Category Archives: News_and_Views

As I’ve watched new Kansas City mayor Sly James do everything right his first few weeks in office I’ve thought about everything we did wrong four years ago. ..

Where to begin?

The most obvious place to start would be two days after the election when all of us who worked on KC mayor Mark Funkhouser’s campaign read the Star and learned that the guy we got elected would have his wife working in the Mayor’s Office, at Steve Glorioso’s old desk.

But this is my confession, so a better place might be the week before the inauguration when I got a phone call from Star reporter DeAnn Smith.

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A few months after I quit my job in the Mayor’s Office, I read one of Gloria Squitiro’s “Notes from Funk’s Front Porch,” which was posted on one of the local blogs. In it, she wrote, “To borrow a phrase from Jerry Garcia, ‘It’s been a long strange trip.”

I wanted to write a comment ripping her for this.

For one, the phrase is, “What a long strange trip it’s been.” Second, it’s a Bob Weir song, not a Garcia (though he does sing harmony on the line in question). Lastly, the lyric was written by Robert Hunter.

Petty.

Sad, too.

It’s a testament of missed opportunities.

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Once again, the Star is the big winner on Election Day in KCMO.

During the primary, the paper of record conquered the Titans of Industry, the Chamber of Commerce and the secretive cabal of CEOs known as the Civic Council, when it backed Mike Burke and Sly James over Deb Hermann.

For the general, for the coup de grace, they vanquished the King Maker, the Old Mr. Moneybags who had never backed a loser in a mayor’s race: Mr. James B. Nutter.

So now we know, once and for all, who runs this city.

A word to Mayor-Elect Sly James from a man who has been 29th floor and failed:

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Editor Rule #1: Protect your reporters.
 
Even if you know you’re going to have to downsize them on Friday, protect them.
 
If someone attacks one of your reporters: lash out, fight. It’s your job to make reporters look good and feel happy. And no one, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE can make them feel bad, except YOU. Punish all extra-editorial transgressions immediately and severely.
 
If, say, some overweight, droopy-eyed blogger were to refer to one of your reporters as, say, a chickenhead, it is your obligation decree that said blogger “will never appear in the pages of MY FUCKING PAPER except in stories written for the sole purpose of DESTROYING him!” (Decree must be shouted.)
 
This is especially true for a publication such as the Pitch, where you have the freedom to write really nasty things about really nasty people.

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That thing I wrote last week about voting for Mike Burke? Total lie.

It wasn’t a lie at the time I wrote it. But today, as I stepped out of my house and headed for the polling place, I realized that I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Maybe it was the conversation I had this weekend with one of my neighbors. He said he was voting for Sly James because his wife, who used to work right in the middle of everything at City Hall, said Burke is exactly the same kind of leader we’ve always had. He’s always been part of the in-crowd, and the in-crowd is who has made this city the fucked up mess that it is.

Hard to come up with a good response to that one.

So as I strolled down to the old Catholic church where I do my voting, I thought about who I might vote for.

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1. First, a full disclosure: I’m going to vote for Mike Burke.

2. The troglodyte spewed all-caps glee all over his blog Saturday morning about how the Kansas City mayor’s race had “finally, thankfully” gone negative. He posted a YouTube video of an “attack ad” paid for by King Maker James B. Nutter, Sr., on behalf of Burke.

I watched it.

It’s not an attack ad. It’s a simple debate argument leadership style — the only issue the two too-friendly candidates have agreed to debate about.

The pro-Burke video offers a couple of examples of Sly James’s apparent indecisiveness and juxtaposes them to examples of Burke’s supposed decisiveness. Debate 101. All extremely fair.

Of course, it’s no surprise that the sickly cave dweller has sensationalized it.

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I’ve just finished a book called The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson, who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was recently made into a movie starring George Clooney. Ronson’s latest book, which comes out in May, is about “the madness industry,” and it says that a disproportionately high number of psychopaths are in leadership positions.

When I read that, I started thinking about all the characters I got to know during my stint at City Hall and wondering which ones might be dangerously insane.

But first, let’s have a little refresher course in psychology. Psychopathy is a unique condition in the annals of headshrinkdom. It refers to people who “are so deficient in empathy and conscience that they pose a threat to their fellow human beings.”

So who in city politics fits that description?

Über scum political operative Steve Glorioso comes to mind, of course. As does Terry Riley, the bullying councilman for the southeast part of the city.

And the name at the top of the list?

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