holiday as it is this year.
The ruling comes as early voting began Tuesday in Georgia.
Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County election board, had asked the judge to declare that her duties as an election board member were discretionary and that she’s entitled to “full access” to “election materials.”
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump reads a note that Justin Caporale brought onto the stage at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump waves to supporters at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
FILE - Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks along the southern border with Mexico, on Aug. 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Ariz. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris departs Erie International Airport, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, after a campaign rally. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at Erie Insurance Arena, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris talks with local staff before she departs Erie International Airport, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, after a campaign rally. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump greets supporters at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris claps on stage during a campaign rally at Erie Insurance Arena, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
