Run for Marathon victims last night in Cambridge, Mass.

--- Tim Briggs, one of 300 who took part in a run through the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, last night. The group raised $4,000 for the families of those killed and wounded in Monday's Boston Marathon bombings.   

Runner Carrie Ozols, who crossed the finish line a half hour before the explosions, told wickedlocal.com,

“I feel like that’s how I cope with things – I go out and run with people, especially people I care about and run with regularly. If anything, I’m even more determined now.”

Ed O’Connor, the founder of Cambridge 5K, which organized the run, told Runner's World:

“I think you’re going to see next year's marathon be twice as big. I’ve heard people who aren’t in marathon shape say, 'I’m going to start training right now.'"

Also, there is a social media campaign called Run for Boston calling for people everywhere to lace 'em up today and get going for Boston:

On Wednesday, April 17, runners, non-runners, and people who believe in hope and peace will run together as a sign of solidarity for the people and runners of Boston." Run for Boston is also is calling on runners to 1) Gather your friends 2) Pick a place 3) Wear blue or yellow and 4) take a picture with a "run for Boston" sign and post it at their site.

RunnersWorld photo

Amby Burfoot, center.

"We have used our public roadways for annual parades, protest marches, presidential inaugurations, marathons, and all manner of other events. The roads belong to us, and their use represents an important part of our free and democratic tradition.

"I trust and believe that will not change in the future--not in Boston, not at the Boston Marathon, and not at other important public events. Yes, we must be ever-vigilant. We can not cover our eyes and ears, and pretend violent acts don’t threaten our great institutions.

"But our institutions did not become great by following a path of timidity and cowardice. And we can only hope that, when pummeled, as the Boston Marathon was today, they will rise again, stronger than ever."

-- Amby Burfoot, editor-at-large, Runner's World, and winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon (and a guest on our show tonight).

Also from Runner's World: This from Roger Robinson:

"Marathon running is a sport of goodwill. It's the only sport in the world where if a competitor falls, the others around will pick him or her up. It's the only sport in the world open to absolutely everyone, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity or any other division you can think of. It's the only occasion when thousands of people assemble, often in a major city, for a reason that is totally peaceful, healthy and well-meaning. It's the only sport in the world where no one ever boos anybody." 

Headlines like these can only come from one place...

Stunning Detroit Dysfunction Uncovered

Hanoi Jane to Vets Boycotting Her Movie: Get A Life

NY Post: Lies of Obamacare

Daily Beast: How 60s Radicals Ended Up Teaching Your Kids

Back in the Limelight: Bush Returns To Public Stage On His Own Terms

Such is the rich biosphere of Fox Nation, where Hanoi Jane and Obamacare, abetted by 60s radicals and politically correct Pentagon officials in saggy pants, reign unchecked in a charity hating, anti gay gun owning gulag called Detroit. Luckily George W. Bush is waiting in the wings, on his own terms.  Granted, trying to top these anxiety-filled headline gems may seem like an fool's errand, but that should never stop us from trying.

Take these three headlines:

Stocks Ease in Early Trading; Gold Plunges

Giant, Rat-Sized Snails Invade South Florida

Aussies Go Wild Over Native Adam Scott's Masters Win

Given the Infoxication treatment, they might sound like this:

Unanswered Benghazi Questions Trigger Gold Panic

Castro-Engineered Spy Snails Leave Slime Trail of Terror

Foreign Aggressor Conquers Georgia, Vows "It's Only The Beginning"

Now it's your turn. Channel your inner Fox Nation headline writer, post your submissions in the comments and we'll enjoy a sampling of your collective genius tomorrow. Good luck!

Comedian, actor, force of nature Jonathan Winters has died at his home in California at age 87. If his name isn't immediately on your comedy radar, consider that every single comedian that you love, and I mean all of them, think of Jonathan Winters as a mentor, a master and an ideal to aspire to. And if he or she doesn't think that way, here's hoping they start. Much more about the incomparable Mr. Winters here, here and here.

Inside the Capitol, Congress is fighting over the fate of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but across the street at Washington's Union Station, officials have reached their own energy verdict. According to DCist:

Union Station recently started getting all of its electricity from wind power, and will do so for the next three years, its power supplier said yesterday. The historic train depot signed a contract with Herndon, Va.-based Washington Gas Energy Services that will see it purchase renewable energy credits from a network of wind farms in order to offset its annual energy consumption.

The station consumes nearly 19 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year, according to a news release announcing the deal. Switching Union Station to wind power will be equivalent to reducing gasoline consumption by 1.4 million gallons or taking 2,700 vehicles off the roads for a year.

Wind energy had its best year ever in 2012, growing 28 percent, according to the just released annual report for the America Wind Energy Association. Also? "Over 6,700 new wind turbines were erected, which produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 3.5 million homes. Overall, America finished the year with 45,100 wind turbines that can power 15.2 million homes."  And, apparently, Union Station. (btw, April is also Earth Month 2013, and visitors to Union Station can check out a collection of environmental exhibits and events there.)

Insert joke about wind long being D.C.s most plentiful natural resource, here.

