"What happened last week was that the Bush administration formally declared a
federal emergency in the District of Columbia.
So what was it? An ice storm? A hurricane?
No, it's the inauguration of his successor. The inauguration is scheduled to make landfall on Tuesday and wreak havoc all night long, as Category Five conga lines buckle highways round town, and emergency busboy crews find themselves overwhelmed as they struggle to clear drained champagne flutes. So the mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, put in a request for more federal money, and, apparently, the easiest way to sluice the cash to him no questions asked was for the president to declare a state of emergency in the District and funnel however many extra gazillions he wants through FEMA – the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"I don't know if anybody's ever done that," said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary."
This is what the military calls "mission creep." You start out with a goal in mind and end up doing something completely different. In this case, declaring a 'federal emergency' was supposed to be just that. An emergency. Incoming hurricane! Terrorist attack! Human sacrifice! Cats and dogs living together! In short, something worthy of being called an 'emergency' at all. But then again, maybe I'm overreacting. Clinton did the same thing for W in 2000. Uh, didn't he? Oh, never mind...
Read the entire article (it's a good read). Here's just a bit more:
"We're now told that the problem with the last New Deal is that it was too
small, so Obama's new New Deal has to be even bigger. That's like telling New
Orleans that the problem is they're not far enough below sea level so they need
to dig deeper. If Washington is now a federal disaster area, it would be nice to
think of Barney Frank and the gang waving from the roof of the Capitol until
they can be evacuated somewhere safe, like one of the outlying South Sandwich
Islands or Charley Rangel's vacation property in the Dominican Republic. But,
alas, Washington is one of those disaster relief cases, where they get the
relief, and the rest of us get the disaster. As the incoming president has said,
this is the worst crisis since …oh, at least the great Vernon, Conn., snowfall
of 1996. To facilitate the stimulus, I urge him to declare every American his
own individual federal disaster area."
