Matthew Kisorio from Kenya jumped out to an early lead and defeated arguably the most competitive half marathon field ever assembled on American soil. He crossed the finish line with an event record time of 1 hour and 15 seconds, a personal best.
Defending champion and pre-race favorite Ryan Hall, who won the race last year in 1:01:52, finished thirteenth overall in 1:03:55. Hall, who finished fourth in April at the Boston Marathon and who won the U.S. 7-Mile Championship earlier this summer, was admittedly disappointed by his performance.
For the women, Meserat Defar from Ethiopia, the two-time Olympic medalist and world-record holder at 5000 meters, finished first in a record time of 1 hour, 7 minutes and 44 seconds. Though it was her debut half marathon, she prove to all she is the fastest female.
Although we were their to work, I must admit, one of the reasons I love to go to Philadelphia is for the food and I am not talking about Philly Cheesesteaks. The City of Brotherly Love has some of the best vegan restaurants in the country.
Last Thursday Phil and I had dinner once again at the Horizons, a vegan gourmet restaurant just off South Street in Philadelphia. For starters I had the Truffled Cauliflower Rositto. For my entrée I had the Fresh Hearts of Palm "Melt" with green chile creamed corn, red chile remoulad, and summer bean salad. Both were melt in your mouth unbelievably delicious.
For Dessert we both had the Southern Belle – roasted peaches, vanilla-bourbon soy ice cream, and crunchy pecans. Yummy, yummy, yummy!!!!!
As Election Day 2010 approaches – as the United States wallows in the swamps of war, recession and environmental degradation – the consequences of the nation’s three-decade-old decoupling from reality are becoming painfully obvious.
Yet, despite the danger, the nation can’t seem to move in a positive direction, as if the suctioning effect of endless spin, half-truths and lies holds the populace in place, a force that grows ever more powerful like quicksand sucking the country deeper into the muck – to waist deep, then neck deep.
Trapped in the mud, millions of Americans are complaining about their loss of economic status, their sense of powerlessness, their nation’s decline. But instead of examining how the country stumbled into this morass, many still choose not to face reality.
Instead of seeking paths to the firmer ground of a reality-based world, people from different parts of the political spectrum have decided to embrace unreality even more, either cynically as a way to delegitimize a political opponent or because they’ve simply become addicted to the crazy.
The latest manifestation of the wackiness can be found in the rise of the Tea Party, a movement of supposedly grassroots, mad-as-hell regular Americans that is subsidized by wealthy corporate donors (such as the billionaire Koch brothers) seeking to ensure deregulation of their industries and to consolidate their elite control over the political process.
The Tea Party madness is aided and abetted by a now fully formed right-wing media apparatus that can popularize any false narrative (like Islam planning to conquer Christian America as represented by the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero).
The Right sees an advantage in spreading even the nuttiest of smears against President Barack Obama. So you have right-wing author Dinesh D’Souza and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich concocting a toxic brew of racist nonsense about Obama somehow channeling the anti-colonialism of his late Kenyan father.
“Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s,” D’Souza wrote in Forbes. “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
Incredibly, indeed.
The “factual” basis of this “analysis” apparently is that Obama entitled his touching story about his youth, Dreams of My Father, which was a book that focused on the absence of his father from his life.
In a less crazy time, one might have expected D’Souza’s claptrap to be denounced by politicians across the political spectrum, but that is not the time we live in.
Instead, Gingrich, a leading figure in the Republican Party and a potential candidate for president in 2012, praised D’Souza’s racist psycho-babble as the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama,” adding that D’Souza unlocked the mystery of who Obama is by addressing his “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
Gingrich also pretended that he and D’Souza were the truth-tellers here, not just propagandists spreading a smear. Gingrich said they simply were unmasking Obama who has “played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”
Jimi Hendrix is forever associated with the most widely heralded moment of '60s pop culture -- his astounding and powerful interpretation of 'The Star Spangled Banner' at the historic Woodstock Music Festival.
