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I hadn’t smoked pot in more than a year, but why not? I’d just packed up and dragged everything I own 1,700 miles from Minneapolis to Seattle. Quite a daring move. I was feeling like Lewis and Clark in one, Amelia Earhart, a pirate even. A little marijuana? Peee-shaw. I huffed a huge drag. Unfortunately for me, the dope in Seattle is nothing like the dope in Minneapolis. I found myself embarking upon one of those harrowing journeys of acute self-examination.

Seattle sits just two hours from the border of British Columbia, where some of the most potent marijuana in the world is grown indoors with wicked scientific precision. “B.C. Bud,” as it’s known in these parts, shimmers with purple resin crystals and boasts a punch twice as lethal as that of competing varieties from northern California and Oregon, six times that of common Colombian and Mexican imports. The pot from our unassuming, aw-shucks neighbors to the north contains 30 percent THC, while bud from Mexico contains somewhere around 5. It’s like a revenge or something.

Penalties in Canada are low. Enforcement is laughable. One unit of the B.C. drug squad drives around in a recycled van with duct tape over whatever logo was once on its side. And despite America’s most hearty efforts, smuggling across the border (where price and demand immediately skyrocket) is pretty easy. This part of the world has too much water, too many islands, miles of undeveloped wilderness. The stuff comes across in duffel bags, trucks, car trunks, on snowmobiles and dog sleds, by boat, sea kayak, and jet ski.

The buzz felt great for the first half hour. Real jokey. I noted sharp ironies, fielded puns of modest hilarity, all the while looking into everything. Music sounded extra melodic. Apples with peanut butter tasted like ambrosia. This is so much better than drinking, I thought. On pot you just sit around munching and contemplating beauty. You don’t hang out the car window whacking mailboxes with a broom handle. I flipped through my CDs and came up with the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me.

The music from home played. “Alex Chilton,” “Shooting Dirty Pool,” “Skyway.” I perched on a plaid, garage-sale rocker and stared out the window. It had rained the day before. The sky was gray, streaked with hopeful wisps of almost–blue. I considered Seattle’s soggy climate, its long darknesses and lush, overgrown greenery. Moss clumps stuck to roofing like cheese. Frogs croaking in the fog. The culture here is centrifugal, remote, the best effort from the last outpost. Ideas don’t escape, they only spin round and round beneath thick cloud cover. People here don’t have children. They don’t go to church. They don’t protest injustice. They read books, drink espresso, make art, cut their bangs too short, and smoke super-bionic pot. Craziness like seeds in fertile ground.

What am I doing here? Suddenly, with broiling romanticism, I longed for Leinenkugel’s, Liquor Lyle’s, and Dulano’s Pizza. Unironic institutions. How many people did I know in Seattle anyway? Three? Four? I was severely out of context. I’d abandoned friends I’d known since high school. With a hearty laugh, I’d gone. Off to find a new life. Now I felt like a woman lost. I thought, maybe who you are isn’t really up to your head and heart, but the collection of people, places, and things that surround you. The liquor store where you first bought beer underage. The girlfriend who fell off the dock in her lawnchair, who comforted while you bawled over some lousy guy. And what about mom? She was getting on in years. Smoked like a chimney. I hadn’t spent enough quality time with her. I pictured myself touching down at Minneapolis-St. Paul International just as the undertaker arranged roses around her casket. My eyes stung, urging tears. I’d be the stranger with all the regrets.

Then I heard it, the deep timbre of a boat horn wafting up the hill from the Sound. It shook my insides like a passionate kiss. You know, I thought, there is a charm to this place. I began to laugh. The creeping, tentacled psychosis withdrew. The black veil flipped up like a window shade. Back to Lewis and Clark and all that.

Recently, I attended a Paul Westerberg in-store performance at a Seattle record store, his first show in six years. I stood with 600 or so other fans as he played songs from his new album, Stereo. “No day is safe from thoughts of you leaving. Marriage License. I can’t help thinking. It’s all for nothing. You’re so unholy. Up in the stars now, she’s getting lonely.” It sounded like the old stuff. Paul looked handsome. He felt like home. I peered about the room, picking out the Minnesotans by their unconcerned demeanors. By their bangs of normal length. Rugged individualists. Smokers of mild pot.

