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There is a lot of defense spending in your future. 

The proposed defense budget is $554.2 billion, including $64
billion in war spending. The important number is the $490.1 billion
“base budget.” It is $3.3 billion larger than the amount allocated
for fiscal 2014 and $3 billion higher than the Pentagon itself
requested. Yes, that’s right: Congressional leaders are
forcing money on the Pentagon.

According to Politico Pro, that
extra $3 billion is not only packed with “goodies for the
military’s top defense contractors, including aerospace giants
Lockheed Martin and Boeing,” it’s a sign that the
commander-in-chief is already a lame duck.

President Barack Obama is losing some of the control over the
defense budget that his administration clawed away from top
military commanders early in his presidency, with the service
chiefs and Congress once again openly conspiring to undo tough
spending decisions made by the White House and the Pentagon.

The result: an omnibus spending package for this fiscal year
that includes money to buy lots of weapons the Pentagon didn’t
request but top commanders signaled they wanted anyway.

Here are some examples of the stuff Congress added above the
Pentagon’s requested:

The bill would reject some of the Pentagon’s major cost-cutting
efforts and shift money to congressionally popular programs such as
the A-10 close air support aircraft, called the “Warthog;” Boeing’s
radar-jamming EA-18G Growlers; and Raytheon Co.’s Tomahawk missiles
and ships, including the preservation of the aircraft carrier USS
George Washington.

The bill also includes four more F-35 planes than the Pentagon
requested, for a total of 38 planes. The F-35 is already more than a decade
overdue, more than 100 percent over budget, and it currently can’t
fly at night, in clouds, or near lightning.

This sort of profligate spending is consistent with what we saw
during the Bush years. A recent report from the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) found that inflation-adjusted base funding jumped from
$384 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $502 billion in fiscal year
2014. That’s an increase of 31 percent. 

However, even that fat increase doesn’t do full justice to the
tremendous splurge in defense spending during the Bush years. There
was a 52 percent increase between 2001’s base budget (the lowest of
the decade) and 2010 (its peak level). These numbers exclude the
trillions of dollars spent on wars since 2003. Nor do they account
for all the defense-related spending that goes through other
departments such as the Department of Homeland Security and the
Department of Energy.

Defense contractors have benefited handsomely over the
past 15 years. They were somewhat frustrated by the minimal caps
placed on defense spending via sequestration, but they shouldn’t
have worried. Spending caps, especially when they are tied to
defense, are meant to be broken. Contractors are poised to keep
doing well, despite the ending of most operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

 The fastest growing share of the
Defense budget is pay and benefits for military and civilian
Defense Department employees, which has increased 46 percent in
real dollars. And of course, it is worse than it looks since
there are also substantial personnel costs contained within the
operations and maintenance component (O&M) of the budget. That
jumped 34 percent in real dollars between 2000 and 2014.

As with other parts of the federal government, health care
and pension costs for Defense workers are well on
their way to bankrupting us all. As we explained over at Mercatus:

About one-third of this increase was driven by increases
in federal civilian employee pay and benefits, excluding health
insurance. The cost of the Defense Health Benefits program doubled,
which accounted for another third of the increase in O&M. As
the CBO notes, “primary reasons for that growth are the new and
expanded TRICARE benefits that lawmakers authorized, including
expanded benefits for reservists and their families, and the very
low out-of-pocket costs of TRICARE relative to other health care
plans.” The rest of the increase in the O&M component can be
attributed to rising fuel costs, operations support, and
“other.” 

Congress clearly has no intention of refomring these
bloated programs. What’s make it even worse, Pentagon officials—who
understand that more health care spending means fewer tanks and
bombs—tried to include changes that would slow the rate of growth
in benefits in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. It
turns out that the military can get anything it wants. As long as
it’s not less money.

In 2012, Reason TV outlined “3 Reasons Conservatives
Should Cut Defense Spending Now!” Watch below:

It’s not
clear that any Indian reservations are clamoring to sell pot along
with cheap smokes and chances to win at blackjack. But if they want
to explore this new revenue option,
that apparently is OK with the U.S. Justice Department,
provided they follow the same guidelines that states with legal
marijuana are expected to keep in mind.

Yesterday the Justice Department issued a
memo that extends the logic of its August 2013
guidance concerning marijuana cases to Indian Country. Should
any reservations decide to allow marijuana cultivation and sales,
the new guidance says, U.S. attorneys should focus on cases that
implicate the “federal law enforcement priorities” listed in that
earlier memo, which include interstate smuggling, sales to minors,
and links to criminal organizations. The implication is that if
reservations establish “robust and effective regulatory systems,”
prosecuting growers and retailers who comply with them would not be
a good use of federal resources.

At the same time, reservations that do not allow marijuana can
still call upon the Justice Department to enforce that ban, even if
they are located in states that have legalized the drug. According
to John Walsh, the U.S. attorney for Colorado, that assurance was
the main goal of the memo.

I will talk
about all the latest news relating to the travesty of journalism
that is Rolling Stone‘s University of Virginia rape
story on CNN’s Smerconish this
Saturday. The program airs at 9 am ET and 6 pm ET.

For more on this subject, go
here.

There have been some quality interviews on The
Independents this week. Here’s three of ‘em,
starting with the great entertainer and thinker Penn Jillette talking
about crime and punishment in the news:

Next up,
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) talks about Obamacare Dr. Evil
Jonathan Gruber. Make sure to watch through to the end!

Finally, on the day the Torture Report dropped, Kennedy referred
reactions from former Reasoner
Julian
Sanchez and ex-CIA guy Mike
Baker:

Go to this
page for other past video segments.

In a new Heritage Foundation video,
anti-pot activist Kevin Sabet bravely tackles “the
myth that marijuana doesn’t kill.” Although cannabis consumers
(unlike drinkers) do not die from acute overdoses, he says,
“marijuana does kill people” through suicide, chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease, car crashes, and other accidents. 

I won’t say Sabet is attacking a straw man, since
overenthusiastic cannabis fans have
been known to say that “marijuana doesn’t kill anyone”
(although the top Google result for that phrase is an article by
Sabet explaining why that’s not true). But I will say that Sabet
manages to obscure the fact that marijuana does not kill people
very often, especially compared to the death tolls from legal drugs
such as tobacco and alcohol, which is the relevant point in
evaluating the scientific basis for pot prohibition. Let’s take a
closer look at the four ways that marijuana kills, according to
Sabet: 

Suicide. Some research does find a
correlation between suicide and marijuana use, but that does not
mean the relationship is causal. A longitudinal
study published by The British Journal of Psychiatry
in 2009 reached this conclusion:

Although there was a strong association between cannabis use and
suicide, this was explained by markers of psychological and
behavioural problems. These results suggest that cannabis use is
unlikely to have a strong effect on risk of completed suicide,
either directly or as a consequence of mental health problems
secondary to its use.

Furthermore, there is
some evidence that letting patients use marijuana for symptom
relief reduces the risk of suicide. Still, if reefer has ever
driven anyone to kill himself, that would be enough to prove
Sabet’s point. You can’t say it has never happened!

Chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease. “You can’t say that smoking a crude plant, a
leaf, is good for your lungs,” Sabet says, “and so we know that
COPD and marijuana are inextricably linked.” 

Here is how the American Thoracic Society summarizes the
evidence regarding marijuana and COPD: 

Heavy marijuana smokers also are likely to develop lung damage
because marijuana smoke contains many of the same harmful chemicals
as tobacco smoke. We do not know if smoking a small amount of
marijuana (for example, light users who smoke an amount equal to
1-2 joints a month) over a long period of time increases your risk
for developing COPD. We do know that in some people (especially
those with lung problems), smoking marijuana can make their
breathing worse. 

A 2012 study of
5,000 young adults who were followed for two decades, reported
in The Journal of the American Medical
Association, found that “occasional and low cumulative
marijuana use was not associated with adverse effects on pulmonary
function.” Donald Tashkin, a UCLA researcher who has studied
the health effects of marijuana use for many years, told Web
MD “the main thrust of the paper has confirmed previous
results indicating that marijuana in the amounts in which it is
customarily smoked does not impair lung function.” 

Assuming that heavy pot smoking causes lung damage, people can
avoid that risk by using vaporizers or consuming cannabis in the
form of edibles. In that sense it is clearly not true that “COPD
and marijuana are inextricably linked.” 

COPD kills more
than 120,000 Americans a year. According to the CDC,
it is “almost always caused by [cigarette] smoking.” Neither the
CDC, the American
Lung Association, nor the National
Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute mentions marijuana
consumption as a risk factor. Yet Sabet is sure at least a few of
those COPD deaths can be blamed on pot, although he does not hazard
an estimate. By contrast, he notes that the CDC attributes
480,000 deaths a year to cigarette smoking, which causes not
just COPD but a laundry list of ailments, including lung cancer and
heart disease. 

“Saying marijuana has never contributed to death or never killed
anyone is like saying tobacco hasn’t killed anyone,” Sabet says at
the beginning of the Heritage Foundation video. What he means, he
says, is that tobacco smokers, like marijuana smokers, do not die
from acute overdoses. But given the enormous gap between
tobacco-related fatalities and marijuana-related fatalities, the
comparison is reckless. 

Car crashes. “Marijuana is the second most
implicated drug in drunk or drugged driving accidents,” Sabet says.
That is misleading, because “implicated” means a driver killed in a
crash tested positive for traces of marijuana, which does not
necessarily mean he was under the influence at the time of the
crash, let alone that marijuana contributed to the accident.
Marijuana can be detected in blood and urine long after its effects
have worn off. 

Marijuana does impair driving ability, but not as dramatically
as alcohol does, which is why legalization might actually
reduce traffic fatalities, assuming that more pot smoking is
accompanied by less drinking. “Researchers have now said that
[marijuana] doubles the risk of a car crash,” Sabet says. By
comparison, research indicates that a blood alcohol concentration
of 0.10 percent
quintuples the risk of a car crash. 

According to the National High Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA), drunk driving kills about 10,000 people a
year. How many people does stoned driving kill? “That’s difficult
to say,” said a NHTSA official who
testified at a House hearing on the subject this year. “We
don’t have a precise estimate.” The most he was willing to affirm
was that the number is “probably not” zero. 

Other accidents. “There are a number of, you
have to imagine, injuries in other accidents that result from
marijuana that just aren’t tallied,” Sabet says. Well, yes, since
they aren’t tallied, you do have to imagine them. But if stoned
falls from ladders and so forth were a major cause of death in
America, someone probably would be counting them. The CDC,
for example, counts
about 7,500 deaths from alcohol-related falls each year. It
attributes another 8,000 or so deaths to alcohol-related suicide,
about 1,600 to acute alcohol poisoning, and some 38,000 to chronic
diseases caused by excessive alcohol consumption. All told, it puts
alcohol-related deaths (including car crashes) at 88,000
annually. 

What is the comparable figure for marijuana? Tellingly, Sabet
does not have one, but he wants you to know it is more than zero.
To recap, these are the annual death tolls from three of our most
popular drugs, the first two of which happen to be legal: 

Tobacco: 480,000

Alcohol: 88,000

Marijuana: > 0 

“You can’t say marijuana doesn’t kill anybody,” Sabet declares.
No, but you can say that marijuana’s relative hazards have nothing
to do with its legal status.

In a 2011
profile about California’s ongoing fiscal mess, Vanity
Fair interviewed San Jose’s then-Mayor Chuck Reed, a
progressive Democrat who has for years been warning about coming
cuts in public services if the state’s pension systems don’t get
benefit levels under control. Reed did the math and the picture
wasn’t pretty. “By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million
people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be
serviced by 1,600 public workers,” according to the piece. “The
problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, ‘you get to
one.’ A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with
a focus on paying pensions.” But while San Jose and other cities
will never literally reach a single employee who sits in the room
mailing out pension checks, the trajectory is headed in that
troubling direction. Now, writes Steven Greenhut, even the
California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s
largest pension fund and one of the state’s most adamant opponents
of pension reform, released a report in November that
bolster’s Reed’s case.

View this article.

We live in an time of two-way
surveillance. On one hand, governments and other powerful
institutions can track us more closely than ever before. On the
other hand, ordinary civilians can
pull out a cell phone and start recording if they see a cop or
some other official doing something abusive, irresponsible, or just
embarrassing.