Although Jimi's solo performance is one that evoked the sounds of gunfire and bombs and prompted many professional musicians to admit that, upon first hearing, it moved them to tears, James Marshall Hendrix in fact started far from the psychedelia many associate with him. In fact, when one delves into the various genres of music he conquered, one becomes convinced that Jimi Hendrix was not simply a rock guitarist. In the process of redefining the electric guitar, he became trans-musical.
Sept. 18 marks the 40th anniversary of his untimely death at age 27 in London. One of my intentions in researching his early life for the book 'Becoming Jimi Hendrix' (Da Capo/Perseus), co-written with Steve Roby, was to inform casual fans about not only his psychology and his genius but also his unceasing growth and interest in all forms of music. Jimi traversed and enlarged everything from Delta and Chicago blues to rhythm and blues to even surf, jazz and, inevitably, a radically new form of guitar playing.
The lonely Seattle boy who fashioned a guitar out of cardboard and cellophane, and even carried a broom to elementary school, playing it like the instrument he longed for, responded immediately to the blues. His aunt Ernestine Benson exposed him to Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson, and insisted his father, Al, buy him his first real guitar, a battered remnant, for five dollars.
One can see how deep the blues ran in his blood in the documentary 'A Film About Jimi Hendrix,' when he spontaneously picks up someone's Zemaitis 12-string, gets instantly familiar with it and reels off a version of his 'Hear My Train A-Comin'' that has every bit of the intensity and authenticity of any Delta blues performance one might name.
So, how did Jimi Hendrix become the apotheosis of psychedelic rock? One hint of his interest in a sound that no one was yet playing came in Clarksville, Tenn., with his band the King Kasuals, after his honorable discharge from the Army's 101st Airborne Division in 1962. Singer-songwriter Jimmy Church recalled the moment Jimi busted a speaker in his amplifier and asked Church to listen to the new sounds that emanated from the cabinet: "I looked at him kind of funny and said, 'Your speaker's busted.' He said, 'Yeah, but listen to that tone.'"
But in the competitive milieu of Nashville rhythm & blues, Jimi could not gain acceptance for the bursts of frenzied inventiveness he sometimes cut loose onstage. Certainly, his performance style had become more theatrical, including biting strings and playing behind his head, necessitating the fan club called the Buttons, which sewed back on the buttons Jimi sheared off his outfits during his flashiest tricks.
Jimi's first real acceptance of his experimentation was on the so-called Chitlin Circuit, the small, rural clubs in the Deep South that howled with appreciation for the sonically and theatrically outrageous. But as Jimi learned on the road with numerous musical greats, including Little Richard, the Isley Brothers and Ike and Tina Turner, neither popular music consumers, nor the bandleaders he worked for, approved of his early use of feedback and tonal shifts. Jimi Hendrix was fired regularly for his explorations. Once, his guitar was thrown out the window of a tour bus and he was stranded by the side of a road in Knoxville.
Jimi wanted to assert himself when he was based in Nashville. Playing songs like 'Tutti Frutti' and 'I'm a Man,' 'Twist and Shout' and 'Stand by Me' every night grew tiring for him. He yearned to take music into a new direction. In a later interview in Downbeat magazine, he stated, "I mean, I love the blues, but I wouldn't want to play it all night. It's just like although I love Howlin' Wolf and Otis Rush, there are some blues that just make me sick. I feel nothing from it."
Everything about his circumstances suggested that Jimi Hendrix would never go beyond being a backup guitarist and occasional session man. He did not lead his own groups. He was embarrassed by his own singing voice and did not write songs. And while he could play a right-handed guitar upside down and pick up melodies with staggering speed, Jimi alienated many of his fellow players in Nashville with his new approach that was deemed to be merely showy and pretentious.
Wisely, Jimi never ceased his quest to learn. And being on tours with the likes of Albert King, B.B. King and Albert Collins provided him the chance to study with masters. Jimi admitted that Curtis Mayfield's smooth and fluid style also impressed him. Jimi paid the highest possible compliment to his boss Little Richard, the self-proclaimed "King of Rock and Rhythm," saying he wanted to do with his guitar what Little Richard did with his voice. But their touring together was punctuated by admonitions to Jimi to stop stealing the limelight, as well as fines levied against Jimi for not wearing the humiliating outfits Richard demanded of his backup band.
