KC Confidential

Think tale of two cities…

In one corner we have the Kansas City Star, ostensibly the defender of “actual news” in what passes for “our” area. In my new, little corner of the globe, lies the Arizona Daily Star, Tucson’s fast fading bulwark of liberal-leaning, “flavored” news.

So even as I managed to escape the dreary daily drumbeat of angry editorials and “fake news” in KC a year ago, unexpectedly I crash-landed in a similarly far left spin zone out west.

Can you believe it?

This from a dude who not that long ago voted twice for Obama and considered MSNBC my cable news channel of choice.

It’s interesting dissecting the two Stars and their similar efforts at trying to micromanage the way folks think. As opposed to merely informing them what’s going on.

I digress.

There’s little doubt both of – what we once called “newspapers” are pursuing the similar “truths” these days.

Meaning just about anybody that passes for woke or liberal is good and correct,  while anyone that skews conservative is pretty much dead wrong, or as Dwight Sutherland likes to say, “evil.”.

Ah, but the difference between Tucson’s Star and the one I wrote for for 16 years is largely in “tone.”

The angry inmates that overran the asylum in KC enjoy berating and bashing the likes of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall. So while Dr. Fauci recently called Marshall a “moron” (off mic, of course), KC’S Star long ago pegged him and Hawley as cretins. They love nothing more than the opportunity to use WWE-like moves to pull out the hair or deliver a thumb to the eye, when the journalistic referees (editors?) are not looking.

Arizona’s Star loves few things more than posting letters and cartoons sticking it to Kyrsten Sinema for not going along a couple of President Joe Biden‘s loonier policies.

Out here, they can’t bring themselves to full-out bash fellow Dems like Sinema and Joe Manchin. Instead they rely on over-the-top fan mail and heinous, reader donated cartoons to rub their news noses in doo-doo.

Whereas, KC’s journalistas pride themselves in fighting dirty. Continue reading →

Sam the Sham

Things are getting seriously sad at Kansas City’s newspaper of record…

What’s left of its news staff – tails between their legs – exited their historic brick home at 1729 Grand a few years back and moved into, later selling its gigundo $250 million glass house that many assumed was a step up.

It wasn’t.

The Star has been fire selling off assets for a dozen years, trying to keep its head above water as subscribers, readers, columnists and staff fled the fast sinking ship in record numbers. Just prior to editor-turned-publisher Art Brisbane‘s departure in 2006, the newspaper had more than 2,000 employees.

It’s anybody’s guess now, but well under 100 would not surprise.

Take me, for instance…

Convicted felon/editor Mike Fannin continues to hang onto his paycheck, but anyone who one-upon-a-time mattered there is long gone.

Now, the last writer with the slightest semblance of Star power sports columnist Sam Mellinger has left for a cushy PR job with the Royals.

Not a good sign.

At 2021 year end the few remaining news staffers had to flee the newspaper’s downtown glass house to work out of their ramshackle homes and apartments. And now, the Curious George of retired Star newsies, Jim Fitzpatrick, has tracked what passes for the newspaper’s new headquarters to a mere Post Office box on the Plaza.

Yes, it’s come to that… Continue reading →

Is it possible for too many Christmas decorations to be too much?

In cities like Kansas City, the more the merrier. Plaza holiday lights? Bring ’em – let the good times roll.

Then again, whatever happened to tasteful holiday decorated homes that seem increasingly to have become engulfed in garish overkill?

I migrated to Tucson a year ago where the powers that be here decided long ago to limit streetlights, neon lighting, even the outside lights on people’s homes. All in the interest of keeping nighttime skies dark and filled with stars, like the “good old days.”

They do it via strict zoning, the likes of which I’ve yet to see elsewhere.

That doesn’t stop big retailers from hawking all sorts of holiday lighting and inflatable monstrosities.

Did you know that for $399.95 Hammacher Schlemmer will sell you an 18 foot tall, inflatable Frosty the Snowman? Continue reading →

I’m a pretty laid back guy…

Aside from hanging out long ago with the Prime Minister of Canada on the stern of my parent’s yacht, dating a girl long distance in Torino, Italy in the ’80s, running The Pitch, then choking out the highest read column in the Kansas City Star for 16 years, passing out with COVID 19 a year ago just before Christmas while returning a rental car in Arizona and getting married to an amazing, beautiful lawyer who works for the Attorney General of Arizona, “Vanilla” has pretty much been my middle name.

Ah, but once upon time in the early 1970s I loaded up my dirt brown Fiat X 1/9 sports car with as much Coors beer as it would hold and enough clothes to last a year and moved to Mayfield, Kentucky.

You know, last weekend’s Tornado Town.

It was a storybook, small southern city in what is called the “Jackson Purchase.” I went there to learn as much as I could about grading grain and running what is called, a “country grain elevator.”

The Coors was my ticket to ingratiating myself to the elevator owner and locals of the dry county, where they prized the “pure Rocky Mountain spring water” from which it was allegedly came. At the time Coors wasn’t sold “east of the Mississippi.”

Like the early Pilgrims trading beads for Manhattan Island I supplied my rare brewskis and locals reciprocated by introducing me to equally rare, illegal moonshine and the saltiest country ham you probably never ate.

After a few months of living in a small motel just off the main drag downtown – which as of last Friday night is history – I rented a tiny mobil home just west of town, and settled in for a year.

Needless to say, it was a bit on the unglamorous side.

Still lI loved hanging with the farm folk ands locals in Mayfield and fanned out on weekends for exotic places such as Memphis or Nashville to hang with luminaries like Wolfman Jack (honest) and southern belles who had possibly less romantic interest in me than I appeared to have in them.

TMI, anyone? Continue reading →

Is Westport on its last legs?

Nope, times are definitely tough, but it’s more like a changing of the guard. More than a half dozen businesses either have – or are about to bite the dust in KC’s original entertainment district – but a new generation is ramping up to sally forth in the post COVID era,

“Westport is just in a transition period,” explains longtime Westport landlord and businessman Bill Niro. “It’s actually upgrading a little. You know, we’ve still got the Buzzard. Harpo’s and Kelley”s, but we’ve got a big country bar coming in taking the space of the Foundry and the old Hurricane. The southwest corner of Westportand Broadway is going to be the new, big gay club in town called Fountain Haus. And we have Throwback KC and Bridger’s that are both primarily black dance clubs. But you know what? The whole live music scene is now gone from Westport and that’s unfortunate.”

The latest post COVID casualties include the Riot Room, Joe’s Pizza Buy the Slice and Westport Saloon.

A new country bar is taking over the Riot Room space, and  it appears that an offshoot of Joe’s KC BBQ will take over the Joe’s pizza space (that ripped off Pyramid Pizza in the same location with near identical twisted pizza crust and jars of honey for dessert, opening into Kelley’s.

A potential bidding war may erupt where Westport Saloon is concerned.

“The very day they announced they were closing at the end of the year I had two calls asking about the space,” Niro says. “And now I have at least three people interested in it.”

Unfortunately, Westport still has to vie party supremacy with downtown’s Power & Light District.

Speaking of which…how has the P&L fared the past 20 or so months? Continue reading →

Careful what you wish for…

Remember that one? Well, that’s also my advice – albeit belatedly – for fans and alums of Big 12 college football powers like Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas. And going forward, KU‘s whine-and-cheese crowd who can’t stop gazing wistfully on booking a birth in the Big 10 conference.

My Mizzou-loving pal Will Gregory, loves to boast about how much more money his school’s athletics department gets after bailing the Big 12 ten years back to join the almighty SEC.

Just one problem…

In addition to pissing off many of their beloved – former rivals like Kansas – they’ve been bumping around the bowls of college sports, while leaving scores of their area brethren bored out of their minds. All while slipping past boring schools like Vanderbilt, North Texas and Central Michigan, while getting their you-know-what’s handed to them by the likes of Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia.

