Daily Briefs: City of Darkness, Pro-Fetus Group Gets Pro-Fetus License Plate, and Some Other Stuff That Happened

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

• Pro-life Missourians will soon be able to demonstrate their enthusiasm for fetuses with “Choose Life” license plates. The Alliance Defense Fund sued on behalf of Choose Life of Missouri when the state initially rejected the requested specialty plate. The judge’s ruling, made on First Amendment grounds, brings my dream of an “ASS GRASS OR GAS” specialty plate a step closer.

• Imaginatively named Missouri public policy group the Show-Me Institute released a study demonstrating that Kansas City light rail will lead to the collapse of civilization, as embodied by the headless Statue of Liberty seen in every apocalyptic film ever made. Presumably, Kansas City would first need to build a Statue of Liberty. So that’s it. Once the think tanks chime in with all of their thinking, it’s time to pack in your public transportation initiative.

Only, it turns out that the study’s author has this whole weird light-rail thing going on and spends a lot of time trying to shovel under light-rail plans in cities across the country.

• “If you offer your roommate five bucks and a bottle of Oxycontin to murder your ex-lover’s girlfriend, you just might be a redneck.” HAHAHAHA, man that never gets old.

• Anthony Amato resigns as Kansas City School Superintendent.

• Swallow whatever food you have in your mouth before you read this: A salesman came to Springfield resident Tamra Eason’s house with what she describes as an obviously homemade tattoo gun. And he offered to to tattoo her. And she thought it was a good idea. The next day, she passed out and had to be hospitalized. Eason and two other women have infections at the tattoo sites, and are now being tested for hepatitis and HIV.

I can’t make out from the picture what she had tattooed. Some kind of blurry, scabby-looking pseudo Kanji writing or something. I would have predicted Tweety Bird, a wizard with a crystal or a picture of Jesus.

• The New York Times says voters are in a dark, brooding, Batman-like mood this year, as opposed to the sunny, lasagna-loving, Garfield mood we were in back in 2000. And nowhere is the mood darker than right here in gothy, black-lipstick-wearing Kansas City. Following a lot of grandiloquence about war and the changing face of the country and whatnot, the writer sort of backs up his argument with interviews of residents from several cities, including Kansas City.

• The Kansas City Star‘s Mike Hendricks is ready to move beyond the Frances Semler controversy. The first time I read this Prime Buzz blog post, I thought he was telling everyone who disagreed with him to shut the fuck up. I bookmarked it in a righteous fury, but when I came back to it this morning with the intention of writing a snotty rejoinder, it seemed disappointingly rational. Either I read it wrong the first time, or magic copy-editing elves had come through Mike Hendricks’ window and massaged his rhetoric with their magical scented massage oils.

So yes, by all means, let’s move beyond the racially divisive Semler appointment to the fact that if you’re looking for a gimongous cliche to use as the tagline for your blog, it’s pretty tough to beat “Stop the Spin — I Want to Get Off.” Oh, believe me — I tried.

In retrospect, I was trying too hard. By contrast, Hendricks has the Zenlike effortlessness of Master Li Mu Bai from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Admittedly, I stole all of my taglines from various “crazy” office posters and coffee mugs in my Plog shift supervisor’s cubicle, but I have much to learn from this Mike Hendricks.