Jimi found inspiration in classical music that he and Army buddy-bandmate Billy Cox listened to in Nashville. Jimi was taken by Dick Dale, "King of the Surf Guitar," who showed Jimi his "power slides" in a club in Pasadena, Calif. By the end of his life, Jimi Hendrix, weaned on the blues, was jamming with Miles Davis and John McLaughlin, as well as with the group Traffic.
His rejection by R&B club owners and players in Harlem ironically led to his breakthrough, in the burgeoning coffeehouse scene of Manhattan's Greenwich Village. In the dark, underground confines of the Café Wha? on MacDougal Street, Jimi found himself, writing and singing his own songs for the first time, bringing in the blues and jazz and R&B and the science fiction of his youth and his dreamlife and his humor and his despairing side and his hopes for a world united, not racist and politicized.
It took Linda Keith, the former girlfriend of Keith Richards, to persuade Jimi to sing, and he wound up being complimented by the man they both idolized when Jimi created his version of 'All Along the Watchtower,' which Bob Dylan acknowledged as better than his own.
The greatest testimony to how far Jimi Hendrix liberated pop music is still, in my opinion, on a tape box of the master of the single 'Purple Haze.' Some technician at Track Records in London sent it to Reprise/Warner Brothers Records in Burbank, Calif., for remastering, prior to its release in America. On the box were the handwritten words, "DELIBERATE DISTORTION: DO NOT CORRECT." Jimi had to wait for the music industry, recording technology and the masses to catch up to the sounds he heard ahead of us all. And when the time finally came, my God, did he let us have it.
Before he’d served even one year President Obama lost the support of the easily distracted left and engendered the white hot rage of the hate-filled right. But some of us, from all walks of life and ideological backgrounds -- including this white, straight, 57-year-old, former religious right wing agitator, now progressive writer and (given my background as the son of a famous evangelical leader) this unlikely Obama supporter -- are sticking with our President. Why?-- because he is succeeding.
We faithful Obama supporters still trust our initial impression of him as a great, good and uniquely qualified man to lead us.
Obama’s steady supporters will be proved right. Obama’s critics will be remembered as easily panicked and prematurely discouraged at best and shriveled hate mongers at worst.
The Context of the Obama Presidency
Not since the days of the rise of fascism in Europe, the Second World War and the Depression has any president faced more adversity. Not since the Civil War has any president led a more bitterly divided country. Not since the introduction of racial integration has any president faced a more consistently short-sighted and willfully ignorant opposition – from both the right and left.
As the President’s poll numbers have fallen so has his support from some on the left that were hailing him as a Messiah not long ago; all those lefty websites and commentators that were falling all over themselves on behalf of our first black president during the 2008 election.
The left’s lack of faith has become a self-fulfilling “prophecy”-- snipe at the President and then watch the poll numbers fall and then pretend you didn’t have anything to do with it!
Here is what Obama faced when he took office-- none of which was his fault:
# An ideologically divided country to the point that America was really two countries
# Two wars; one that was mishandled from the start, the other that was unnecessary and immoral
# The worst economic crisis since the depression
# America’s standing in the world at the lowest point in history
# A country that had been misled into accepting the use of torture of prisoners of war
# A health care system in free fall
# An educational system in free fall
# A global environmental crisis of history-altering proportions (about which the Bush administration and the Republicans had done nothing)
# An impasse between culture warriors from the right and left
# A huge financial deficit inherited from the terminally irresponsible Bush administration…
And those were only some of the problems sitting on the President’s desk!
“Help” from the Right?
What did the Republicans and the religious right, libertarians and half-baked conspiracy theorists -- that is what the Republicans were reduced to by the time Obama took office -- do to “help” our new president (and our country) succeed? They claimed that he wasn’t a real American, didn’t have an American birth certificate, wasn’t born here, was secretly a Muslim, was white-hating "racist", was secretly a communist, was actually the Anti-Christ, (!) and was a reincarnation of Hitler and wanted “death panels” to kill the elderly!
