Hello Fiends:

Well, it has finally come to this.

Bipartisanship, as you may or may not remember, was at an all-time fever pitch before the November election.

Since another four years of a Republican administration was not something most of us were willing to live through without doing something extremely stupid and destructive, I was in especially vitriolic form -- which in itself was more or less stupid and destructive, in that all of the newspapers I was writing for ended up canning the Dregulator.

But, in truth, it was time to let the Dregulator go.

It was a fine woodshed -- a good place for me to cut my teeth and learn about grownup issues. Behind the scenes, though, most of the papers I wrote for never quite got over the fact that it stopped being a tabloid column, and resented that I got morbidly obsessed with creedly political shite and started quoting more from constitutional law blogs than I did from TMZ.com.

Oh whelllll.

But I like writing about political stuff, so after a certain period in the journalistic penalty box, I will probably figure out a way to channel those rants in a more productive way.

There's something fitting about the fact that the Dregulator ended right before the election, as well, given that the election turned out the way it did. If it didn't, and we were facing Cindy McCain and her Restylane SWAT team of emergency dermatologists entering the White House and installing gold-plated electric swan-boats and tiling the whole West Wing in Delft until it looked like something King Ludwig of Bavaria would have thought of if he were even more gay, more insane, more rich and taking even more Vicodin....

...then you bet your mom's fanny I wouldn't stop writing the Dregulator until they pulled my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard. I'd go down all belligerent and wrong like Charlton Heston.

But actually, I am really very happy about the election of Barack Obama. And this means that the Dregulator is allowed to die in peace.

Eventually, though, I will not be happy with Barack Obama, because this is the way of things. And then, there will be a new column altogether.

Love,

Cintra

--George W. Bush, after winning the 2004 Presidential election.

Mission accomplished! America is, indeed, spent.

The American economy has finally succumbed to its binge of economic drunkorexia: The body was starved, so that the head could get loaded. The head got so high it was cross-eyed, and inevitably plowed the markets into a tree.

Stefan Reyniak, a partner at Raycliff Capital Private Equity in New York, told me, "The American economy is having a near-death experience: It is floating over the table looking down at its own body."

History is full of clever opportunists. One of Rome's more entrepreneurial sorts was a guy called Crassus, who assembled his own fire department from a team of slaves. If your house caught fire, he'd offer to buy it from you for a fraction of its value. If you agreed to sell it to him, he'd put the fire out. If you didn't sell, he'd watch it burn down and tell you what an idiot you were for not selling it to him.

Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury (and Goldman Sachs alumni) appears to have learned from the best.

Some people, apparently haven't been learning much at all, lately.
Look out, John McCain: Your Veep is showing! On CBS, no less:

Katie Couric: Explain to me why [Alaska's proximity to Russia] enhances your foreign policy credentials.

Sarah Palin: Well ... it certainly does. Because ... our ... our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there is Russia...

Katie Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

Sarah Palin: (nodding) We have trade missions back and forth .. .we... we do. It's very important when ... when you consider even national security issues with Russia as...Putin: Where's his head? And ... and ... ahh ... comes into... ah ... the airspace of the United States of America. Wh ... where do they go? It... it's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is... from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation --Russia -- because they are right there. That are right next to our state.

The Couric/Palin interview left many questioned unanswered.

For example: Which designer's swimwear will Governor Palin be wearing in the bikini portion of the election?
And will she be field-dressing a Cossack for the talent portion?
And will she be volunteering the use of her own bilge-pump to help in the Wall Street bailout?

Governor Palin also didn't comment on the recent Army Times announcement that beginning October 1, the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division, "will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North....the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities."

Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald assures us that when the Posse Comitatus Act (the act preventing the government from using the Army against fellow Americans) expires on October 1, the Bush Administration most likely won't use this brigade to shut down the elections and declare martial law. This is heartening news for those of us who have been a little bit nervous about Dick Cheney's failure, so far, to shoot any American college students while in office.

"The point," sayeth Greenwald, "is that the deployment is a very dangerous precedent, quite possibly illegal, and a radical abandonment of an important democratic safeguard. As always with first steps of this sort, the danger lies in how the power can be abused in the future."