The $64 million question: Who cares these days which schools MU wins or looses to?

By contrast, the thrill of slipping past Nebraska in 2007 and playing KU at Arrowhead was surreal.

Missouri was ranked No.3 and Kansas No. 2; the winner was to be Numero 1.

It was the oldest Division One rivalry – according to Sports Illustrated – Kansas was averaging 45.8 points per game, Mizzou 42.5 – but Missouri ended up winning 36-28.

Five years later MU bailed on the Big 12 and KU fired its Phat-but- cruel head coach Mark Mangino and has sucked at football ever since – until recently – when they kicked outgoing Big 12 school Texas at home, 57-56.

Long story short, all the teams that bailed on the Big 12 – searching for bigger bucks in bigger conferences – have struggled to achieve anything close to their glory days in the Big 8/Big 12. Continue reading →

Tyreek Hill mugshot

At what point in time does somebody deservingly rise above the law?

How about, never.

That said, there’s a big difference between this year’s Chiefs from going undefeated and crawling out of last place to hanging to first by a thread.

And that’s pretty much the predicament the Kansas City Chiefs, head coach Andy Reid and quarterback Patrick Mahomes find themselves in. As just about every single person with the slightest interest knows is true.

Let longtime KCC reader comment Rainbow Man explain:

“If Reid is not distracted by his son’s situation that would mean there is something very wrong with him. I think it has definitely been a factor. I am not surprised that there is drinking at the Chiefs facility. Its a posh, clubhouse type of environment. But it is pretty obvious that Britt Reid got intoxicated at One Arrowhead. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a Super Bowl send off happy hour in the office. The Chiefs seem to be Teflon.

“Andy Reid transformed the organization and the Chiefs are are a first class team. I also get a sense that Andy Reid is a good man. I truly sympathize with his personal family issues and none of us know what he is going through there. BUT… the Chiefs expect and demand no scrutiny and they get little scrutiny on matters that deserve it. They are a pretty arrogant organization and they are enabled by the media, local government and law enforcement. They are also enabled by a punch drunk fan base. Right or wrong, winning does cure all ills. So if we miss the playoffs this year and come out weak next season … They will be squirming with fan angst.”

I realize we’re standing on a pretty small stage here now…

Beyond that, the Rainbow man’s taking a harsh internal looksee into a seldom explored obvious.

In today’s world, an NFL football teams live in a world mere mortals can only imagine.

Where else can low lifes like Tyreek Hill  behave so egregiously toward women – yet be forgiven sans question – simply because they are good at the sport they engage in? Continue reading →

The debate whether the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election was fairly conducted has been so bitterly and so viciously waged that it’s hard to see how the truth will ever come out…

(It may take 50 or 60 years if the 1960 election is any indication.)

Neither side has exactly covered itself in glory in that regard, with wild claims and allegations that call into question those who made them’s credibility.

It’s the electoral equivalent of the run up to the First World War, with all the participants so recklessly escalating their rhetoric that it made it difficult to stand down.

In fact, it was uncomfortably close to the kind of disputed election outcomes, complete with threats by the military to intervene, that we see in Third World countries.

I see two issues in considering the fairness of how the election was conducted.

The first is whether it was rigged by those in authority to get the outcome they wanted. Rigging means “to arrange in a dishonest way for selfish advantage; manipulate fraudulently; fix;/ to rig an election.” Webster’s New World Dictionary (1982), p. 1225.

It’s hard to claim that this didn’t happen after the victors openly bragged about doing it.

In a Time Magazine story published February 4^th   – The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved The 2020 Election – liberal journalist Molly Ball indulged in an extended gloatathon on how a “conspiracy” or “cabal” (her words, not mine) of “well-funded powerful people” were able to get “the desired outcome” to the 2020 election.

Virtually every significant American institution from the AFL-CIO to Silicon Valley, to the Chamber of Commerce, to Black Lives Matter and every other left-wing group under the sun were united in this crusade to “save” not just the 2020 election but American democracy itself.

At this point it’s necessary for the unitiated to get out your Captain Midnight Decoder rings to understand what’s being said:

When a Democratic candidate for President loses to a Republican that means democracy is threatened. After all, a small “d” democracy is only truly healthy when the big “D” Democratic Party wins all elections and holds all power.

According to Ball, the anti-Trump Resistance got states to “change voting systems.”

That’s a euphemism for eliminating safeguards against election fraud; like photo I.D, signature requirements, and showing a chain of custody in the handling of ballots. Conversely, we’re told that the Resistance fought “voter suppression” lawsuits, which translates as any legal effort to prevent time honored Democratic methods like vote harvesting, e.g. paying party workers for each ballot collected from nursing home residents.

Ball also brags that the Resistance plotters “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder stand against ‘disinformation’ and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” 

This is, of course, code for stopping coverage of stories damaging to the Biden campaign like the Hunter Biden laptop expose in the New York Post by blocking it on Twitter.

What is the most surprising disclosure is her boast that the anti-Trump cabal funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funds to local election officials to “ensure the proper outcome of the election.”

What if wealthy conservative billionaires like Robert Mercer and Tim Mellon had funneled such sums ($500 million) towards efforts to get out the GOP vote? Democrats and/or liberals would have been outraged.

Private money should not go to election officials to get the results the donors want, any more than private money should go to state court systems, local prosecutors’ officers, or state attorneys general to ensure legal outcomes which benefit the donors and harm the donor’s adversaries. 

I’m sure there are a lot of people who don’t like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates but we can’t just write checks to the U.S. Department of Justice Anti-trust Division to go after them as monopolists. So why should Mark Zuckerberg get to pay state and local election officials to bend the laws to defeat Donald Trump?

Of course, Molly Ball would say that these average, every day, Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires were not really working to defeat Trump.

The “desired outcome” they were working to ensure she repeatedly insists (through the deeply noble, public-spirited left-wing activists she quotes at length in her article) was a decisive, clear-cut result so that the country might be spared a divisive, protracted election dispute.

Funny, I seem to recall these same people not dropping their outrage over the 2000 Florida recount for at least a year after the election. Continue reading →

It’s not easy dodging those “woke” bullets…

Take Dwight Sutherland of Sutherland Lumber fame, who was minding his own business two weeks back at a quaint Westwood coffee klatch just off the Country Club Plaza.

“I was at Hi Hat Coffee  on State Line talking with a friend about the Chiefs – and there’s no mask requirement there – and a guy comes up to me and says, ‘I’m going to splatter your brains all over the wall – he said it twice – he was a young guy in his 20s or 30s and looked like the kind of guy you would see in Westport.

“I didn’t say anything to him, but I went outside to try and get the license number on his car. And he saw  me and figured out what I was doing, so he started backing up State Line really fast so I couldn’t get a look art his license plate. And he’s driving 40 miles an hour – like Starsky & Hutch – and peeling his tires. He made so much noise that George Brett‘s wife came out of her flower shop next-door and said, ‘What in the hell’s going on?’ ”

The bottom line:

“This is the kind of stuff that goes on these days,” Sutherland says. “Because the inmates are running the asylum and this guy is absolutely ‘woke’ to the max. You know, if you don’t do exactly what they say, you’re an anti vaxer or a Trump insurrectionist or terrorist.”

So much for not wearing a mask in public…

“So I said to him, ‘Look, I’m socially distanced and I’m double vaccinated and my friend told him we were talking about the Chiefs, not him. ‘We weren’t talking about you’ – he thought we were talking about him.”

” ‘You’re breathing down my neck,’ ” the guy said. ” ‘You’re trying to give me herpes – I ought to splatter your brains all over that wall.’

Not that the dude wasn’t weird enough already, Sutherland says. Continue reading →

007 Shows up with daughter at No Time to Die premier

Nothing lasts forever, right?

Honest presidents, cheap gas, movies with actual actors and story lines,  as opposed to over-the-hill actresses winning Academy Award for pooping into buckets.

That said, COVID delays aside, at least we still have James Bond…for now.

I checked out the new Bond flick No Time to Die on opening night – the one that took nearly two years to find its way to movie theaters, after having an announced opening more than a year ago.

And, any…?

“I did like it,” says KCC movie maven Jack Poessiger. “In spite of the fact that it’s two hours and 46 minutes long.”

Speaking of which…

“I recommend you go to the bathroom first,” Poessiger says. “Because once it starts you won’t want to have to get up.”

Incidentally, here in Arizona, next-to-nobody hardly ever goes to a movie theater these days. Still they snagged around 50 people at my opening night 7:20 pm screening.

Which was a new record, since every other movie I’ve seen a movie was like a ghost town.

I checked on some of Kansas City area theaters and they were doing far better, but looks like we have a way to go to try and catch up to the pre COVID movie era.

Will movie theater moviegoing return to the good old days?

“I’ll grant you, a lot of theaters will go away,” Poessiger says. “There won’t be as many of them as we have now.

Also going away: the current James Bond, actor Daniel Craig.

“The talk is, there’ll either be a black Bond or a female Bond next,” Poessiger says.

Hold it right there…

There already is effectively a female Bond of sorts – Lashana Lynch – in the just released movie.

The schtick being, Bond had retired and Lynch was given his 007 designation.

But since Craig won’t be returning, movie rights holder Barbara Broccoli is already on record that the next James Bond will remain a dude…

English actor Idris Elba – who is black – is who Poessiger thinks might take Craig’s place.

Although buy the time the next JB movies hits the screen, he’ll be 50.

Lynch’s 007 will be back for the next film, but the jury’s still out on if she’s gay or straight.

Such are the times we live in… Continue reading →

People tend of mellow oftentimes as they grow older…

Take former KC Star bad boy (and rival columnist) Jason Whitlock.

Ah, but the artist who-called-himself Big Sexy has bounced around plenty since leaving the newspaper a year or two after I did 10 or so years ago. He’s managed to land some reasonably sexy gigs on ESPN and Fox before parting ways – usually somewhat  abruptly.

More recently, the middle-aged Whitlock has been plighting his trough at conservative firebrand Glenn Beck‘s Blaze Media. That after making several appearances on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and other conservative media shows weighing in on sports and conservative politics.

On one of Whitlock’s recent podcast / online shows – Fearless with Jason Whitlock -he decided to purge himself of some of the vices Star readers knew him best for.

“One of the things that has really bothered me in the last couple of years – it’s like this Lizzo, this singer Lizzo, comes out of nowhere and she looks to be 300, 320 pounds or so. And I’m looking at mainstream media and the left try to normalize her obesity.

“Obviously, I have an obesity problem and I don’t want this normalized. I don’t think it’s healthy. And it’s like, everything they seem to be pushing seems to be connected to death. The lifespan of ever weight people, much shorter – that’s just a fact – so I don’t understand why there would be any motivation, how someone could see it as healthy. Hey, let’s tell overweight people that this is great and they shouldn’t feel any sort of way about it. And you should feel good about being overweight. And you go girl and you go Jason. It’s crazy.”

Remember those stripper chicks with Jason that were posted online? Continue reading →

Former KU basketball coach Roy Williams said it first and arguably best…

After suffering an uninspired home game crowd, Williams said, “The place should never be described as a wine-and-cheese crowd, and that’s what it sounded like out there tonight. If you don’t want to cheer for us, keep your big butts at home.”

Well, in the wake of Oklahoma and Texas announcing that they’re bailing on the Big 12 conference for the SEC (with Mizzou and Texas A&M),  KU’s “big butts” are back.