There are days when Morrill Hall, the main administrative building at the U of M, seems like a beehive of activity, and other days, usually in the summer, when it seems like a morgue. On the day President Mark Yudof announced he would be leaving for Texas, it was both: A solemn mood hung over a buzz of endless speculation. Was he really leaving for personal reasons? Who would succeed him? How would a number of top vacancies in the administration be filled?

The next day the newspapers trumped TV coverage in capturing the moment, with close-ups of Yudof, his eyelids red and his face wan, delivering the results of what had clearly been a difficult decision. At a private meeting with staff earlier in the day, he had been choked up to the point where he could barely speak, but by the time of his press conference he was somber and philosophical. In his departure, there was no underlying anger for the governor or the Legislature. Even when someone reminded him of the barrels of ink outraged sports writers had spilled on him, he only seemed bemused. A consensus among the drones at Morrill Hall formed quickly. Yudof was being straight with people. In going to Texas, he was truly going home. For the delicate ego of this state, which has elevated the notion of its high quality of life to a near-religious concept, there was at least some solace in the fact that Yudof’s decision was a personal one.

But other uncomfortable questions remained: Didn’t professionals who come to Minnesota end up wanting to stay here because of the people, the arts, the commitment to education—remember Wendell with the walleye on the cover of Time? And now the Mary Tyler Moore statue? Why did it have to be Texas, a state whose braggadocio is the inverse of Minnesota’s quiet smugness; Texas, which took away the state’s professional hockey team a few years ago and may one day take its football team? Moving to New York, Washington, D.C., or California might have been understandable. Iowa or Wisconsin unthinkable. Texas was somewhere in between, but still a hard decision to swallow.

People who worked with him marveled at his ability to charm audiences inside and outside the University. Some of his persuasiveness arose from genuine charisma, or some kind of leadership juju we don’t pretend to understand. But we attribute much of Minnesotans’ goodwill toward Yudof to the fact that the difference between the public and the private man was never really that great. You could see that in his refusal to rehearse for his speeches, which sometimes drove his staff crazy. The logic was never articulated, but we suspect he balked at rehearsing when he was just going to be himself in front of an audience. Why practice being himself?

For five years Yudof was genuinely committed to the enterprise of the University, to its students, to its role as an intellectual center for the state, and to its improvement. Minnesotans could sense that. There was a level of personal accountability for the large and unwieldy institution he had taken on that really connected with people. In ways his recent predecessors had not, he became the face of the University of Minnesota. But university presidents can’t serve that role indefinitely. The job is too taxing and the enemies gradually accumulate over the years. Although we wish Mark Yudof had given Minnesota another two or three years, only the Gopher lives forever.

…and clean up the beer bottles and ashtrays?

We don’t feel inclined to dog pile on our departing governor, although we’re wondering whether he’ll still make his Huck Finn run down the Mighty Miss on one of his beloved jet skis. Frankly, we’re not surprised that he’s pulling the plug on a second term. The word from inside the compound was that first lady Terry was less than thrilled with the job. We’ve never been convinced that Jesse wanted the job either—surely not if it meant having to hobnob on the blower all day with pasty pipsqueaks from backwaters like Kasota, Backus, and East Grand Forks. Jesse struggled with public speaking, too, especially when it involved having to engage others in serious dialogue about the issues. It was so much less complicated when it was just him and a microphone and the dense, excitable listenership of KSTP radio.

No, Jesse Ventura wanted the job for one reason: Jesse. He was, is, and shall remain a celebrity. And today he’s bigger than he’s ever been. You think he could have acted his way off the B-list to the top of the A-list in the past four years? You think a cameo in Predator X would have landed him on the cover of Time?

We have fond memories. Jesse was possibly the most surprised person on the planet when he became Minnesota’s 38th governor. We thought we saw his jeans riding a little lower when final election returns actually came in that night so long ago. For once, he was at a loss for words of any length. To be sure, Jesse Ventura was a refreshing half-nelson in the milquetoast realm of Minnesota politics. But we were distracted by his constant gripe—a celebrity’s gripe, textbook—that others would profit from his name and likeness, and he spent a lot of time trying to prevent that kind of dough from slipping through his own fingers.

