Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

When punctuation fails: The Kansas City Star's Yael T. Abouhalkah posts about a
"shocking" JoCo sales-tax development. When I clicked on the link, I immediately realized that Yael didn't actually mean "shocking." He meant

As in, with little air quotes. Overland Park and Olathe elected officials are hustling to put a quarter-cent sales-tax increase on the August ballot, but without telling voters how they plan to spend the money; Yael is communicating, via punctuation, his hard-bitten cynicism and directing a mildly sarcastic rejoinder to JoCo politicians. HEY, JoCo politicians: Thanks for all the transparency in governing. Oh, I mean

HAHA. You see how that works? Britney Spears making air quotes is the new Calvin pissing.

After the jump, John McCain is gonna keep pounding out the same campaign rhetoric until it starts working, damn it, plus: KMBC Channel 9 doesn't want to cite its sources. Click here, or you can click on this portrait of bewigged Sir John Baptiste de Medina, this total asshole who lived from 1657 to 1710:

Steady liver-spotted hand on the Rascal tiller: Sen. John McCain is now running to be elected Hillary Clinton, trying out some campaign tactics against Sen. Barack Obama that didn't so much work during the lengthy Democratic primary season, which you may remember dominating the news cycle from the outbreak of the Greco-Roman war until early June this year. From Politico: "The 71-year-old McCain has begun embracing his status as a known commodity, telling NBC’s Kelly O'Donnell when asked about his age on Thursday: 'They need a steady hand at the tiller. … That's what I'm going to try to convince them of.'"

Back in February, Sen. Hillary Clinton was a known commodity with her steady hand on the tiller and her steady Bluetooth earpiece connected to her 3 a.m. hamburger phone, and as it turns out, better than half of Democratic primary voters decided that they didn't want a steady-handed 3 a.m. phone answerer. IRON MY SHIRT, JOHN MCCAIN!

Top secret: As a smart, handsome man with the sculpted muscular hypertrophy of a 20-year-old middleweight, when I saw a link to a KMBC Channel 9 report on a "controversial list of drugs doctors would never take," I thought, Do they mean sports doctors? As far as my sports doctor is concerned, deca durabolin, nandrolone phenylpropionate and injectable primobol are off the table. "I would never inject those directly into my muscle tissue, and you shouldn't, either," he says. Other than those, he'll hear arguments from the Thai and Mexican pharmaceutical sales teams who enjoy limited governmental regulation of their businesses.

But the KMBC report turned out to be about boring old Celebrex and boring old Prilosec, and was inordinately frustrating, especially to a man as steroidally prone to irrational rages as I sometimes can be. I realize broadcast news has less to do with bare essentials of journalistic writing than it does with finding places to stand in front of and talk, but it's irritating that it never occurs to anyone involved with writing, reporting or editing this story to divulge the source of the controversial list. Where does it come from?

Larry Moore never mentions their apparently top-secret deep-throat source during what amounts to the broadcast news version of the "lede," and Kelly Eckerman mentions the list at the top of her story but never says where she found it. Plus, they describe the list as "controversial," but they won't say who's objecting to it. Is it Pfizer? GlaxoSmithKline? Maybe the KMBC news team is just embarrassed that they have issues of Men's Health laying around their office, because the list totally comes from Men's Health magazine, portrayed by Hal Holbrook in Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's OTC Heartburn Remedies.

If you have questions about deca durabolin, nandrolone phenylpropionate and injectable primobol, consult your sports doctor.

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