The television tells me no one has any money and I believe them because they play me a particularly persuasive montage of FOR SALE signs and deserted malls and confused-looking homeless people. This is the first recession (or worse?) brought to you with FULL TEAM COVERAGE — we can watch it live, in hi-definition, every minute of every day. It’s like the Olympics but with an exponentially longer, yet untraceable tape delay. We can watch banks turn away outstretched hands, bankrupt auto executives weep in $XXXX suits, foreclosed houses overrun with tumbleweeds and bobcats and fat Midwestern-looking factory workers moving what appear to be levers.

Prominent TV commercial actor and occasional swimmer Michael Phelps publicly apologized Sunday for smoking weed. Phelps was compelled to apologize not because he ripped his first bowl and felt just oh-so awful afterwards, but because some British newspaper published a photo of him smoking out of a bong. As it turns out, weed-smoking swimmers — at least unapologetic ones — lack the ability to sell inappropriate beachwear to old, fat Europeans.

I know it’s Day One — or maybe Day Two, who knows? — and we should be tapering the celebration and demanding that the Big O get rolling down that bold new course he so adamantly promised us. But I’ve been waiting for eight long years and I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to recede into soberness just hours after watching honor and dignity finally and dramatically be restored to the White House. I think a star-studded concert in the foreground of a national monument is in order!

Before most of us woke up on Black Friday, maybe even before some of us went to sleep, a maintenance worker at a Long Island Wal-Mart had been trampled to death, his body identified, and the Supercenter nearly cleaned up. Two hours earlier a mob of shoppers smashed through the front-doors and flooded the store in search of televisions and vacuum cleaners and digital cameras and marked down Kung Fu Panda DVDs. 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour, a temp worker from Queens, found himself staring down the barrel of the desperate mob of slobbering mommies and daddies and sons and daughters poised to unleash their savage fury on anything standing in their way. And that’s what happened.

I’ve never understood the victim-complex gun owners inflict on themselves. Politicians of both parties pander to them shamelessly, assuring them in the condescending tone of a mother to her toddler that the big bad government would never take away their guns. We celebrate hunting as a fundamental American tradition on par with setting off 4th of July fireworks or mumbling the Pledge of Allegiance everyday before class. It’s as if shooting, skinning and bloodletting an animal for sport and going out in the backyard to throw the old baseball around with dad are qualitatively equivalent. There are over 200 million guns in this country. Gun ownership is roundly accepted.

The soon to be former president, reduced to a punch line, an abstraction McCain ducked and Obama abused, slithers back to Crawford in tatters this January. Lost in the dust storm of Obama and his many millions of supporters stampeding toward Washington to reclaim a country they once loved is the departure of the bumbling Texan, our president, George W. Bush.

Finally, the end. Away with the destroyer of freedom and humility and the virtuous America. Be gone, creator of chaos and starvation and shame. The day is here at long last. The king is dead! Rejoice!

As someone who owns pretty much everything Radiohead has ever recorded and reads a lot of David Foster Wallace and owns an unnecessary number of plain black t-shirts I feel obligated to roll my eyes at MTV with that same hipster condescension that makes the disinterested smokers outside Rand Hall so insufferable. This column should be 900 words of such eye rolling at the cable giant. The words “shallow,” “superficial,” and “lacking substance” should figure prominently. There should be a significant amount of whining. A healthy helping of nostalgia for the good ol’ days when the network was anti-establishment and cutting-edge and all those attractive little fictions associated with the golden age of MTV.

It’s sad, almost disgraceful. The Philadelphia Phillies are a massive commercial product carefully constructed by a collective of cheerless millionaires. They are sanded and polished to appeal to sheepish consumers like me who will pay top dollar to feel a part of something. Everything from of the shape of the P on their hats to the volume with which the neon Liberty Bell sitting atop their home park rings out after a homerun disappears into the mash of elated loyalists has been researched and focused-grouped to align with my economic predispositions. But as Chase Utley walks to the plate — his smooth strut stiffened by a hip injury he refuses to acknowledge — my position is not that of the consumer but of an active participant.

Like the vast majority of Americans I have no idea why the economy crumbles before our eyes. It has something to do with bundling mortgages though. Something to do with “securitization” and risky loans and “collateralized debt obligations” and stuff. Apparently cheap foreign capital looking for yields was involved.

If I had any clue what these explanations meant I’m sure they’d be incredibly useful. But to America and me an I-banker sounds like one of the dozen useless applications that cause my MacBook Pro to cost two grand. I thought the Lehman Brothers made a series of pornos featuring busty blonde twins. I wouldn’t know who Hank Paulson was if he walked into my dorm room dressed as the Monopoly Man holding a sign that said, “I’m Hank Paulson.”

“Sarah Palin: Babe-raham Lincoln,” says a t-shirt featuring a dated beauty shot of the Alaskan Governor. Alas the phrase of Wayne’s World fame seems to have some application due to the thunderous arrival of former pageant queen and current Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

For those of you unfamiliar with Palin, she’s the down-home Jesus freak, corrupt Governor of Alaska who gives her kids dog names and thinks global warming isn’t man-made and believes the Iraq War is a “task from God” and could very well be running your country in the coming months.

But the shirt says she’s Abe Lincoln with boobs.