The other complaint that started to trip so easily off Ventura’s tongue in recent months was also straight out of the celebrity operator’s manual—that his family was entitled to its privacy. But this is one of the great tradeoffs of fame, whether you’re leading a state government or guest-starring in a Schwarzenegger flick. The cost of celebrity is privacy, and it’s a full-time gig. If Ventura wanted to enjoy his millions in peace, perhaps he should have been a brain surgeon. Then again, he was accustomed to hunting man, not serving him. Anonymity would be the death of The Body.

The problem with celebrities, of course, is that they so rarely know when to bow out of the limelight, and never do it gracefully. They tend to hang around in smoky backrooms and crappy straight-to-video releases, comparing their miniscule Q-ratings against the great totem pole of superstardom—the one with Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts up on top.

The truth is that Ventura is not bowing out of celebrity at all. On the contrary, he’s losing the annoying day job, with a resume that’s a lot longer than it was four years ago. It’s padded not with memorable political achievements, but with major media appearances. Just so, will anyone read it if it doesn’t arrive on the State of Minnesota’s letterhead? Perhaps the biggest surprise is yet to come for Ventura. Will Tim Russert, David Letterman, and Hugh Hefner still come calling when he’s no longer putting the “guber” back in “gubernatorial?”

You love them or you hate them. But would you lose your career over them, the way Kris Hasskamp did? The Rake revisits the tetchy subject of personal watercraft, just as our lightheaded governor pledges to drive one all the way to New Orleans.

Kris Hasskamp began her difficult crusade to regulate jet skiers five years ago with the noble intention of helping elderly retirees find a little silence in the great north woods where they had moved to escape the noise and traffic of the city, only to spend their summers irritated and isolated by the ceaseless noise of miniature powerboats circling their lakes for hours at a time. As a representative of the Brainerd area, she knew well how one of the state’s premiere vacation resort areas had become a cauldron of noise during the summer months.

With their concerns in mind, the House DFLer went to work crafting a modest piece of legislation that would eventually bring about the end of her political career and leave emotional scars that still sear. Although personal watercraft (PWCs) had been around commercially for more than 20 years—remember that first one in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me?—their design grew more sophisticated over the past decade as manufacturers moved from the rough-and-tumble standup models requiring a touch of balance and athleticism to sit-down models as easy to drive as a motor scooter. To lake visitors and residents, they had been a mild if tolerable nuisance until the recreation boom of the 1990s. Then the high-flying economy fueled a dramatic increase in PWC sales. Elderly folks reported trouble, in particular, with the noise of jet skis. One resident of Hasskamp’s district had constant summertime angina attacks caused, his doctors thought, by exposure to jet ski noise. Another moved after feeling the stress of noise was effecting his health. One couple tried to escape the PWC roar by cowering in their basement on weekends, when an influx of urban riders added to the cacophony of motorized boats. While seniors could suffer motorboat noise, since it tends to pass quickly on a lake, jet skiers have an annoying habit of going around and around in circles and jumping waves, creating a high volume of noise for hours on end.

“I was getting calls for several years about jet skis after I was elected in 1988,” Hasskamp says. “Part of the reason was the number of jet skis quadrupled in number in the state. Older people were coming to me in tears and angry about all the noise. And then when I heard threats from some residents that they were going to start shooting guns from docks at jet skiers I figured something had to be done.” Never one to shy from a fight and known for her theatrical flair, Hasskamp introduced a law in 1997 and played a tape of a chainsaw to let fellow legislators know just what a jet ski sounds like on a lake. A radio announcer and avid jet skier by the name of Jesse Ventura heard the chainsaw story and, angered by any regulatory efforts involving his favorite recreational vehicle (he owns six), dubbed her “Chainsaw Hasskamp,” a moniker that stuck.