They not-so-subtly called for his assassination through the not-so-subtle use of vile signs held at their rallies and even a bumper sticker quoting Psalm 109:8. They organized “tea parties” to sound off against imagined insults and all government in general and gathered to howl at the moon. They were led by insurance industry lobbyists and deranged (but well financed) “commentators” from Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh.
The utterly discredited Roman Catholic bishops teamed up with the utterly discredited evangelical leaders to denounce a president who was trying to actually do something about the poor, the environment, to diminish the number of abortions through compassionate programs to help women and to care for the sick! And in Congress the Republican leadership only knew one word: “No!”
In other words the reactionary white, rube, uneducated, crazy American far right,combined with the educated but obtuse neoconservative war mongers, religious right shills for big business, libertarian Fed Reserve-hating gold bug, gun-loving crazies, child-molesting acquiescent “bishops”, frontier loons and evangelical gay-hating flakes found one thing to briefly unite them: their desire to stop an uppity black man from succeeding at all costs!
“Help” from the Left?
What did the left do to help their newly elected president? Some of them excoriated the President because they disagreed with the bad choices he was being forced to make regarding a war in Afghanistan that he’d inherited from the worst president in modern history!
Others stood up and bravely proclaimed that the President’s economic policies had “failed” before the President even instituted them! Others said that since all gay rights battles had not been fully won within virtually minuets of the President taking office, they’d been “betrayed”! (Never mind that Obama’s vocal support to the gay community is stronger than any other president’s has been. Never that mind he signed a new hate crimes law!)
Those that had stood in transfixed legions weeping with beatific emotion on election night turned into an angry mob saying how "disappointed" they were that they’d not all immediately been translated to heaven the moment Obama stepped into the White House! Where was the “change”? Contrary to their expectations they were still mere mortals!
And the legion of young new supporters was too busy texting to pay attention for longer than a nanosecond… “Governing”?! What the hell does that world, uh, like mean?”
The President’s critics left and right all had one thing in common: impatience laced with little-to-no sense of history (let alone reality) thrown in for good measure. Then of course there were the white, snide know-it-all commentators/talking heads who just couldn’t imagine that maybe, just maybe they weren’t as smart as they thought they were and certainly not as smart as their president. He hadn’t consulted them, had he? So he must be wrong!
The Obama critics' ideological ideas defined their idea of reality rather than reality defining their ideas—say, about what is possible in one year in office after the hand that the President had been dealt by fate, or to be exact by the American idiot nation that voted Bush into office… twice!
Meanwhile back in the reality-based community – in just 12 short months -- President Obama:
#Continued the draw down the misbegotten war in Iraq
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Thoughtfully and decisively picked the best of several bad choices regarding the war in Afghanistan
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Gave a major precedent-setting speech supporting gay rights
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Restored America’s image around the globe
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Banned torture of American prisoners
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Stopped the free fall of the American economy
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Put the USA squarely back in the bilateral international community
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Put the USA squarely into the middle of the international effort to halt global warming
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Stood up for educational reform
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Won a Nobel peace prize
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Moved the trial of terrorists back into the American judicial system of checks and balances
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Did what had to be done to start the slow, torturous and almost impossible process of health care reform that 7 presidents had failed to even begin
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Responded to hatred from the right and left with measured good humor and patience
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Stopped the free fall of job losses
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Showed immense personal courage in the face of an armed and dangerous far right opposition that included the sort of disgusting people that show up at public meetings carrying loaded weapons and carrying Timothy McVeigh-inspired signs about the “blood of tyrants” needing to “water the tree of liberty”…
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
#Showed that he could not only make the tough military choices but explain and defend them brilliantly
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)
Other than those "disappointing" accomplishments -- IN ONE YEAR -- President Obama “failed”! Other than that he didn’t “live up to expectations”!
Who actually has failed...
...are the Americans that can’t see the beginning of a miracle of national rebirth right under their jaded noses. Who failed are the smart ass ideologues of the left and right who began rooting for this President to fail so that they could be proved right in their dire and morbid predictions. Who failed are the movers and shakers behind our obscenely dumb news cycles that have turned “news” into just more stupid entertainment for an entertainment-besotted infantile country.
