Daily Briefs: Eliminating Affirmative Action, Another Smoking Ban, the Kids Are All Right. I Guess.
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By CHRIS PACKHAM
• It’s Super Tuesday! So go to your polling place for a chance to win valuable prizes.
• GOOD NEWS: We’ve achieved perfect racial equality in Missouri. And it’s about damn time, what with all the imbalanced scales, plus the injustice. You know the injustice I’m talking about — the kind we don’t have anymore! Therefore, via logic, we need to eliminate affirmative action.
An ambiguously named group called the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative Committee wants to end affirmative action with a constitutional amendment. The group is headed up by Ward Connerly, a black man from California tired of seeing white people in Missouri denied employment or advancement, etc., etc. It’s like the opposite of annoying movies about the civil rights movement in which the righteous white people — such as, say, Alan Alda — come to save African-Americans from injustice caused by white people. Or maybe it’s the obverse. I’m not sure. But one thing I’m 100 percent positive about: I want California amending Missouri’s Constitution. LADIES, AM I RIGHT?
• I admit that it did occur to me that the Funkhouser recall movement was a long shot. But y’know? At least Mike Hendricks doesn’t sound the least bit smug or self-satisfied.
• Smoking is no longer permissible in Blue Springs restaurants or neonatal intensive-care units. From now on, you’ll have to stick to bars, tobacco shops and day-care centers.
• There was a Hillary Clinton voter-outreach teleconference at Liberty Memorial auditorium on Monday. Tomorrow, Clinton talks to California voters via flag semaphore. HA HA HA! I love maritime-communication humor! But seriously, here’s an example of political flag semaphore:
• A group of middle school students stole and wrecked a minivan.
• Kids at Shawnee Mission West want to exercise their First Amendment rights by ending the National Anthem with the words “home of the Vikings” instead of “home of the brave.” For some reason. Probably involving “pep” or “spirit” or a related club.
The kids are citing the very real, very legal precedent of football fans singing “home of the Chiefs” at home games. Except now, according to football law, you can get kicked out of Arrowhead for making mid-anthem edits.
• Nearly a quarter of Britons think Winston Churchill was a mythical figure. Forty-seven percent believe that Sherlock Holmes was real. That sounds bad just, y’know, numerically. But for the roughly 80 percent of Americans who I more or less assume operate under the same misconception about Sherlock Holmes, and the 75 percent who haven’t even heard of Winthrop Churchman, finding Osama Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was a tremendous victory.
Oh, and before you get up on your high, junior-college-educated horse and start yammering about your “street smarts” or something, I saw the box-office figures for Meet the Spartans, and I’m well fucking aware that the United States is populated by two groups of people: (1) me and (2) everyone who needs me to tell them again about the rabbits.
• The KMBC Channel 9 news intro from the 1980s had that weird pseudo-morse-code music in the background, which used to be the sound that news made, and which is still the sound that news makes in the wondrous land that is my head:
