Glorioso Links Funk, Darla Jaye to Arizona Shooting

Professional provocateur and Jim Rowland backer Steve Glorioso threw a perverse note into Mayor Mark Funkhouser's State of the City address at the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday.  As the Kansas City Star noted, Funk "talked about tough decisions he made to improve the city’s finances, efforts to make the city safer, neighborhood improvements and his own frugal nature."  But Glorioso, in full demagogic mode, blamed the shooting on right-wing  talk radio shows and wondered why, during his frequent appearance on local shows like Darla Jaye's on KMBZ, Funkhouser did not challenge the hosts to change their imagined ways. Never mind that Glorioso himself once hosted a highly charged talk radio show or that the Arizona shooter was a left wing pot head who burned American flags and read the Communist Manifesto.  For his part, Funkhouser argued that both sides were guilty of overheated rhetoric--he experienced his own series of death threats after appointing a conservative to the Park Board--and asked for bi-partisan sanity, a state of mind with which Mr. Glorioso has little familiarity.