Sami99tr

Note to Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera: if you think you can say whatever you want to about New Orleans, without rebuttal, here's this from the Times-Picyaune:

A conversation between Fox News pundits Geraldo Rivera and Bill O'Reilly -- containing a couple of prominent inaccuracies and the assertion that everything outside the French Quarter in New Orleans is a "vast urban wasteland" -- drew an angry letter from a collection of local civic groups on Monday.

The segment aired last Friday after video clips emerged in court showing prisoners at the Orleans Parish jail complex drinking, using drugs and brandishing a gun while behind bars. After running the clip, Rivera and O'Reilly discussed the city's crime and corruption problems in the same astonished tones that many locals have, but fired off sweeping generalizations about how New Orleans has been corrupt for "hundreds of years," and how problems plaguing the criminal justice system look solvable if enough residents would just demand some tougher police tactics.

"As you may know, that city has been corrupt ever since Andrew Jackson defeated the British down there in the Battle of New Orleans," O'Reilly said in introducing the report.

The Business Council of New Orleans and River Region, Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, Common Good and Greater New Orleans, Inc. penned this response to Mssrs. O'Reilly and Rivera. To wit:

Dear Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Rivera:

Your April 5 “Fridays with Geraldo” segment, “New Orleans prisoners gone wild,” was a
disservice to New Orleans, America and the truth. Its broadly dismissive tone was all the
more disconcerting because as recently as February 4 you had proclaimed, “New Orleans
has come back big time from Katrina. It’s once again a great American destination.”

Now let us be clear: the truth is that the prison video is shocking. But it is also true that
the video is four years old, and that the prison has been closed. There will be
consequences. And we are confident that we will fix this problem, because as you will
see below, the truth is that New Orleans has confronted and defeated an extraordinary
range of other challenges over the past five years.

On this theme, The Wall Street Journal recently ran a much broader, more balanced and
more accurate story – “The Real Super Bowl Winner: Why New Orleans Came Back
from Katrina Better than Ever” (attached). In this piece, the Journal describes how New
Orleans is now a national model for reform, suggesting “Other troubled cities and
Washington, take note.”

For the truth is, in the few years since the devastation of Katrina, the largest manmade
disaster in the history of the United States, New Orleans has addressed long-standing
challenges with a speed and efficacy unprecedented in the history of our great nation.

* * *
In your segment you asked two basic questions about New Orleans: “Why can’t it
improve?” and “Why doesn’t it get better?” The truth is, it can and it does, dramatically.

There is a preponderance of evidence:

Education – Previously burdened with some of the worst schools in the country, New
Orleans was recently named “America’s Best City for School Reform,” and the
graduation rate has now passed the national average. Our universities are booming too,

(2)
with Tulane recently attracting more applications – 44,000 – than any other private
school, of any size, in the country.

Civic Reform – With diverse civic and business groups working in partnership with
political leadership, New Orleans has “enacted more major reforms simultaneously than
any other modern city” (Brookings Institution).

These include:
• Establishment of Office of Inspector General - now a national model
• Establishment of Independent Police Monitor - also a national model
• Consolidation and Reform of Levee Boards - providing oversight to make post-
Katrina Army Corps projects the most efficient and effective in modern history
• Consolidation of Property Assessors – breaking up century-old political dynasties
• Implementation of Master Zoning Plan with Force of Law – to guide planning for
the next 20 years of New Orleans
• Development of Public/Private Partnerships – based on national best practice
models for economic development and youth recreation
• Implementation of State Ethics Reform – taking Louisiana to #1 in the USA in
ethics disclosure laws (Center for Public Integrity)
Economic Development – Buoyed by business-friendly leadership, New Orleans has
been described as “the greatest turnaround of our lifetime” by Richard Karlgaard, the
publisher of Forbes. Over the past two years we have been named #1 in the USA for:
• Improved City for Business (Wall Street Journal)
• Employment Growth (Brookings)
• Technology Job Growth (Forbes)
The fact that global companies like GE Capital are choosing New Orleans for expansion
(300 new jobs announced in 2012) is hard evidence of this improvement.

Entrepreneurism – Post-Katrina New Orleans is also one of the most entrepreneurial
places in America, and now leads the USA by 30% in number of start-ups per capita.
Underscoring this, the Tax Foundation ranked Louisiana as the #2 state in the country to
start a business.

Talent – After decades of out-migration, people are coming back in record numbers.
New Orleans is the fastest growing city in the USA since the 2010 census, and was
named “America’s Biggest Brain Magnet” by Forbes for attracting people under 25 with
college degrees.

Flood Protection – From $15 billion of new investment, to a consolidation of levee
management, New Orleans now has the most advanced flood protection in the nation, and
is in fact actively involved in the new task force to assist post-Sandy New York and New
Jersey.