In those Pre-Governor Ventura days, Hasskamp got support from then-Governor Arne Carlson, a majority of the public in polls conducted by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and many members of the Legislature. She lost on a couple of key issues, such as banning PWCs on lakes of fewer than 200 acres (jet skiers argued that would have put a majority of the state’s lakes off-limits) and a proposal to allow citizens to file complaints with the DNR against unruly riders. She did, however, manage to see some regulations passed. The new laws forced riders to abide by a150-foot no-wake zone near shore, they restricted PWC use to the hours between 9:30 a.m. and an hour before sunset, they required training of firms renting jet skis, and they imposed age restrictions on riders. The current state jet ski license carries all the state’s regulations printed right on it, so users have no excuse for not knowing them. While those laws may not seem particularly aggressive, they represented progress in a state where summer comes accompanied by the hum of mosquitoes and of jet skis, where one of their major manufacturers, Polaris Industries, resides, and where the governor loves them so much he plans to embark on a trip from the Twin Cities to New Orleans on one.

After being named a “public enemy” by the jet ski industry and the Jetsporters Association of Minnesota (JAM), Hasskamp lost her seat in the 2000 election. But her legislation worked. Jet ski complaints are down and lake owners appear pleased with greater respect riders have for other Minnesotans. The regs also started a small movement to begin to place limits on motorized watercraft in Minnesota through local control. If Hasskamp paid a steep price, the results have impressed even her. “There was going to be road rage on the water and there was great public demand for these laws. Polls both showed more than 90 percent of the public wanted jet ski regulations,” she says. “This is a story about legislation that actually worked.”

Illustration by Matt Adams

Two watch-at-night thrillers that rely mainly on mood and atmosphere for their impact, each very pleasurable in its own way. Be warned: Neither is very big on the element of surprise or particularly strong in plotting. Mothman is of the MTV generation in its abrupt, disconcerting imagery; it’s a glossy B-movie that charms by its unexpected visual verve. Director Mark Pellington has a terrific sense of tempo that makes the most of periodic creepy interludes. Not the least of its charms is the unshakably placid Richard Gere, an actor who was a great wooden Buddha long before he began stumping for the Dalai Lama. The Others , with its methodical, foreboding gothic air, is more substantial and more thoroughly fun. Its director, Alejandro Almenabar, is a talent to watch; he made Abre Los Ojos [Open Your Eyes], the original, superior version of Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky . Which probably explains why we have this Tom Cruise-produced Nicole Kidman movie at all. It was surely part of a quid pro quo to secure the rights to Open Your Eyes . Ironic that The Others , the afterthought in the deal, turned out to be so much better than Crowe’s folly.

The Funniest President traveled to Wall Street recently, on a mission to kick shins and take names. Since entering public life W has scattered behind him a string of linguistic pearls the likes of which many older Americans still recall fondly from the TV show Kids Say the Darnedest Things. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” “I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.” “Teaching children to read… will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country.” “For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.”

But he was at his deadpan best in the financial district speech: “In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience, there is no wealth without character.” Ah, but seriously, folks—seriously! Telling one of these CEOs not to cook the books is like telling a crack whore to dress better and keep off the pipe until the cocktail hour! Ba-dum-PAH.

Enron begins to seem like the good old days. That was only a billion dollars or so in flim-flammery, and onlookers could pretend it was an isolated instance of malfeasance rooted in the looking-glass world of energy derivatives. Then came Worldcom at $4 billion and Merck at $14 billion. And sandwiched between them, to less fanfare, a series of brewing scandals involving Xerox, ImClone, Tyco, Kmart, Adelphia, Qwest, Global Crossing, and Halliburton—the last concerning alleged improprieties that took place in the late 90s when Dick Cheney headed the company. The business press is taking all this much more seriously than mainstream media. As Joseph Nocera wrote in Fortune, “Phony earnings, inflated revenues, conflicted Wall Street analysts, directors asleep at the switch—this isn’t just a few bad apples we’re talking about here. This, my friends, is a systemic breakdown…We have reached the tipping point.” Nocera and his colleagues correctly call the present ferment the worst U.S. financial crisis since 1929.

The saner heads on Wall Street, endangered species that they are, want some regulatory reform to ensure that such scandals don’t flare again anytime soon to disrupt their affairs. But talk like this is bound to seem not only reckless but silly to the president, who has never known any other way of doing business. W is a man who never registered a single success in his chosen trade, the oil business, but nonetheless managed to parlay the family name into a handsome stake in Harken Energy, which he cashed in just before his father’s war on Iraq sent Harken stock tumbling. Stock sales by insiders are supposed to be registered at the SEC within two months’ time; W waited over half a year without adverse consequence. He likewise turned a $600,000 investment in the Texas Rangers, and a role as greeter at The Ballpark in Arlington, into a $15 million payday when the team was sold. Double-dealing, something-for-nothing cronyism, and the absolute entitlement of the powerful to grab as much as they can are no more than Bush’s birthright. Privately he must be mystified by all the fuss.

