It's not just the fag-haters, creationists, pro-lifers and bigots who are happy Bush managed to get himself another term. The trained assassins are smiling now, too, as is evident in the headline splashed across the title page of the post-election newsletter put out by Blackwater USA, a privately owned company that rents out mercenaries to do a government's killing.

"BUSH WINS ANOTHER FOUR YEARS!! HOOYAH!!" may seem a strange sentiment from a company whose employees have been beheaded and brutally slaughtered, their bodies mutilated and hung over the Euphrates River, but with a 600 per cent growth in the past 18 months, it's clear Blackwater prefers to rate success in dollars rather than lives. The North Carolina-based mercenary firm won a $21-millon (U.S.) contract to protect Paul Bremer in the early days of the Iraq invasion, and has since picked up several more high-dollar contracts. So fecund is business these days that Blackwater recently opened new offices in Baghdad, where they're sure to make a killing.

» Scott Saxon