If your holiday shopping this season finds you in a bookstore, ask for the section on presidential history and take a peek. I'll hazard a guess you'll find literally hundreds of works of presidential history, from the scholarly tomes with hundreds of footnotes to the downright silly works on presidential pets.

Now, take a moment and imagine it's 2033, and you're looking for a nice downloadable e-book history of the Clinton or Bush presidency.

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

- Article VI, U.S. Constitution

Growing up in the 1960s, I saw firsthand the religious bigotry that John F. Kennedy encountered over his Catholic faith.

While Ben Cohen's and Jerry Greenfield's goal of getting Iowa voters to pick a candidate in the upcoming caucus that will pledge to shift money from the Pentagon's discretionary budget towards domestic initiatives appears, at first glance, to be a noble effort towards ending unnecessary spending on defense programs that are no longer useful, one has to question how serious Cohen and Greenfield are about making these cuts a reality. (See "Guns and Butter: Can the Ben & Jerry's Founders Change Federal Spending Priorities?", River Cities' Reader issue #655.)

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.