We all know that. But there was a time when hardly anyone saw
such a future coming. Four
decades ago, it was widely assumed that new surveillance
technologies would serve only the state and the corporate world.
The idea that ordinary people might point a lens back at the
powerful didn’t really take hold until a witness with a
camcorder recorded
the beating of Rodney King in 1991.

Yet that wasn’t the first time a man with a camera was at the
right place to tape some cops who’d gotten out of control. If you
were attentive enough, you could see the outlines of the new era
taking shape even before King came along. Two years
earlier, for example, in Cerritos, California,

a bridal shower at the home of the Dole family, natives
of Samoa, apparently attained a level of festivity that provoked
the interest of the sheriff’s department. In all, according to
accounts in the Los Angeles Times, about 100 officers from
three law enforcement agencies showed up for the event, bringing
with them a helicopter whose noise and blinding searchlights
reportedly added to the confusion.

The police said that they were pelted with rocks and beer bottles.
Neighbors and party guests said the cops initiated the violence in
which 34 persons were arrested and an undetermined number
injured.

A cam-equipped neighbor decided to unobtrusively tape what he could
of the scene. He got shots of an officer beating people on the
ground who, it appeared, were already restrained. Dismissing the
images on the tape, the sheriff said, “It would be unusual to use a
baton if they were handcuffed.”

Unusual or not, local newscasts gave their viewers a picture of the
law in action somewhat different from the one the police would
prefer to project.

The story ultimately ended with what the Los Angeles
Times called
“the largest civil rights damage award against police in California
history.” Here’s a news report that includes some of the neighbor’s
footage, starting about 48 seconds in:

The Dole family didn’t come first either. A year before police
attacked their home, two men carrying cameras—Clayton Patterson and
Paul Garrin—happened to be on the scene during the
Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988, when squatters and cops
clashed over control of a park in Manhattan. When officers started
clubbing bystanders and otherwise trampling people’s rights, there
was videotape to back up the victims’ complaints. In one meta
moment, Patterson got footage of the police smashing Garrin into
the wall.

There may well be even earlier examples. But it’s the events in
Cerritos and in Tompkins Square Park that were cited in a prescient
piece Peter Karman wrote for the leftist paper In
These Times. (That’s where that passage I quoted about the
Dole party came from.) The article was titled “Little Brother Is
Watching Too”—in those days, that headline wasn’t
a cliché yet—and it appeared in 1989, long before the world had
heard the name Rodney King.

Citing a variety of examples—not just camcorders but radar
detectors and the tools used by hackers—Karman argued that the
surveillance state was being turned upside down. He also noted the
central role that market forces were playing in this
transformation, though he phrased this in a way calibrated to
appeal to In These Times‘ socialist audience: “owing to
the treasonous nature of modern capitalism,” he wrote, “the same
corporations selling the tools of social control to Big Brother
were happily adding to their profits by selling their antidotes to
little brother.”

Later in the article, he extended the point:

The videocams with which Patterson and the Cerritos
resident caught the police at their worst first began to bloom
years ago in parking lots, lobbies, workplaces and,
surreptitiously, in the ceilings of those blank motel rooms to
which undercover cops bring the subjects of stings. Banks of
monitors showing bare corridors and newscasts of time-signed scenes
of politicians stuffing money into briefcases became commonplaces
of our visual landscape. We also knew, of course, that we were
being watched on the job—but knew, too, that we would probably bore
our surveyors to death before giving their tape machines anything
to pop their heads about.

Commercially speaking, there were only so many hallways, washrooms
and cops that could be mounted with videos. Real profit lay in
putting a videocam to the eyeball of every tourist, nostalgist or
artist—in short, just about everyone. Once that happened, the
technological tables again turned on Big Brother.

Today millions of Americans carry pocket-sized devices that can
not just record the police but can transmit their footage to the
world. In the future, those tools will be even smaller and more
ubiquitous. (If Google Glass–style
technologies catch on with the wider public, Karman’s line about
“putting a videocam to the eyeball” may prove even more prophetic
than it looks now.) And just about everyone understands this. What
was a counterintuitive thesis in 1989 is now the conventional
wisdom. It’s reached the point where some anti-authoritarians have
had to start issuing
reminders that these technologies can still be used by powerful
people too.