And it’s high time we call it like it is…

Referring to KU’s big butts as a “wine and cheese crowd” is pretty close to being accurate, but these days they’re more of a “whine and cheese” crowd.

Seriously.

After having lived in Lawrence, Kansas for much of the past decade, I can confirm that KU sports fans – basketball fans primarily – are little more than spoiled snobs.

Having hired basketball deity Bill Self – who has long since mastered the art of what amounts to cheating by most traditional college sports standards – all they really care much about outside of their families, personal wealth and health – is how close the Jayhawk basketball team can get to winning the Big 12 and into the Final Four.

And that’s pretty much it.

Sure, they’ll glom onto the Royals in the rare event that Kansas City’s baseball team halfway matters – and  who wouldn’t get behind Chiefs superstar Patrick Mahomes team?

However, it’s Self’s men’s basketball team that lends Lawrence its primary, claim-to-fame and identity.

Outside of that, they’re just a hipper Kansas college town because they’re closer to KC, not stuck in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas like K-State.

And now that the Big 12 has been diminished by the pending loss of its two highest ranking football teams, it’s become one of those last man out, turn out the lights affairs.

Yet for like 10 years KU has refused to play basketball and football games with Missouri, after MU jilted the Jayhawks and Big 12 by bailing for the SEC. That’s only recently begun to thaw.

Mizzou were little more than traitors, having left Kansas trapped in the precarious and uncertain position of maybe belonging to a conference on the verge of taking a dirt nap.

So out of spite, KU trashed the oldest college football rivalry west of the Mississippi.

Now it’s KU’s turn to leave the other Big 12 conference schools in their dust.

That after a very successful effort to add four new major colleges to get the Big 12 back from 10 to an actual dozen schools. And on the day last week when the big announcement was made that Brigham Young, Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida would be coming aboard – and everybody involved was celebrating wildly – KU’s newest athletic director was busy letting the world know that the Jayhawks were still trying to get in the Big 10.

Classy… 

So after a decade of trashing Missouri for being  a cheating spouse, turns out imitation is indeed flattery after all.

What’s left of the Lawrence Journal World‘s missing in action sports staff Matt Tait told 365 Sports earlier this week that KU is still kinda committed to the Big 12.

“And I think they are committed to making it as strong as it can be -because the future or the other options are all uncertain right now and nothing is given. So as much as the fan base up here really, really wants to see KU in the Big 10, it may never happen.” Continue reading →

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

“I come to bury Pastor Bob, not to praise him.”

“The evil that men do live after them.”

   (With apologies to William Shakespeare)

I generally subscribe to the maxim “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” – concerning the dead, say nothing except good…

However, in the case of the Right “Reverend” (sic) Robert Meneilly I’m willing to make an exception, given the legacy of hatred and division he left behind.

No one in the history of Kansas City did more to split the community along racial and religious lines.  He was particularly adept at stirring up fear and resentment of evangelical Christians among Jews.  He was almost as skilled at encouraging rich WASPS to regard working class conservatives as intellectual and social inferiors who could be put in their place by their betters voting for Woke Democrats.

Perhaps the most repugnant aspect of Pastor Bob’s church militant was his ability to twist words in a form of thought control.  For example, politics was no longer defined as the contest of liberals versus conservatives. Instead, according to Meneilly and company, it all came down to “Moderates” (the Mainstream Coalition) against “Right Wing Extremists” (anyone to the right of Kamala Harris).

Thus, by definition there could be no such thing as a left-wing extremist because everyone left of center was effectively redefined by Meneilly as a “moderate.”

I think the best indication of this “champion of love and compassion’s” true character was a cartoon from the Mainstream Messenger.  It mocks Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition’s dispute with the IRS, comparing it to Christ’s suffering and death on the Cross.

This is not only blasphemous—particularly by a minister—but it is viciously, sadistically cruel.  Continue reading →