Plog - Daily Briefs: Think of the children. Plus: Truth trucks and patriots.

By CHRIS PACKHAM

Covering a dispute over the transfer of some school buildings from the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to Independence, The Kansas City Star editorial page takes the easy, cushion-y path of upholstered least resistance, bypassing any explanatory preamble and just immediately invoking the children. Right there in the lede! I mean, Jesus, warm me up a little bit. Take me to dinner, first; don't just go lunging for my emotional bra straps. I am required by the terms of my contract with Muscle and Fitness magazine to point out that those are metaphorical — not real — bra straps. Although, if anyone wants to take me out to non-metaphorical dinner after which your odds of nipple action are quite favorable, I can be reached here.

Anyway, if you only read the first line of the Star's editorial, skip everything in the middle, and then read the last line, the whole thing is as follows:

Schools exist for the benefit of children... The stalling hurts the children.

Just mentally substitute the ellipses for a bunch of indifferently composed, simple declarative sentences with the typical anti-adult bias we've come to accept from the Kansas City Star. As a grown-up, I'm sick and tired of being treated like a second-class citizen, and if you want to know why so many people have become alienated from mainstream society and slipped into adult supremacy, look no further than than the anti-grown-up Star. After the jump, some stuff about smoking, vehicular propaganda, and what we can all learn about patriotism from the dictionary. Click here, or on the Merriam Webster Talking Dictionary defining a word kids find hilarious:

My other car is a strident political diatribe: The anti-tobacco, pro-untypeable-special-character truth® campaign brings one of its "truth trucks" to the Vans Warped Tour at Sandstone today, and I thought Operation Rescue might be interested to hear that anti-smoking propagandists have co-opted their favored discursive strategy of printing behavioral agitprop on trucks and driving them around places frequented by kids, such as Chuck E. Cheese. Although the truth® campaign doesn't use the persuasive rhetorical approach of enormous photos of abortions, it does seem like there's probably some copyright infringement or a patent violation or something like that.

I volunteer a lot of my time to a pro-abortion advocacy group called "The Do-Over Project," and we've come up with some with some pretty compelling concepts for a fleet of what we're tentatively calling "Retort Trucks" or "On the Other Hand Trucks," which actively encourage pregnant women to terminate their pregnancies. Here's a mock-up of a van we're hoping to park near maternity clothing outlets and lamaze classes:

We think our "Feelin' Great!" campaign could be the McDonald's "I'm lovin' it" juggernaut of Michelle Malkin's "Big Abortion" industry. As an additional benefit, by using large delivery vehicles, Operation Rescue's trucks can be obscured with some judicious double-parking.

Enthusiastic amateur: Midwest Voices blogger Ross Balano is pig-biting mad about Barack Obama's "redefining" of patriotism during his speech in Independence on Monday, and to back up his argument, tri-cornered-patriot-hat-wearing Balano makes resort to the last refuge of the eighth grader who waited until the last minute to write a report about beets: the dictionary. "Webster defines patriotism as, 'love or devotion to one’s country,'" he says. "When I read that definition, Obama is not a person who comes to mind."

So, there you have it. Barack Obama hates America — as empirically proven by the dictionary. We'll be keeping a close eye on whatever the Encyclopedia Britannica has to say about George Washington and how it proves that secret Muslim Barack Obama's tax plan involves using American veterans as slave-labor in the abortion biofuel refineries.

Confusingly, Balano then uses the Truman Memorial Building, where Obama delivered his speech, as connective tissue for a weird digression about Hiroshima, writing,

"Truman, after all, was the man who ordered the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. This was the ultimate act of war killing thousands of innocent Japanese women and children. He didn’t even give them habeas corpus rights. Just BOOM and that’s all folks."

Oooooo-kay, Abbie Hoffman, while you're busy smashing the state with your dictionary, I'll be washing the smell of all this stinky patchouli and spilled bongwater out of my Dockers. I'm late getting this posted today, so I just want to point out that the comments for Balano's blog post are fucking priceless.