Daily Briefs: President Bush, the Minutemen, Midgets

February 1, 2008

Chris Packham,

By CHRIS PACKHAM

• President Bush and the Minutemen are in town at the same time. Just a coincidence? Or has Kansas City become a gravity well for douches? I’m leaning toward coincidence, but I’ve been watching out my window for Neil Strauss, NAMBLA and the Sprint customer-service department. Maybe Kansas City will become like that town in Florida where aging circus performers go to retire, only instead of circus performers, we’ll have douches.

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150c4589121ca96b960e4f” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%The president came with a short to-do list that included presenting the President’s Volunteer Service Award — kind of a presidential certificate of participation — to Leawood, Kansas, resident Samuel Turner Sr., a volunteer with the American Heart Association. The Minutemen came to present Latinos with a paranoid display of patriotic bigotry.

Later, Bush is giving a speech at Hallmark — titled “Warmest Congratulations on the Occasion of Your Bat Mitzvah” or “Sincere Condolences on Your Loss of a Job to Illegal Mexican Immigrants” or something.

• A dude says he was awake throughout a surgical procedure. I tried to watch the video, but the KMBC Web site took over my browser, the way all the Mexicans are trying to take over our pneumatic-cattle-gun responsibilities at the meatpacking plant. For two full minutes, I demonstrated my capacity for emitting one long stream of filthy profanity while my browser ignored me. So you more or less have to take KMBC’s word for it that some guy went through a harrowing surgical ordeal.

• Guess what H&R Block is cutting 500 of? If you guessed “jobs,” you’ve got your finger on the femoral pulse of the local economy — which means your finger is in the economy’s groin. GROSS!

• CHURCH ALERT: Police are warning area churches about a man who showed up at Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church at 13145 Blackbob Road and claimed to be seeking help but was later found digging through people’s desks. For pocket-sized New Testaments or office supplies, I guess. What else do they keep in churches? Family Force 5 CDs? Copies of Left Behind novels? The Ark of the Covenant? My mom used to make me go to Mass, and I guess I more or less always assumed that the altar was the priest’s office. So now I’m imagining a thief rifling through the office supplies the priest keeps in his altar.

• In a story that would probably cause tedious, unfunny Dave Barry’s autonomic nervous system to involuntarily type “which we are not making up,” criminal gangs in Sweden are zipping midgets into suitcases and checking them into the luggage holds of “coaches.” This is a British newspaper item, so I’m not sure if “coaches” means buses, trains or actual coaches, as seen on the cover of every Regency Romance novel your grandma ever read while sitting on the GeriCare safety-tub seat she uses when she takes a bubble bath. Ha ha, you just pictured your grandma taking a bath. But anyway, once inside the luggage holds, the midgets can rifle the bags of other passengers at their leisure. Unlike Dave Barry, I am not going to append a joke about boogers to this story.

• It’s the second weekend of the Worlds of Fun Good Time Jamboree! With the Starland Vocal Band! And— back by popular demand — Rick Nelson!