Daily Briefs: Canadian Passport
By CHRIS PACKHAM
Professional voice of reason Mr. Yael T. Abouhalkah of The Kansas City Star calls for a transfer of cranial heat and the prevailing of cooler, sexier heads with regard to an offensive New Yorker cover. I was all, like, "The New Yorker? What, did John Updike write another precious New England elegy to extramarital blowjobs?"
What do I know? What with my subscriptions to Cat Fancy and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's Guideposts, I don't have time for The New Yorker. 
But a coworker explained that the magazine printed a watery, boring cartoon depicting Barack Obama nailing Jesus Christ to a crucifix made out of your puppy, or some damn thing. I should point out that in a display of bipartisan overreaction, even the McCain campaign denounced it. Everyone's upset. Over a cartoon. Seriously, you guys, I always hated fucking Animaniacs, but I'm not going to heave any bricks through windows. Although, just typing the word Animaniacs started that nightmarish theme song playing in my head.
After the jump, some stuff about the Department of Corrections and Bombardier Aerospace. Click here, or on this drawing of a Bombardier-manufactured CRJ-100 flying away from you. Please note that you are crying and wearing a dress:
Out by the river: Probably contrary to whatever the judge's intentions were, most of my court-ordered meetings with Kurt, my parole officer, take place at Caddyshack on Third Street, where he tosses back shots of Dewar's, bitches about his ex-wife and talks about how much tail he gets working his night job as a racial sensitivity trainer for the Power & Light District's security detail. "Shit, man, they's all high-school drop-outs and day-labor hoboes," he says. "Everyone knows it's a reverse-osmosis caucasian filter. The whole trick is teaching those stupid kids to pretend they ain't racist."
I usually pick up the tab. I need to stay on his good side, and back in 2003, Missouri probation and parole officers were wrongly excluded from a cost-of-living pay increase. It took a judge to overturn that decision, but since the Department of Corrections ignored the court order and failed to give the officers their back pay, Kurt's always asking to borrow money and smoking "OP's" -- specifically, my packs of Parliament Lights. But keeping him happy keeps me out of Leavenworth Penitentiary, and if that means I have to play wing-man while he picks up barflies, then I'm gonna suck it up and talk to the fat chick, because I ain't never goin' back.
I hate chess metaphors: The Kansas City Star is asking the question that Tony's Kansas City has been asking for weeks: Was KC a pawn to Bombardier Aerospace? Only, when Tony asked it, it didn't end with a question mark, it wasn't actually phrased as a question, and there were some breasts or something in there. It doesn't take a Kansas City Business Journal, or even a Camp, to know that no Canadian aerospaceplanes were going to be rolling off any imaginary assembly lines out by the airport. Everyone — including babies and Larry Moore — knew it was a long shot, but the Star's Kevin Collison spends 600 words advancing the un-fucking-believable contention that big businesses would never leverage competing bids to maximize an advantage, and Kansas City was therefore a real contender. I used to sell term life insurance to old people, so I've seen some desperately terrifying levels of naivete in my time. But that's like watching a toddler cross a busy highway or something.
Yeah, yeah, I know Bombardier is a Canadian firm, which sort of defacto makes it a "mom-and-pop" operation. But it's also a company so large that when its product-excreting sphincter relaxes, airplanes come out. Unlike Collison, I just sort of assume that the third largest aircraft manufacturer in the world has wind-tunnel-tested proficiency with the wheeling and also with the dealing. The weirdest thing is the article's unstated thesis that somehow, Kansas City's feelings are hurt by Bombardier's decision to remain in Canada, and Kansas City needs the emotional reassurance of quotes from the director of the Missouri Department of Economic Development. So I just want to get out in front of Collison's apparent assumption that I'm a pussy, and say that I haven't been crying into my pillow all week about the aerospace industry.
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