Daily Briefs: Two Presidents
By CHRIS PACKHAM
Still Alive: As a kind of stunt, I thought I might try making jokes about every story on the index page of The Kansas City Star website this morning. 
Unfortunately, they printed an unusually high number of stories about people who died, so I quickly Netscape-navigated away to inoccuous, unfunny list-generating node Cracked.com, a website so completely shitty that I will not provide them with a working link. Not only am I not allowed to make fun of freshly-dead people, the news stories themselves always inspire me to Max Von Sydow-like brooding about my own death, making me all sad and depressed, which I already wrote about several weeks ago.
Netflix is down, so in lieu of watching The Wire episodes that have been at the top of my queue for the last week, I've been catching up with my old friends, Smirnoff vodka and juice. We actually used to spend a lot of time together watching The Wire, but now we just hang out and call old girlfriends until we're too drunk to press the flat little buttons on my Razr phone. After the jump, a brief analysis of a very special section of The Kansas City Star, and how it will save journalism. Plus: some other stuff. Click here, or, for our French-speaking readers, ici.
Maybe you can buy integrity: I've always been an avid reader of the Star's "Indulge" section — oh, you don't know about "Indulge?" It's a "monthly fashion and lifestyle magazine" cooperatively written by "the lifestyle staff of The Kansas City Star and The Star Co.'s Targeted Publication Department." Trust me: After a long afternoon of heavy differential calculus brain-curls and multiple reps of brainy trigonometry power-squats, Indulge will shut down your brain so completely that you may actually lose autonomic functions like bowel control. The magazine works like this: Actual Star lifestyle writers — your Jeneé Osterheldt, or your Ann Spivak — write a short paragraph on the theme of an article of clothing ("Spring is on the way, so it’s time to ditch those big bubble coats for something cooler, like a hoodie.") Then, advertorial staffers step in with paid ad copy about actual hoodies you can buy at J. Crew. Ad dollars come raining down like pork sandwiches from the sky, corporate coffers are engorged like R. Kelly at Chuck E. Cheese, fat little executives strut through the Star hallways flaunting their silken finery, and print journalism is saved.
When presidents of the United States collide: Batty old President John McCain whipped out his Presidential Diplomatic multi-tool, unfolded the Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham components, and started poking with them at Russia, or as McCain knows it, "the Grand Duchy of Moscow." All of which The Washington Post thinks is weird, because Other President George W. Bush has sent Secretary of Mushroom Clouds Condoleezza Rice to the region on a similar diplomatic journey of self-discovery. Foreign policy was simpler back when we only had one president, because jurisdictional disputes between diplomatic delegations in front of international dignitaries are always embarrassing, like when your mom used to get drunk in front of your friends, and then ask all of them to slow-dance. Here's a picture of her:
"Sheerioushly, c'mere 'n' put yer handsh on m'shouldersh... I LEAD, y'shtoopid dummy. Put Gordon Lightfoot on the shtereo..."
HAHA, that's your Republican mom.
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