Kansas City News Blog

Since there's nobody I love more than readers of Daily Briefs except for my puppy and my girlfriend IN THAT ORDER, I wanted to express my thanks and gratitude with a traditionally indifferent e-card at absolutely no cost to myself. Obviously, this card would have been my first choice, but unfortunately the American Greetings card company's brain has GONE COMPLETELY INSANE, and they actually charge a subscription fee if you want to send personalized Flash e-cards to your contacts list. So, MERRY CHRISTMAS to you from Daily Brieficist Chris Packham and all of us here on the Plog second shift. Shift supervisor Faysal Alkhaiwani brought in some shawarma and halwa showaiter his wife made for our office "holiday feast," and now I'm all bloated with Bahraini cuisine. So this is going to be short. After the jump, delicious little chunks of copy. Click here or here:



Citycitycitycitycitycitycity, shittyshittyshittyshittyshittyshittyshitty, hallhallhallhallhallhallhall:Brobdingnagian Mayor Mark Funkhouser, the tallest man on earth, and his embarrassing spousal teratoma, Kansas City "First Lady" Gloria Squitiro, are enormously popular and will be incredibly hard to beat in the 2011 election, but Steve Kraske was talking up some possible mayoral contenders yesterday, including 2007 candidates Albert Reiderer and Henry Klein and a lawyer named Sly James, none of whom have socially or civically embarrassing wives. Meanwhile, Ruth Bates has filed another EEOC discrimination claim against the city after some clumsy, thick-headed comments the mayor made w/r/t her actual motives for filing her original lawsuit. The article isn't local reporting, either; the AP is covering the whole thing, now that it's turned into a Rube-Goldberg-like succession of unlikely and embarrassing missteps that will apparently not end this calendar year. On the other hand, it's been, like, two weeks since any wavy stink-lines have emanated from City Hall, but that might be because Funkhouser stays home all the time, now.

The Saddleback Civil Forum on Who Cares? President-Elect Barack Obama done went and honked off all the hippies, who were on a hair-trigger to begin with, by selecting affable, gay-hating Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. This is the hippies' Waterloo, or whatever. They've decided to draw their fucking line in the sand over saying "grace" before the all the inaugural balls. All through the campaign, Obama was saying he'd reach out to people who disagreed with him. Now he's actually doing it, and the phrase the flower children have settled on to embody their outrage is "a slap in the face." It's a "slap in the face" to gay people, and a "slap in the face" to all the Daily Kos diarists who did so much typing during the campaign in order to alienate anyone who disagreed with them and also to repost lists of the previous evening's horrible talk-show monologue jokes, because that's what they do over there for whatever stupid reason.

-- Chris Packham