Daily vitriol

"Caltech really needed something to get behind," said physics major Erica Nicole Eber, apparently not making a witty pun about her butt because she's like, studying physics or something and is hence entirely devoid of irony or sex. "When you go to basketball games when we're not cheering, it's so quiet you can hear the players spit," which is a charming thing to say. The elite school's original cheer squad disappeared along with their football team in the 1970s, as well it should have. Eber founded the new squad two years ago to bring some enthusiasm back to campus, along with bouncy skirts and annoying perkiness. But in March of last year, dressed in white and orange uniforms decorated with Caltech's beaver mascot, the squad won first place in the Division II Co-Ed/Jr. College category at the Cheerleaders of America West Coast Open competition in Irvine, beating out the CalPoly Sloths in front of a roaring crowd of roughly 27 semi-drunk parents and a handful of senior citizens bussed in from the nearby rest home who were told they were going to see Regis and who became terribly frightened...

Doughy overlord Dick Cheney jokes with Jay Leno about hiding in his undisclosed location like a hairless-cat-stroking, thinly veiled fearmongering puppeteer. Defense Secretary and reputed crocodile Donald H. Rumsfeld chuckles as David Letterman's mom urges him to "put the hammer" on Osama bin Laden because isn't that so funny and cute and never mind the bile and the hate. First Lady and noted hollow mannequin/useless prop Laura Bush, who is about as compelling as a sack of wet lima beans, made light of the president's tussle with a pretzel when she appeared on Leno's "Tonight Show"; he's practicing "safe snacks" now, she cracked, in a weak joke carefully scripted three weeks ago by 16 different Shrub handlers. And Secretary of State Colin Powell fielded questions on MTV, upsetting some conservatives when he endorsed condoms for sexually active young people, as opposed to the usual massive guilt and back-alley abortions and a lifetime of sexual misinformation and angst and dysfunction, which is just about the only mildly independent thought the administration allows him nowadays, given how he's been almost entirely castrated by the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft Triumvirate O' Sneering Pain.