Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

From the Comments:

Beazley says: Is there or is there not some question as to the status of Georgia's sovereignty? Like HUGE gaping questions even more open to interpretation than questions asked in the past about the sovereignty of say Taiwan or The Philippines or whoever the fuck actually owns Kashmir?

The Yes Man says: Yes. Let us all discuss serious thing.

Let's.

Yes.

The worst, worst, worst: Over the weekend, Sen. Barack Obama decided not to hire Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill as his running mate, opting instead for Sen. Joe Biden. Tonight, she gets 10 minutes to speak to the Democratic National Convention, where she will introduce Michelle Obama to a crowd of about 21,000. All of which is fine, but to totally change the subject, what I'm actually very satisfied and happy about is the current lack of unfunny, Dave Barry-esque pseudo-humorists "declaring" their "candidacy" for "president," a joke so totally FAIL that you'd think Joel Stein and Lore Sjöberg and Danielle Crittenden would all be simultaneously campaigning for the Unfunny President of FART. So apparently we've solved that problem, just like global warming, and now we need to tackle "I APPROVED THIS MESSAGE" because it is a totally unacceptable substitute for funny, and now it appears every two years, like the Olympics.

After the jump, Mayor Mark Funkhouser totally loses the thread, apparently willfully, plus: My summertime mojitos recipe! Click here, or on Joel Stein's version of Oblique Strategies, the remote-controlled fart machine:

FART for Vendetta: Mayor Mark Funkhouser has apparently expressed the unbelievable opinion that the McClatchy-owned Kansas City Star has a "vendetta" against him. As an impartial observer with the emotionless detachment of diagnosed sociopathy and a corresponding inability to empathize with other people, I'd like to point out that this is the stupidest thing ever said by anyone, ever. Because how was it even possible for the embarrassingly Funkhousery Star and its columnists to have been more pro-Funkhouser? I mean, without actually replacing one of its more useless sections (FAITH) with a Funkhouser advertorial section.

It's pretty clear that Funkhouser doesn't actually believe his own vendetta bullshit; he's just kicking himself for squandering a sweetheart media relationship on scale with — well, I have to go back to the state-controlled news orgs in those Balkan states that used to have all those rape camps back in the 1990s. Funkhouser had a pretty good thing going there, for a while! Now, just like when the Rape Camp Intelligencer-Tribune finally had to turn on Slobodan Milošević after his wife screwed everything up at the office and caused the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian and Kosovar muslims, Funkhouser is going to have to exchange friendship bracelets with another newspaper. Remember back when Kansas City had two papers? In those days, Hershey bars were a nickel, and people were allowed to call other people "retarded," even if they weren't. OW, MY HIP! Call the pharmacy on my Jitterbug phone and order my once-a-month Boniva.

Mojito! The Supreme Court decided that Christian doctors couldn't discriminate against patients based on sexual orientation, taking away one of the key freedoms American doctors enjoy: eugenics by malpractice. It's actually called "conscientious refusal," and next, the Supreme Court will be coming for your guns and your freedom from the quartering of soldiers in private houses during peace time, and then the slippery slope, followed by scalping Thunderdome tickets in Bartertown. I'll bet I can guess the majority on that decision without even looking. At least I hope I can, because I don't want to look it up. I'm not paid for my journalisming, it should be obvious by now, I'm paid for being pretty. It's seriously written down that way in the job description provided by the human resources department.

This week, I'm buying an above-ground pool, the simple, honest pool of the common man, with all the money I've made selling mortar-and-pestle prayer cloths to Christian pharmacists. They're the ones who live in small towns and refuse to fill ortho tri-cyclen prescriptions, so they're pretty easy to spot. Those people are suckers. My business plan is based on an idea I got from the Rev. Robert Tilton off the TV box. I'm not 100 percent sure how you make it through an actual science-based college curriculum with your belief in irrational voodoo magic intact — maybe they got lucky on the curve, or their dad was the dean or something — but, as the Westboro Baptist Church would print in bold, 30-point caps on a blast-fax press release, THANK GOD FOR CHRISTIAN PHARMACISTS, because they're rich and they believe in a bunch of ooga-booga magical superstition. Pretty soon, they'll all be driven out of business by empirical, science-based pharmacists and I'll be laying poolside smelling like bleach, the chlorine of the common man, drinking the common man's "mojito." Instead of white rum it has Wild Turkey and instead of sugar-cane juice and mint it has more Wild Turkey. Mojito!