The fine print on the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 really brings the abusable bits to life. It basically says that the Chief Executive reserves the right to declare martial law whenever he feels like it -- for any threats, provocations, "incidents" however real or imaginary. This Act was mitigated somewhat in 2008, but the President, as usual, doodled 'signing statements' all over it - which, we must assume, looked like the usual obscene boy's room graffiti drawings.

"Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah 'Evita' Palin," wrote Naomi Wolf. "You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state."

On the upside, financial market regulations are now clamping down with a vengeance again, just like they did after the Great Depression. Perhaps we should think of them as economic rehab.

If Amy Winehouse can get well, then so can America.

Through the choice of his pro-life running-mate, Sarah Palin, John McCain and the GOP have made one point perfectly clear:

This is a single-issue election, and the issue is abortion.

The entire future of America -- our precarious economy, our critical foreign policy -- everything about this election that requires a sensible, grown-up argument with wonky, unemotional, boring facts behind it -- is being thrown under the bus.

The Republicans, in the face of Obama's ascendancy and the indefensibility of their policy decisions in the last eight years, have just pulled a desperation maneuver and hijacked what is perhaps the most important presidential elections in America's history by demoting it to an emotional cat-fight between pro-choice and pro-life women, over the one issue where neither side can be reasonable.

The rest of this election, no matter what is discussed, is essentially brain-dead.

McCain, with one stroke, has tipped all the wavering, undeclared Christians into his own till. This is brilliant political strategy, until you consider the fact that it is horrifically short-sighted. Many taxpayers who aren't conservative Christian Republicans will lose faith in this country, and abandon any hope that the nation will pull out of its current downward spiral. Many will abandon America completely rather than subject themselves and their children to the disastrous aftermath of yet another hair-raisingly corrupt and incompetent Republican administration and its policies. I believe the choice of Sarah Palin is a tacit declaration of war, by the GOP, on secular government, and a declaration of its intentions to let the highest office in the United States serve as a handmaiden to the ambitions of the Christian right.

Sarah Palin represents the ambition of evangelical Christianity to forcefully dominate, and pervert into its own ideological image and likeness, the legislature of a country that was founded on a principal of religious freedom.

John McCain has effectively declared a holy war on Americans whose religions are less dogmatic than that of evangelical Christians. The GOP seeks to put women back in chastity belts: Sarah Palin is their fit-model.

Freedom, like it or not, is synonymous with moral relativism. The whole point of American freedom is that someone else's extreme religion is disallowed from imposing its morality on personal decisions concerning our lifestyles, our sexuality, or our bodies.

We didn't pick this fight: John McCain did; abortion may be the fight, but it isn't the point. The issue at stake is our personal, civil liberties and individual rights -- particularly those of pro-choice women -- which are being directly threatened by the GOP's grasping, rapacious desire to impose a new theocratic authoritarianism on our society.

Christian evangelicals have forced America's sexual IQ to plummet even lower than the value of the American dollar. Do we really want an America where teenage girls are going to die from abortions that, once illegal, will only become an unsafe, underground economy like illegal drugs?
Do we really want our daughters to be forced to flee to liberal, civilized places like Mexico City (where abortions incidentally, are free) to terminate their unwanted pregnancies?

Freedom and hope are the greatest selling-points of America. If America sells out its freedom to Christian religious extremists, the brains of this country will go elsewhere, because freedom will go elsewhere. America will be as hopeless as a fat, poor, pregnant teen -- and just as smart a conversationalist.

Now that America is so deeply in debt, we don't get to make the rules anymore. Our future as a country now relies very uncomfortably on the perception the rest of the world has as to whether or not America will be able to bounce back after an utterly calamitous eight years of faith-based, conservative Republican administration with absolutely no sense of responsible stewardship.

With Barak Obama, there is some actual hope for America -- at least in terms of the perception of America beyond our borders -- to begin a slow, painful recovery. If John McCain and Sarah Palin win, they will accomplish more than the Taliban and al-Qaeda combined in terms of destroying the image of the United States as a free country, and a democracy that protects the civil liberties of individuals.

We cannot afford another administration with religious delusions of moral certainty in the White House. The sorry fact is that John McCain has brought this grudge match into the election booth: the future of America now hangs on the issue of choice. If abortion is made illegal, Liberty, ironically, will die.