Tourism – Recently voted America’s Favorite by Travel + Leisure, a record number of
tourists visited New Orleans in 2012, over nine million, and New Orleans led the USA in

(3)
RevPAR (room rate) growth, at a remarkable 33% year-on-year.
In the name of truth we should also clarify some false statements from the April 5
segment:
• Our government is no longer dysfunctional. It is so good, in fact, from the
Governor down to the Mayor, that we were voted #1 Most Business Friendly
Government in the USA in a recent national economic development survey (Area
Development).
• Your assertion that 60,000 out of 320,000 New Orleanians are in jail is simply
wrong. The truth is, the prison population is about 2,000 out of a population of
360,000. Your number is such a misstatement that it best belongs in Mr.
O’Reilly’s “Hall of Shame” for distributing “defamatory, false…information.”
• Our murder rate is unacceptable. But it is not 14 times New York City. And your
comparison to the remarkable turnaround of Times Square in NYC neglects the
fact that that process began with Mayor Koch in the 70’s and took over 30 years –
and we have been at ours for about five.
• The notion that “everything outside of the French Quarter” is an urban wasteland
is simply slanderous, and is utterly refuted by all of the preceding truths in this
letter.
• Finally, perhaps the greatest inaccuracy in your entire story is the ending, when
you say that nothing changes in New Orleans because “folks aren’t demanding
it.” Things are changing more dramatically in New Orleans than they have in
any urban environment in recent American history - because we are demanding it,
and because we are doing it.
* * *
But don’t take our word for it – please come back and see for yourselves. On behalf of
the business and civic community of New Orleans, we invite you to come visit us in New
Orleans, so you can witness firsthand the extraordinary people and organizations that are
driving, in the words of Mayor Landrieu, “a story about the resurrection and redemption
of a great American city.”

This is the truth about New Orleans.

Yours truly,

Business Council of New Orleans and River Region
Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans
Common Good
Greater New Orleans, Inc.

Sketch comedians Deep Rogue Ram made this fake Kickstarter ad celebrating the souvenir possibilities of Canadian tar sands, now oozing through selected Arkansas backyards and wetlands.

While here in the States the Supreme Court weighs Prop 8 and DOMA, couples in Ireland are making their own (adorable) case for same sex marriage.  As Lora says in this clip, called "Yes to Love,"

"We're very proud to be Irish. We're very proud of our country. We just want our country to accept us for who we are and be treated the same as everybody else."  

Cheers.

Some people might be able resist to a story about a group of smart brave kids banding together to help save their beloved local state park from budget cuts. I am not one of those people.  This documentary, "How the Kids Saved the Parks," follows students from Grass Valley Charter School in California on their quest to save the gorgeous South Yuba River State Park. According to Grist:

The kids put together a Mobile Media Action Team, and met with John Laird, the California Secretary for Natural Resources. They explained to Laird why they thought South Yuba Park should not close, and also gathered more than 10,000 signatures urging the state to keep the park open. In short, they did a lot of difficult, adult stuff, and because of their efforts, the community managed to find a way to keep the park open (with a $3 to $5 entry fee, but still).....The entry fee alone won’t generate enough revenue to keep the park open, but officials say that the groundswell of support insures it will not close.

Even though California is making something of a comeback, it's no secret that its state parks are in deep financial trouble. The Wall Street Journal reports: "California lawmakers should outsource management of some state parks to cope with chronic under funding, advised an influential state commission, which found that the state had expanded its park system without providing adequate income to support it."

Last week the state's Little Hoover Commission released a report entitled "Beyond Crisis: Recapturing Excellence in California's State Park System."  In it, member Virginia Ellis advocates a major overhaul. "Without a bold, new course equal to the vision that created the state park system, California risks a replay of closing parks that the state can no longer afford to operate," she says.

Solutions will require creativity, perseverance and guts. Maybe California could put the Grass Valley Charter School kids on retainer.

As if there weren't enough going on this week, the Obama Administration announced the National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy, a coordinated government strategy to protect animals and plants from the perils of climate change. According to the Department of the Interior

The Climate Adaptation Strategy provides a roadmap of key steps needed over the next five years to reduce the current and expected impacts of climate change on our natural resources, which include: changing species distributions and migration patterns, the spread of wildlife diseases and invasive species, the inundation of coastal habitats with rising sea levels, changing productivity of our coastal oceans, and changes in freshwater availability.

And their logo? Sharp.

What is Mexico City artist Pedro Reyes holding here? After confiscating and publicly destroying some 6,700 weapons in the city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's Secretary of Defense gave some mangled guns to Reyes, who turned them into musical instruments like this pistol-guitar. The Lisson Gallery in London is currently exhibiting two groups of Reyes' sonic creations. 

The first, a series titled Imagine, is an orchestra of fifty instruments, from flutes to string and percussion instruments, designed to be played live. The second, Disarm, is a never-before-exhibited installation of mechanical musical instruments, which can either be automated or played live by an individual operator using a laptop computer or midi keyboard.

Says Reyes: It's important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons; as if a sort of exorcism was taking place, the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for the lives lost.

-- a letter from "Roy" to the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department apologizing for poaching three whitetail deer illegally between 1967 and 1970. Enclosed with the letter was a check to the enforcement division for $6,000.

"I was amazed," said Capt. Richard Mann. "It's not uncommon for me to hear from people who are sorry for a wildlife infraction, but usually it's because the judge stuck them with a big fine."