By CHRIS PACKHAM

· We're getting back to basics. Remember back in January, when Daily Briefs started? It was nothing but a bulleted list of news links with smart-ass commentary. Well, those days are back, and I hope you like your lists with extra bullets, because starting right now, it's all about the news links. You're looking at a whole new old Daily Briefs. More bullets. More links to Yael T. Abouhalkah. Still yet more bullets. Fewer lengthy, digressive stories. But just as many swears. To commemorate our redoubled commitment to brevity and nothing but stuff we read in the newspaper and Yael T. Abouhalkah, click here, or click on this old-school giant logo:

· Giant Uncle Sam parade stilt-walker Mayor Mark Funkhouser and his horrible spouse Gloria Squitiro are clinging tenaciously to their bizarre codependent working relationship in the face of a new ordinance from the City Council regulating volunteer city workers which was obviously specifically designed to force Squitiro out of City Hall. Because they can't codepend over the phone, people, have you ever tried that? It's all of the uncomfortable self-consciousness and none of the fun of phone sex.

So but Funkhouser, according to this post by the very thorough Mr. Yael T. Abouhalkah at The Kansas City Star, is now insisting that Squitiro was never a "volunteer," but rather a "First Lady." Yael cites her latest newsletter, in which she writes, "Just to be clear: I do not 'volunteer' for the City of Kansas City. The title of First Lady was handed to me the moment that my husband was elected Mayor. My only role in his office has been to serve my husband as his personal assistant, so that he can better serve the residents of our city." HAHA, she's just as wrong as she is racially insensitive! Allegedly. I saw that ballot, and it did not say "First Lady" on it anywhere, and if it did, I'd have scratched out Gloria Squitiro and written in Rhonda Chriss Lokeman. You're allowed to line-edit ballots, right? If you initial the changes? Anyway, Yael points out some quotes from the Mayor himself referring to Gloria's voluteer status, as if that's going to make a damn bit of difference, like, OHMYGOD, hoisted by his own hoisterizer, those Funkhousers are so crazy, what's the deal with those two, LADIES, AM I RIGHT?

· From our new segment, JESUS CHRIST, KMBC, YOU WERE THINKING WHAT, EXACTLY?, in which we point out something on the KMBC Website and then say "JESUS CHRIST, KMBC, YOU WERE THINKING WHAT EXACTLY?" This photo and caption appear today on the front page of the KMBC Website:

Presumably, the court allows him to visit the glistening medical waste bags of his body fat on alternate weekends. HAHAHAHA! JESUS CHRIST, KMBC, YOU WERE THINKING WHAT, EXACTLY?

· HAHA, failed Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina totally failed at being a campaign surrogate yesterday by saying that Sarah Palin could never possibly be the CEO of a corporation, which, as I seem to remember the girls saying back in fourth grade quite a bit, "No doy." For being so sexist and dumb and such a bad campaign surrogate, she's not allowed on TV anymore, although she's not getting kicked off Team Centrum Silver, because no way are they a bunch of sexists who install impenetrable glass ceilings over the heads of their surrogates. A source in the McCain campaign says, "Carly will now disappear. Senator McCain was furious." So Fiorina will fail, quietly, from McCain campaign headquarters for a while and really think about what she's done.

· The New York Times says "McCain Laboring to Hit Right Note on the Economy," but I read the first two words in the headline and thought it was going to say "McCain Laboring to Get Up Off the Couch." HAHAHA! Get it? Because he's old and his bones ache! My grandpa used to sound just like the pneumatic brakes on a city bus with all the huffing and panting he did while standing up from the couch. But what the Times actually means is that McCain's been going around like an absent-minded old fellow telling everybody that his "fundamentals" were "sound," and, when challenged, he claimed that "fundamentals" means "people." The poor, poor man doesn't remember what words mean. And did! You! Hear! That John McCain "invented the BlackBerry," a device for extracting "the cybermails" from Al Gore's internet?

· What with the Wall Street troubles, I can't help thinking of John Steinbeck's classic novel Of Mice and Men, because frankly, I've always wanted to have a hulking man-child for a sidekick, to set off my own brilliance like a precious, precious jewel. I came close back in 2002, when the judge sentenced me to 1000 hours of community service. None of the other felons or misdemeanees were slow, but I formed a bond with a wall-eyed convict named Quatro Kilgore. He was 50 years old, just off a five-year stretch for exposing himself to runaway teenage girls at the bus station. Only, because he can't see a damn thing, what he thought was the bus station was actually a catholic church, and what he thought was a runaway teenage girl actually turned out to be a Kansas City vice detective attending Ash Wednesday services.

"Girl, you look crazy good," Quatro said to me the first morning at the Department of Corrections.

"I'm a man," I said.

"Hey, you need some skag, sugar? Make you feel like muthafuckin' Superwoman. Shit make you feel like you can fly, all the way to the damn muthafuckin' Kuiper Belt."

"I'm NOT A WOMAN," I said.

"Shit. I pay three-large for tha Lasic surgery, I still be seein' like Marlee damn Matlin."

"I think Marlee Matlin is deaf."

"Fuck that bitch. And her seein'-eye dog," said Quatro. "What's that say on your baseball cap?"

"It says, 'Over the Hill and Off the Pill.'"

"DAMN! And you ain't a woman? What the hell you wear that for?"

"'Cause it makes me look cool!" Sensing a new friendship, I asked, "What's the Kuiper Belt?"

"Kuiper Belt a band of icy rocks, circles the solar system beyond Neptune. Quatro got hisself a muthafuckin' graduate degree in optics engineerin'. He know so much about telescopes and lenses and shit he could pack it up in a muthafuckin' overnight shipping crate the size of a muthafuckin' refrigerator with your ass's address on the shipping label, and then overnight-deliver that muthafucka right up your ass."

So much for a hulking man-child sidekick. But thanks to alternative sentencing guidelines, I got to know a lot of new and interesting people like the members of conservative think-tanks. Owing to politically creative interpretations of the phrase "Community Service," legal ambiguities surrounding allocation of work to non-profits, and also what with one thing leading to another, we were pulled off the highway rest stop cleaning detail and reassigned to the Trade and Economic Freedom Committee of the conservative Heritage Foundation. This kind of thing happened all the time in the early years of the Bush Administration.

"Goddammit," I said. "Don't they know I'm a liberal? Look at the sticker in my truck window!"

"If you don't shut up," said Quatro, "I'm-a punch you in the head." Then, he magically transformed what was a threat into more of a bold Mission Statement by punching me in the head.

"But -- but I didn't say anything!"

Quatro's rejoinder turned out to be a well-articulated second punch in the head, after which there was apparently a van-ride to the offices of the Heritage Foundation which I don't really remember. We were met by two extremely hot receptionists, but if I covered my left eye with my hand, they resolved into one receptionist. Deploying the ancient art of the double-entendre, I attempted to say, "Are you Della Reese? Because I want to 'touch' you on the ass, 'Angel,'" but I was slurring my words, so instead, I tried to exude my pheromones at her.

"Why is this man flapping his arms?" she asked Quatro.

I started to explain that my pheromone-secreting apocrine glands are located in my armpits, but Quatro pushed me aside. "He's a little slow."

While we waited for our assignment, I spotted the aquarium. Swimming around inside was a Red Oranda, looking all lonely and forlorn and pretty and red, and I knew I had to save it. So while Quatro was getting our assignment for the day, I reached into the aquarium and snatched the fish out, and hid it in my pocket.

The Heritage Foundation issued us orange reflective safety vests and copies of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. We were tasked with the conceptual heavy-lifting for a policy brief on new market opportunities for improving worker productivity. We broke down the day's work into two loads: Quatro would write up a theoretical precis, and because my ability to speak was now limited to Subject-Verb word pairings, I would draw the pictures for our PowerPoint presentation.

At the end of the day, the entire Trade and Economic Freedom Committee gathered in a conference room. Quatro started talking about the disincentives of corporate taxes, which, on the big screen, I illustrated with the PowerPoint drawings I'd prepared.

"Um —why does your presentation include — what is that?" asked a total Professor Plum-looking guy at the head of the table.

"It's a MONSTER! Driving a FUNNY-CAR!" I said. The guy stared at my "OVER THE HILL AND OFF THE PILL" baseball cap with something like dawning realization. I could tell Quatro was aerially surveying my skull for an appropriate landing site for his fist.

"Somebody smells like dead fish," said the receptionist lady.

I shoved the fist containing Li'l Precious Red Sovine under my leg.

"What you got in your hand?" asked Quatro in a not-friendly voice.

"Li'l Precious Red Sov — nothing," I said.

"You got a fish?" Quatro held his hand out. "Give me the fish, Chris."

I handed it over, and Quatro said, "I want you to look out there at the river, Chris. Someday, you and I will have a farm. And on that farm, I'm a punch you in the head!" And he punched me in the head.

"You hadda do it, Quatro," said our community service supervisor.