Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

As a red-white-and-blue-spangled, bald eagle-y patriot, I've never once regretted choosing to serve my country in the National Guard, but one weekend a month, I'm required to report to active duty at Stars and Stripes, where I write a snotty internet column about military news and Photoshop pictures of Hillary Clinton's face on Osama Bin Laden. Yeah, I know, it's blatantly unfair, but I'm trying to catch some favorable attention from the Joint Chiefs so I can advance my one-weekend-a-month career. The bus to Fort Leavenworth leaves early, so today's items are short, but packaged in a very high concentration. Click here, or on this extremely rare autographed photo of "Proud to be an American" recording artist Lee Greenwood expressing pro-Islam sentiments:

Douchebaguette: It's fair to say now that Mayor of Big & Tall Menswear Mark Funkhouser and his apparently judgment-deficient bride Gloria Squitiro have lost the previously unquestioning support of The Star's Mike Hendricks, they need to find a different work arrangement. One whereby he does all his important mayoring without her sausage-fingered assistance and she spends some time at home, presumably screaming at the help in Spanglish. Although I definitely get the feeling that maybe Funkhouser doesn't wear the really-long-inseam pants in the house and he might need to get her approval for any new arrangement, but that's why they say marriage is a kind of nightmarish partnership, like having a biomechanical xenomorph ram its ovidpod down your throat and plant its embryo in your chest.

Human trafficking jam: Like most of you, I always assumed that drivers of ice cream trucks were perverts of one kind or another. "Honey! The pervert's coming! Can I have some money?" I'd yell, whenever I heard that tinkly "Pop Goes the Weasel" music coming down the street. I know, I know -- that's a prejudice, and only a real "dope" is prejudiced; stay in school; huffing fumes from the lawnmower gas tank is bad. But still, whenever I see the ice cream truck, I automatically check to make sure I have my pepper spray and little orange rape whistle, because I loves me some bomb pops, and I'm irresistibly compelled to go out and do business with whatever variety of sex offender is on duty that day.

HOWEVER: Kansas City, Missouri, ice cream vendor Frosty Treats has been fined $5000 for enticing 6 Russian students to the area and forcing them to work for as little as 82 cents an hour. The company promised them $10,000 for the summer, plus housing and transportation. Instead, the kids were charged for gasoline, had to pay rent for the vans and slept three to a room on mattresses on the floor. Reinforcing the stereotype of ice cream vendors as complete moral degenerates, Frosty Treats manager David L. Carslake intercepted and withheld Social Security cards that would have allowed the Russians to get other jobs. I assume hiring practices at Frosty Treats usually involve scanning the Missouri sex offender registry for new parolees, which I guess is more expensive than tricking foreign kids, but if you can't figure out any other way to make a profit on ice cream in the morbidly obese land of Liberty and diabetes, maybe it's time to get into a new line of work, like streaming video of potty-cams on the internet.