Here’s the good news: President Obama is succeeding without the help of his lefty “supporters” or hate-filled Republican detractors!
The Future Looks Good
After Obama has served two full terms, (and he will), after his wisdom in moving deliberately and cautiously with great subtlety on all fronts -- with a canny and calculating eye to the possible succeeds, (it will), after the economy is booming and new industries are burgeoning, (they will be), after the doomsayers are all proved not just wrong but silly: let the record show that not all Americans were panicked into thinking the sky was falling.
Just because we didn’t get everything we wanted in the first short and fraught year Obama was in office not all of us gave up. Some of us stayed the course. And we will be proved right.
Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays, depending on your point of view) to everyone!
PS. if you agree that Obama is shaping up to be a great president please pass this on and hang in there!
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of “Patience With God – Faith For People Who Don’t Like Religion (Or Atheism).”
Huge news: Obama appoints populist hero Elizabeth Warren to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau! Check out clips of Warren on the "Daily Show":
Dear Dee,
HUGE news: President Obama just appointed populist hero Elizabeth Warren to establish and lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau!!
This is the boldest step Obama's taken so far to rein in the big Wall Street banks. And it's a major victory for grassroots progressives who rallied for Warren.
The banks fought to keep her out of this job—and now that she has it, they'll do whatever they can to keep her from exercising her full authority. That's why we need to get the word out—to make sure she has the grassroots support she needs to aggressively police Wall Street.
So we made a video of Warren's greatest hits from her appearances on the "Daily Show" and a list of five cool facts about her. Check them out at the link below and send them to all your friends:
Top Five Things You Should Know About Elizabeth Warren
1. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was her idea. Here's why she thinks this agency is so critical: "It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance your home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting your family out on the street."1
2. The Republicans are so scared of her, they tried to pass a law blocking her from leading the agency. Republicans in Congress and the big Wall Street banks have always been against Warren leading the new consumer agency. Republicans even offered an amendment that was widely understood as designed to block Warren. That amendment failed.2
3. She is one of the most prominent, successful and fierce female lawyers in America. Coming from working-class roots, she graduated from high school as a debate star at 16. She finished law school when she was nine months pregnant. And she has repeatedly been named one of the 50 most influential female lawyers by the National Law Journal and was twice nominated as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People (among other honors).3
4. She spoke truth to power about the failed foreclosure program. The Home Affordability Modification Program was supposed to save homeowners from losing their homes but has left many deeper in debt than they were before. Warren used her position on the Congressional Oversight Panel to bring the voices of these disaffected homeowners right to the decision makers in the administration and demand accountability. 4
5. She may have actual superpowers. She once calmed a crowd at an NBA game with her encyclopedic basketball knowledge. She explained the financial meltdown so clearly to Jon Stewart that he said it made him "want to make out with" her. And there's a viral cowboy rap video about her.5
Check out the video of Warren on the "Daily Show" and share it with your friends and family. Just click here:
The progress of social justice is slow and measured. Its growth depends on an increasing number of us becoming aware of the truth and consequences of our actions.
I believe that it is morally wrong to allow our wanton desires to interfere with the basic needs and interests of other sentient beings.
I believe the physical and psychological abuse – confinement, social deprivation, mutilation, genetic and reproductive manipulation, and profit exploitation – imposed by us on other animals is morally wrong.
I believe the suggestion that the exploitation of other sentient beings by humans can be achieved without cruelty, violence, or injustice is false and misleading.
As an advocate for all life, committed to compassion and justice, I refuse to take part in the exploitation of other sentient beings or to collaborate with those caught up in such injustice.
I pledge to do my best to live a life that conveys a clear, sincere and uncompromised message that is free of resentment, fear, exploitation, anger, cynicism, and manipulation.
Furthermore, I pledge to continue to support a broad range of nonviolent initiatives and programs that will hopefully one day eliminate the needless pain and suffering we inflict upon all the many wonderful creatures with whom we share this planet.
