Every wannabe recipient of Hillarycare or Socialized Medicine or Republican FedMed Lite or Universal Health Slavery or whatever plan du jour the powercrats are peddling with the promise that everyone can have free medical care at the expense of everyone else needs to study the text below.

New Orleans has been trashed by a trio of disasters since 2005.

The first, of course, was the costliest and one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history, which bitch-slapped the Big Easy upside the head and made every mama-to-be forget about ever naming a girlchild Katrina.

The second calamity was man-made: The levees broke. The federally built levees in the system burst asunder in more than 50 places. Expert testimony before Senate committeecrats included this: "Most of the flooding of New Orleans was due to man's follies." The Army Corps of Engineers eventually fessed up that their levee-building stunk.

The third disaster was also man-made: The bureaubrains from FEMA responded.

Is "free" too much to pay for online music? In October, the critically acclaimed group of Internet entrepreneurs known as Radiohead released its latest album, In Rainbows, in digital format and invited fans to download it from its Web site. The price? The completion of a registration form, plus whatever you feel like paying. Five dollars? Great! Zero? That's fine, too.

In an information age when we're required to hand over confidential information to make a purchase, drive a car, or visit a doctor's office, our privacy is being relegated to the junk heap of antiquated, obsolete ideas. Nowhere is this more evident than in the telecommunications industry, where technological breakthroughs that add convenience to our lives are simultaneously giving corporations and government agencies almost unlimited access to our most private moments.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the central statistic the federal government uses to calculate inflation. The CPI is a statistic used by the government to track the cost of goods and services. Beginning with the Jimmy "I will never lie to you" Carter administration, food and energy were removed from the CPI because of the volatility in pricing of these items, but that has since been extended to include anything that reflects unstable or volatile pricing. This was done because this volatility in pricing interfered with long-range projections concerning inflation.