Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

You're dead, new fish! A Springfield woman was sentenced for her son's David Benedek-grade X-treme truancy after he missed half of the 2006-07 school year. It's about time that society cracked down on these law-flaunting moms with their sweatpants and their ugly Keds, but will her "shock time" behind bars be enough? I'm suggesting some kind of outright Scared Straight program for delinquent moms, whereby they're gathered into one room where hardened convicts with facial tattoos and the distinctive eye-glaze conferred by anti-psychotic drugs scream at them about ass rape. Sorry, did I just say "ass rape"? Please let me make it up to you. After the jump, we indulge in some apocalyptic scenarios of varying degrees of plausibility, plus some discussion of everyone's favorite senator. Click here or on this picture of what appears to be some kind of wrinkly turtle head sticking out of a business suit:

Morning Panic: Afternoon Edition: This isn't terrifying at all: The United States has no grain reserves left.
I have a friend, also named Chris, with whom I used to go bike riding down in the West Bottoms. His favorite conversational opener on bike rides was asking what I would do right at that moment if we were confronted with a shambling zombie horde. The man liked apocalyptic scenarios, but most of them revolved around the dead rising from their graves, making the whole issue abstract enough to project beyond our bike ride to an entire zombie apocalypse lifestyle in a fortified downtown loft, with shotguns, chain saws, a generator and all the high-end consumer electronics we could load into our stolen and up-armored U-Haul. That's what we talked about. I understand that ladies like to discuss things like ballroom dance and uteruses. Anyway, when push comes to shove, I am, right at this particular moment, probably totally unprepared for a zombie holocaust.

The United States used to be a lot better at preparing for apocalyptic scenarios. I mean, sure, we have our strategic oil reserve, to be deployed when the Soviets parachute onto the grounds of American high schools, but what the fuck are we going to eat? Also, as much as I'd like to pin this one on George W. Bush — because he's had an easy ride for long enough; somebody should really speak out about him at this point — Congress decided to end stocking strategic grain reserves in 1996, while George W. Bush was still snorting cocaine in the Texas governor's mansion and remembering when he used to do it off the back of the Lincoln Bedroom's Lincoln Toilet. Allegedly. Or, ha ha, that was a joke. Whichever passes legal muster. Uh, in conclusion, we should bring back the strategic emergency anti-starving grain reserve. The end.

Swimming With Combines: So, flooding? The Missouri river is cresting here and there, threatening farms and also anything else situated in Missouri flood plains. Not that we have to worry, what with the foresight of the Founding Fathers of America's 1990s, and our strategic grain res- ... uh. I was going to finish that sentence with the last half of the word "reserve," right at the moment when I remembered, for dramatic effect, the previous paragraph. Anyway, this story from KCTV Channel 5 discusses things meteorological and agricultural and ends with this worrisomely apocalyptic graf: "Several farmers said they hoped the rain would stop so they could recover. Otherwise the farming industry could take a hit they can't bounce back from." And you know what that means: Soylent Green, followed by outright cannibalism without benefit of cosmetic processing, followed by Death Race 2000.

We could all learn a lot from Joe Lieberman about being shitty: I don't have a lot of affection for Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, but as a sociopathic backstabber incapable of emotional resonance with other people, I do empathize with him. Or, I would if I were capable of empathy — it's complicated and also kind of dark, like the calculus that puts high-impulse thermobaric munitions directly over the sites of Iraqi kindergartens, or the whole plot of time-travel confuso-film Primer. During the 2006 midterm election, Lieberman's Connecticut seat was threatened by actual Democrat Ned Lamont, who had beaten Lieberman in the state's Democratic primary the way Bill Murray used to beat his wife. Haha, allegedly.

ANYWAY! In the midst of an electorate starting to run hot with anti-war sentiment, Lieberman's campaign reached out to awesome rock-star Illinois Sen. Barack Obama to make a personal appearance and endorsement, which he did on account of his general awesomeness and magnanimity, and so doucheweasel Lieberman went on to win the Connecticut senatorial midterm as a, whatever, "Independent Democrat" or something. All because of Barack Obama, is how I'm going to frame this story as a way of appealing to stupid people and their larval equivalent, children.

So now that Obama is running for president as the Democratic nominee, Lieberman is campaigning against him in favor of geriatric Republican nominee John McCain. Just to be even more of a dick, he's mostly doing it by fomenting fear among liberal Jewish voters and propping up all the racist rumors about all of Obama's secret Manchurian Musliming. Anyway, the awesome Talking Points Memo has a run-down of this whole sordid mess, which I've been using as a template to backstab this one chick who paid my bail-bond a couple of months ago. Long story.