The Permanent Emergency

clipped from www.ocregister.com In just about his last act as president, George W. Bush has declared Washington, D.C., a federal disaster area. "I don't know if anybody's ever done that," said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary. Indeed. One reason why nobody's ever done that before is because a presidential inauguration is not (to be boringly technical about it) an "emergency." It's penciled in well in advance – in this case, so well in advance that for years Democrats have been driving around with "1-20-09" bumper stickers on the back of their Priuses. The metastasization of FEMA teaches several lessons Thus, an itsy-bitsy bit of inconsequential government tinkering on the periphery of the mortgage market expanded to the point where federally mandated home loans to the uncreditworthy came close to collapsing not just the U.S. property market but the global financial system.

RTWT