Small wonder his get-tough talk to Wall Streeters was a piece of puffery. If Bush gets his way there will be a few show trials, a hundred additional bodies at the SEC—which, under GWB, is headed by a former attorney for the very accounting firms that have played such a vital role in the crimes at hand—and a shiny new executive commission to study the problem. Bush uttered nary a word concerning any of the grosser forms of institutionalized lying, cheating, and stealing that allowed the stock market bubble to assume such epic proportions—the rules that allow accountants both to audit corporate books and to consult with those same clients on how best to cover up problems, for instance, or the ones that let brokerage analysts participate in deals they are “analyzing” “dispassionately” for the suckers who comprise the investing public.
The Democrats are licking their chops over the likely electoral dividends of all this come November, but it doesn’t mean Democratic pols as a class are any likelier to push substantive action than the Republicans. At the national level the party is more thoroughly dominated than ever by the Democratic Leadership Council and its clones, whose entire enterprise over the past decade and a half has consisted of making the party a more attractive vehicle for the same corporate dollars that flow so unstintingly to Republicans. It’s foolish to suppose the complicity of the Democrats is any less monumental than that of the Republicans, and one of the worst offenders is the man many consider prime presidential timber for 2004, Tailgunner Joe Lieberman. (As I write, Lieberman is being quoted exhorting Democrats not to lose their heads and turn “too populist” on big business’s perfidy.)

If ever the time was ripe for mavericks from both parties to step forward in the interest of doing a little good—and, not incidentally, making names and power bases for themselves—that time is now. And once again we must ask, where the hell is Paul Wellstone? (Or, for that matter, his protégé in public obscurity, Mark Dayton?) You can pore through Wellstone’s web sites or any news archive and find only a scant few discouraging words on the corporate crime wave. Maybe he is afraid of drawing more wrath and more Republican dollars in his race against Norm Coleman; maybe he is being Senatorial, nattering privately and uselessly to his party superiors about the issue; maybe he is just too busy fighting mostly losing battles in the Agriculture committee and rescuing kittens from trees in Willmar. Or perhaps he is awaiting word that one of the CEOs under investigation has snapped and struck his wife—Paul and Sheila are adamantly opposed to domestic violence, you know.

One thing’s for damn sure: In this most pungent domestic scandal of the past few decades, the man The Nation once called “the senator from the Left” is scarcely on radar. By staying on the sidelines this way, Wellstone is both shirking a duty incumbent to his populist pretensions and missing a golden political opportunity. About a year and a half ago, in the pages of Mother Jones, I went on record with the observation that if Wellstone broke his two-terms-and-out pledge to run again, he would probably lose. But with fresh financial scandals breaking every week, the ground under our feet has moved considerably since then in ways that should only benefit Wellstone. Is there a politial candidate anywhere this year who, as a matter of style and presence, embodies the toothsome, glad-handing, reptilian ethos of corporate America any better than Norm Coleman? Yet Wellstone manages to continue running neck-and-neck with him. Quite a feat when you think about it.

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

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In our ongoing survey of bars that serve good food at odd hours, we’re pleased to report that Grumpy’s features an exhaustive—though occasionally sticky—menu of sandwiches, burgers, and delightful comfort foods, all of which we’d stand right up against the menus of any other bar anywhere in the city. We recently worked through a bad case of writer’s block by ordering the cajun pepper burger at about 3:30 p.m. It was accompanied by french fries so hot they made us stop worrying about our brains, and start worrying whether we’d ever regain feeling in our tongues. But let’s face it—we come to a place like this for the ambience, for the feeling we get, the people we see, the vibe. OK, we come for the beer. Still, we hope we’re not the first ones to tell you that Grumpy’s has quietly become the Uptown or the C.C. Club of the new millennium. The music is hard, the place fills up with single-speed cyclists and bike couriers, the reassuringly seedy downtown contingent takes over the pool tables and dartboards, and there seems to be an endless loop of Jackass videos on the numerous TV sets stashed around the place. (It’s art, y’know.) If genuine Minneapolis subcultcha has gone back underground to hibernate, this is where it comes to water itself each night. But the place is big enough and magnanimous enough that you can walk right in and feel at home without being a boho or a regular or both. (Grumpy: We’re sorry if this notice brings in the yuppies, but they can fend for themselves.) Grumpy’s, (612) 340-9738

