Daily Briefs: God, Guns and Manipulative Headlinery

By CHRIS PACKHAM

The Elephant in the Rectory: His Popliness, Pope Benedict Ratzinger XVI, landed in New York. He’s pictured here with some teen girls at Hot Topic.

On the plane over, the Pope made some statements about pedophile priests. One statement suggested that the Vatican is now “screening” priest applicants for pedophilic tendencies. %{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150c4389121ca96b960b20″ data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%No word about bishops who shuffled pedophiles from parish to parish, unannounced by the customary banners reading “WELCOME PEDOPHILE.” Maybe they screen for that, too. This is a big, weird deal for American Catholics, for some reason. Some local anti-pedophile Catholics comment.

I still miss my ex-husband, but my aim is getting better: The Kansas City Star‘s Yael T. Abouhalkah is against taxes for sewers. He’s against taxes for buses. He’s against people who are against Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s position on taxes for buses, which position Yael is against. What else is he against? Guns on campus. And he personalizes his stance with a folksy, homespun anecdote: “When my daughter goes off to college this fall, she won’t be carrying a Glock or any other kind of gun,” he writes, apparently on purpose.

But according to a bumper sticker I once saw on a 1980 Ford F-100 outside a Civil War re-enactment, It’s easier to childproof your gun than to bulletproof your child. Who’s right? Yael or hillbillies? Here are some more counterarguments to Yael’s position against sidearms on the campuses of American Universities, as framed in the discursive idiom of bumper stickers.

• Keep Honking – I’m Reloading.
• WARNING! Driver only carries $20 in ammunition.
• Honk If You’ve Never Seen An Uzi Fired From A Car Window.
• If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets.

Also, this:

If I understand the hick position correctly, those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Fumbling at the bra straps of your outrage. Yes, I said bra straps: This morning, I saw this headline on the KCTV Channel 5 Web site:

I was all, like, YEAH! There’s enough ammunition flying at Our Troops in Our War in Our Iraq. It’s about goddamn time someone interrupted all that ammunition! WHOOOO! USA!!!!

Then I read the article and realized that the two guys were actually literally stealing bullet cups from the Lake City Army Ammunition plant and selling them for the value of their copper. And that a headline writer at KCTV Channel 5 was clumsily trying to get me all Lou Dobbs-y about Our Troops with his imprecise wordsmithery. As if the thieves were rubbing their hands together and twirling their Snidely Whiplash mustaches and saying, “HAHA! Now those American troops will die like dogs under the heel of our insurgent Islamic brethren!”

Then I got distracted by my breakfast, which was a breakfast burrito.

Trainwreck of Talent: I couldn’t let a whole week pass without posting a video from the amazing 1980s New York public-access show Stairway to Stardom. In this clip, a man named Don Costello, described as a “rubber-faced funnyman” lives up to exactly half of that description. Bonus: Includes the “Mahna Mahna” song. FAIL: