he Bush Administration sighed a whistle of relief this week with the news that Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US soldier slain in Iraq who had been standing vigil outside the president's Texas ranch for over two weeks, had finally gone home to California to care for her ailing mother.

"Clearly, the creator has made his will known," Bush intoned smugly, as lightning crackled in the background and the lights inside the president's Crawford, Texas ranch dimmed momentarily.

Sheehan had drawn considerable national media attention to her vigil in recent weeks, becoming the focal point for criticism of the president's handling of the war in Iraq and making a tidy sum selling lemonade to the massive news crews that had assembled. But her mother's recent stroke came hot on the heels of news that Sheehan's husband of 28 years had filed for divorce, causing some religious nuts and the president of the United States to suggest that God doesn't like her.

"The Lord works in mysterious ways," philosophized Bush further, apparently suggesting that Jesus doles out strokes like some kind of celestial blackjack dealer.

When asked if he worried that his comments might be construed as insensitive, the president grew tense for a moment. "I didn't say 'bitch' again, did I? You heard me wrong; I meant 'beavered.' 'Bereavered.' You know, one of them fitty cent words," explained Bush, brushing a dozen locusts off his ink blotter.

Critics have taken Bush to task for refusing to meet with Sheehan, who wanted to ask Bush what her son had died to accomplish. With his approval numbers dropping like a concrete blimp, the president opted to change his Sheehan-dealing strategy from his morning ritual of randomly firing his shotgun in the air while shouting "Bitch, get offa my lawn!" to the more politically expedient tactic of ignoring her completely.

This required having a tunnel dug so Bush could exit his Texas ranch without passing by the depressing protestors camped out front.

"It was great, just like The Great Escape," reminisced Bush, who took no part in the digging of the tunnel but did buy a six-pack of lite beer for the three itinerant laborers who survived the tunnel's construction and frequent cave-ins.

However, neither the president's hard-to-get act, nor sending his sloppy drunk brother to drive his pickup truck over roadside memorial crosses in the middle of the night, did anything to shake Sheehan's resolve. Meanwhile, frequent unexplained events at the President's ranch in the last week, including blood flowing from the faucets, the Bush twins coming down with catastrophic diarrhea, and the failure of the sun to rise at all on Saturday has some religious scholars and Christians who have actually read the bible questioning if God really is on Bush's side this time.

But before the commune could address this issue with the president, the Secret Service discovered we'd cornered Bush for a candid in-pantry interview, sans handlers, and burst in with guns drawn. Thankfully for the cause of news, this reporter was able to sneak out with the story's notes inside a false leg, which drew surprisingly little scrutiny in spite of the low number of three-legged reporters in Texas.

ndiana University graduate student Ian Williams made headlines this week after receiving a $4 million grant from the Center for Cultural Studies to untangle the fascinatingly twisted web of rumors surrounding the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes romance. While some have called the grant ludicrously frivolous, many others expressed relief that somebody else would be figuring this crazy shit out for them.

"Thank God," sighed IU Professor Richard Luxborough. "I got so confused thinking about this last week I almost threw up. Is he gay? Are they really in love? And what's with that crazy motherfucker jumping all over the couch like that? Every answer just spawns a hundred new questions. I wish Ian the best in his research; I think his quantum physics minor is really going to be put to the test on this one."

"Any high school kid who wrote their term paper on this topic knows the basics," explained a cocky Williams, well versed in TomKat lore thanks to the celebrity blog/Access Hollywood/ street-level trash talk research he did in preparing his grant proposal. "Tom was having a steamy homo affair with Rob Thomas, Matchbox-20's bisexual lead singer, only to be caught with his pants down by Rob's wife Marisol. She was bought off by Cruise for over $10 million and the promise that she'd never have to listen to Matchbox-20 again. But Cruise's people still had to act fast and get Cruise's name stamped on some vagina before another damaging gay rumor hit the street."

"And of course that's where Katie comes in," continued Williams. "But what most high-schoolers don't know, unless they read my blog, is that Katie wasn't the first choice of Tom's people. She wasn't Tom's first choice either, but he wanted Antonio Banderas so that's neither here nor there. Tom's people made up a list of B-list actresses who might jump at the chance to boost their careers and pick up a little coin via a sham fag-hag wedding. Number one on their list was Jessica Alba, but they couldn't get through to her without resorting to 'stamp once for yes' communication tricks. Next they wanted Jennifer Garner, but she had this weird Ben Affleck smell on her that kept making Tom sneeze."

"So the mantle fell to Lindsay Lohan," Williams elaborated, drawing a crowd of eager eavesdroppers. "But then it turned out she'd lost so much weight recently that when she turns sideways she almost disappears, like some weird X-Files villain, and that was freaking Tom out at night. Scarlett Johansson seemed like a safe bet after that, but then Tom started talking about Scientology and she ran like a startled deer, leading to an unfortunate but action-packed escape sequence, some of the footage from which reportedly is going to turn up in this summer's The Island. Sofia Vergara was next on the list, followed by Kate Bosworth, but Tom didn't know who either of them was, and this got him all excited about being gal-pals with Sofia Coppola or possibly hooking up with former football stud Brian Bosworth, so they wisely dropped both of those. Finally it fell to poor little Katie, who cashed in at $5 million for five years with the contract stipulation that she'll never, ever have to see Cruise's penis, which is a better deal than either of Michael Jackson's wives ever got."