But there was a time when most people didn’t realize that anyone
but the powerful could deploy this tech. Kudos to Karman
for seeing so early that the future would be more complicated than
that.

(For some of Patterson’s footage from the Tompkins Square
Riot, go here.
For some of Garrin’s footage, go here. For past
editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

Remy helps the
Stand with Hillary super PAC come up with a new music
video.

“Stand with Hillary: Part 2 (Arkansas Badonkadonk)” is the
latest from Reason TV. Watch above or click the link below for full
lyrics, downloadable versions, and more.

View this article.

In sworn congressional testimony on
Tuesday, MIT economist and Obamacare architect
repeatedly refused to immediately provide details of the contracts,
payments, and work he’d produced as a health law consultant to
multiple states and the federal government. Reports suggest that
Gruber has received millions of dollars for his work over the
years.

Gruber did not submit the standard disclosure form before his
testimony. (Gruber said that he had been advised by his lawyer that
the alternative disclosure he submitted was in compliance with
committee requirements.) He said that he had received nearly
$400,000 for his work modeling the effects of Obamacare for the
federal government, a number that has been widely reported, but
when asked for additional information, he repeatedly
told members of the House Oversight Committee that they could
take it up with his lawyer. He was warned that if he continued to
respond that way, the work would be subpoenaed. 

As of this morning, Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa
(R-Ca.) has followed through with a formal request for the
documents. According to a press release, the
request covers… 

1. All documents and communications to or from any federal,
state, or local government employee, including, but not limited to,
any document or communication referring or relating to the
Affordable Care Act or federal and state health care exchanges.

2. All documents and communications referring or relating to
funding, for research or otherwise, from any federal, state, or
local government agency, including, but not limited to, any
contract(s) with a federal, state, or local government agency.

3. All documents and communications referring or relating to
work product produced to any federal, state, or local government
agency, for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the results
of any and all economic models or simulations.

One thing to be on the lookout for when this comes through:
Gruber’s estimate of how many people would lose their existing
insurance under Obamacare.

Gruber admitted during questioning that his econometric model,
created for use by the administration and congressional staff
drafting the law, estimated that some Americans would not be able
to keep their existing health plans, but he wouldn’t say how many.
Shouldn’t that mean that Gruber knew that administration’s repeated
promises that those who like their health plans could keep their
plans under the law weren’t true?

Gruber was asked about the promise, and tried to dodge the
question by saying that he was not a political adviser. But
eventually he explained how he understood the president’s promise.
“I interpreted the administration’s comments as saying that for the
vast majority of Americans the law would not affect the productive
health insurance arrangements that they have,” he said. “I did not
see a problem with the administration’s statement.”

Of course he didn’t. Gruber is, after all, someone who
argued that “lack of transparency” was key to passing the
health law. Gruber wanted the law to pass, and so despite knowing
that the administration’s statement was inaccurate, he did not see
it as a problem. 

Debra Jean Milke has been fighting for
decades a capital conviction in Arizona for allegedly arranging the
murder of her 4-year-old son in 1989. The conviction was based
almost entirely on the testimony of Phoenix Det. Armando Saldate,
who claimed she confessed in an interview. The interview was not
recorded, and she insisted she did not confess.

Saldate also had lengthy history of misconduct and lying under
oath that had been concealed from the defense. His behavior had
resulted in judges tossing out confessions or indictments in four
previous cases. Milke’s conviction was tossed out a year ago by the
U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit. Maricopa County Attorney Bill
Montgomery attempted to get Milke retried. On Thursday the Arizona
Court of Appeals
ordered the charges dismissed with prejudice, citing “egregious
prosecutorial misconduct.” Montgomery said he will appeal this
ruling to the state’s Supreme Court.

The 2013 dismissal, written by 9th Circuit Chief Judge Alex
Kozinksi, actually spent several pages documenting all the
misconduct claims against Saldate, including “taking liberties”
with a woman he had pulled over for a faulty taillight and then
lying to investigators about it. He was suspended for five days for
that incident. You can read the
court’s ruling here (pdf). Saldate subsequently invoked his
Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself in order to not
testify in Milke’s case. Two other men (one Milke’s former
roommate) have been convicted and are on death row.

Hat tip to Ken White of Popehat, who also posted about the case
last year here
and uploaded the court decision.