NEW ORLEANS, LA Carnival 2006...As a mild sociopath with a fear of crowds and parades, I had been awaiting this event with a mixture of childlike anticipation and abject terror. Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, marks the end of the revelry that is the month of February, and the last day before the Catholic holiday of Lent. While Carnival is celebrated all over the world, no city does it with quite the same degree of lewd abandon as does New Orleans. This yearly celebration of all things sensual and insane normally attracts tens of thousands of visitors from all over the country as well as bringing out the entire local community; indeed, nearly everyone in the city spends all year planning and anticipating the Month of February, preparing costumes, planning drinking routes, collecting and ordering beads and other “throws”...however, this Mardi Gras also marked the six month anniversary of the devastation visited upon the Gulf Coast by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Anticipation was tempered by the ongoing stress of recovery, with most of the city still finding refuge in other cities and much of the area completely destroyed; indeed, both city

Dear Free Press Editor,

This Spring the U.S. Senate will bring to the floor what could accurately be called the "Revive Feudalism Bill" or the "Paris Hilton Tax Relief Act of 2006." It is likely the estate tax will be eliminated or gutted. Bush tax adviser Grover Norquist has said that if their side wins on this issue- over time-  they will win on all the issues.

Currently the first $2 million are exempted and the tax rate above that level is 45%. A compromise is likely to push up the exemption level but more importantly decrease the tax rate to 15%. This will amount to a windfall for the heirs of tycoons. Wealth will stay in the same hands creating a class of ruling family dynasties.

Some of the same people who say low-income single mothers ought to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, have no qualms about setting up their children with a portfolio to manage poolside. Clearly, lower taxes on wealth will cause higher taxes on work and the starving of the New Deal. G.O.P. stands for Greedy One Percent.

As each new season brings more waves of higher-tech digital products, I often think of Mark Twain. Along with being a brilliant writer, he was also an ill-fated investor -- fascinated with the latest technical innovations, including the strides toward functional typewriters and typesetting equipment as the 19th century neared its close.

Twain would have marveled at the standard PC that we take for granted now. But what would he have made of the intrusiveness of present-day media technology -- let alone its recurring content?

It’s getting harder and harder to drive out of cell-phone range -- that is, if you really want to. And judging from scenes at countless remote locations, many people would rather not forfeit 24/7 phone access for conversations that involuntary eavesdroppers hear half of. (Virtually always, it seems, the more boring half.)

These days, mainstream media fascination with blogs and the bloggers who love them often seems to assume that the very use of the Internet enhances the content or style of what has been written. It’s a seductive cyber-fantasy. Speed is useful, and so are hyperlinks and visuals-on-demand,

Anniversaries are forced remembrances of events our busy lives otherwise leave forgotten. Past events rush forward through time to spend one day with us in the present, incessantly tapping our shoulders and asking: Remember me? Remember what happened on my day, and what has happened since because of me?

The third anniversary of the aerial “shock and awe” campaign that launched the U.S led war on Iraq will tap our shoulders this month. It will remind us that a fourth year of war stands eager to follow the same terrible path down which this country has been misled for three. War, such as it is, always stands ready and willing, always prepared to gather up its victims from the land of the living, and set them down in their early graves.

In its coverage Thursday of the latest White House Katrina scandal, the New York Times has unbelievably missed the entire main story that President Bush lied to Americans when, four days after the Hurricane hit, he declared on ABC's Good Morning America that"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." But a new videotape released Wednesday by the Associated Press clearly shows the president, along with Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, being warned the day before the storm struck that the levees in fact were in serious jeopardy. Yet the Times' story makes absolutely no mention of this contradiction. In fact, its opening paragraph is so way off the mark as to almost exonerate the Bushies over their inept response to the storm:

"A newly released transcript of a government videoconference shows that hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal and state officials did not know that the levees in New Orleans were failing and were cautiously congratulating one another on the government response."