The daily news cycle is a hungry beast with a short memory, so maybe it should come as no surprise that the revelations of Minneapolis FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley came and went so quickly. Still, you’ve got to credit W and company. The administration has dispatched her story with impressive speed and political acumen.

First they took advantage of the cover afforded by the Rowley firestorm to announce sweeping rollbacks in the U.S.’s meager rules against indiscriminate domestic spying, rules spawned by the exposure of prolific FBI abuses in the 1960s. Under the new guidelines set forth in John Ashcroft’s little-noted May 30 diktat, there is no longer any pretense that intelligence agencies need “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity to mount prolonged fishing expeditions into the affairs of private individuals.

The administration then turned to defusing Rowley’s story. Hence the rushed announcement of plans to reorganize the entire intelligence apparatus, even though the particulars are so ill-formed that Bush has no intention of soliciting funds for it this year. Thus, too, the sudden fanfare regarding the arrest of Jose Padilla a month earlier. After the Padilla story had simmered for a couple of days, the administration cheerfully conceded it was less than advertised. It was unlikely Padilla would ever be prosecuted; as a Defense Department deputy told CBS, “I don’t think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk.”

Job well done. Padilla served his purpose, which was to steal the last bit of thunder from Rowley’s Congressional testimony a few days earlier. There’s no mystery as to motive: Her disclosures concerning quashed pre-9/11 leads (along with news of the FBI’s so-called Phoenix memo and some unattended CIA leads) called into doubt a main premise of the Bush program—the frantic contention that what we need most going forward is a vastly expanded repertoire of police powers and resources.

Only the most gullible could believe that a desire to combat terror is the sole agenda here. Every administration since Reagan’s has chased after rollbacks in the civil liberties and curbs on police power wrought in the 60s and 70s by the civil rights movement, the Warren Court, and post-Watergate reformers. And it’s usually done in the name of war, be it on drugs, pornography, child abuse, “welfare as we know it,” or terrorism. The present threat is certainly more real and more precipitous than the sham domestic wars of our recent past, but it’s fair to ask how much additional security we can expect to buy with a wholesale surrender of freedoms and privacy rights. The answer, by FBI Director Robert Mueller’s own sidelong admission, is probably not much. Testifying before a Senate committee in May, Mueller said that the 9/11 hijackers “contacted no known terrorist sympathizers [and] left no paper trail. … As best we can determine, the actual hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind.” In short, they seem to have done nothing that would have made them any more visible under the expansive new Bush/Ashcroft rules on snooping, electronic and otherwise, than they already were.

Once the immediate embarrassment engendered by Rowley has passed, we’re bound to see her complaint spun a different way. Why, pundits will be prompted to ask, did FBI administrators refuse to seek a search warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui’s belongings? Another sad case of law enforcement shackled by old liberal due process rules and PR concerns. The moral: Slip the shackles! Let the FBI be the FBI! In truth (and Rowley says as much) the agency had ample cause for a warrant under existing standards, but no one in the bureaucratic daisy chain recognized the possible significance of the case or could be bothered to raise their heads to pursue it.

The apparent lesson here is that the old powers of domestic surveillance are quite potent if the FBI is doing its job. American intelligence had plenty of information about September 11, we now know. What it lacked was the coordination or the resolve to add two and two. Bush’s new cabinet department is supposed to remedy this, but no executive “clearinghouse” is going to make the FBI and the CIA/NSA play well together. Jealously safeguarding what they know, particularly from each other, is the foundation of their political power.

The official rejoinder is obvious enough: We have to err on the side of sacrificing freedoms and empowering police agencies, however marginal the gains in domestic security. The stakes are too high to do otherwise. Cold comfort, wouldn’t you say, when the most glaring problem exposed to date is the intelligence machine’s failure to do anything with the information it already had?

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.