"And Katie's actually been playing the role fairly well," raved Williams. "That story about her growing up with a Tom Cruise poster on her wall was brilliant." According to Williams, Holmes' childhood bedroom also featured posters of the rock band Guns 'N' Roses and the horse from The Black Stallion, which doesn't bode well for Holmes' future relationships should the marriage pact with Cruise ever fall victim to downsizing.

Strange as the story may seem to normal humans, veteran rumor-mongers find it excitingly plausible.

"Fans have been in denial of Cruise's gayness ever since Top Gun," gushed legendary New York gossip columnist Dr. Dish. "Quentin Tarantino was right, that movie was gay on fire. I don't care how many times he plays some dude driving a minivan in some movie now; I ain't buying it after that one. Forget homoerotic overtones, that thing was turned up to Gay 11. That thing was all ate up with gayness."

Dr. Dish also points to persistent rumors that Cruise's relationships with Nichole Kidman and Penelope Cruz were both contractual affairs, providing the then-obscure actresses with money, a career boost and lavish lifestyles while acting as a smokescreen for Cruise's long-term relationship with an Asian American Airlines pilot he has stashed away in Chicago. And we mean the pilot is Asian, not that there's a new airline called Asian-American Airlines. Weird.

Though only slightly less convoluted than the saga of Area 51, the TomKat rumors would help explain the speed of the couple's courtship, as well as Cruise's frenzied and bizarre attempts to keep his recent engagement in the headlines. Veteran rumor-whores also recognize a familiar pattern in the Church of Scientology's involvement, since the red hot rumor of the mid-90's was that church wranglers were working overtime to conceal long-time church member John Travolta's hyper-promiscuous gayness.

"That's outside my area of expertise," Williams said when asked for the scoop on the Travolta rumor. "I did my undergrad work on Richard Gere, which frankly doesn't do me a hell of a lot of good now."

You know what pisses me off? These ads you see on TV for some starving children's charity in Oswego or some place, where they say that $2.90 a day can buy you a coffee, donut and a newspaper, or you can feed an entire family in Oswego. To which I say, well yeah, but what about my donut? That shit is delicious. If I feed a family in Oswego, are they then going to turn around and mail me a donut? And how long does that shit take? I'm hungry now dammit, getting a donut from FedEx in the middle of a steak dinner I'm eating next week isn't going to do me a whole hell of a lot of good. These charity boneheads have really failed to think through the details.

And what in the hell are they feeding those Oswegans for $2.90? McDonald's? Thanks, but the U.S. doesn't need any more foreigners pissed off at us like that. Even if we're feeding them Ramen noodles, that's still pretty rough. You can only make it for about three days on that stuff before you start dropping ass like a Play-Doh Crazy Spaghetti Factory.

Now if you tell me they're eating something good for that $2.90, then you've got my attention. I want a slice of that action. I haven't done the math recently, but I'm pretty sure I spend way more than $2.90 a day on food. And I don't even have any kids, or a wife siphoning off $2 of my per diem so she can buy some of that organic beeswax lip balm. You ever try eating on 90 cents a day? Well big spender, I hope you like Juicy Fruit.

I even called one of these places and told them I'd sponsor some poor motherfuckers out there in the Congo if they'd give me the hook-up on some of this cheap grub. I figured, if I'm getting 30 cent steak dinners and lobster bisque for 99 cents, I can afford to carry some freeloading Ethiopians as part of my overhead. What the hell, I've never been a selfish guy. Get on the Mitch Kroeger gravy train, you skinny fuckers.

You know what they said to me? Nothing. I mean they hung up like I had just propositioned them for phone sex. Wake up, charity assholes, that was like two weeks ago! Now I'm calling with a business proposition. No wonder you guys are on TV begging for handouts, you don't have any idea how to run a business.

My solution? Well, for one thing, I'm not one of these conservative assholes who's going to look a starving Ethiopian in the eye and tell him to go get a job and buy his own food. That's bullshit: jobs suck a nut. I would, however, suggest that maybe he should grow a pair and go kill himself a lion. Lions are good eatin', for one thing, and last time I checked they're pretty huge. Kill one of those things and you're going to be ass-deep in lion steaks for the foreseeable future. You might even be able to sell some of the less desirable cuts to your fellow villagers or trade the gonads or the gizzard for some A1 sauce and baked potatoes, to make a real meal of it.

Now don't get started on me about how some skinny Ethiopian dude, tired from weeks of not eating, is supposed to kill a big scary-ass lion. For one thing, if he's really that skinny, the lion doesn't pose any real threat since he can just slip between its teeth like dental floss. But even if he's not down to Kate Moss starvation levels quite yet, it's not like we're living in 400 B.C. here. Lions may be big and mean, but they still get run over by a Jeep just like anything else. And I know that not every starving Ethiopian villager owns his own Jeep, I'm not stupid. But that doesn't mean he can't borrow one. He wouldn't even need it that long, maybe thirty seconds or so. And what kind of asshole wouldn't lend a starving Ethiopian his car for thirty seconds? You should be ashamed of yourself, bud.

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