Washington has a spending problem – it keeps spending money on the F-35. A weapon that not only doesn’t work but isn’t needed. In a time of austerity for social programs with President Obama offering cuts to Social Security and Medicare the government continues to shovel money into this black hole of a weapons project.

Stringent “background checks” are central to many proposals for curbing gun violence. The following is a background check on the nation’s largest buyer of firearms:

The applicant, U.S. Pentagon, seeks to purchase a wide variety of firearms in vast quantities. This background check has determined that the applicant has a long history of assisting individuals, organizations and governments prone to gun violence.

On the heels of the drone that landed inside Iran recently, now there’s a report of another drone crash-landing in the Seychelles Islands. This was a crash landing, rather than the apparently intact drone in Iran, which may have been taken over remotely.

Sec. Gates–who does have his future to think about, after all–wants to make sure his successors (or at least his future employers) understand. No more defense contractors need get tossed into the terrible winepress of budget austerity–there are plenty of fighting folks, ready for trampling.

It’s a sad commentary that the best vision for the future that has been put forward in years came out of the Pentagon from some unelected staffers.

We don’t have a deficit problem, we have a corruption problem that happens to increase our deficit.

Not only were there F-35s traded for a settlement freeze, the U.S. has agreed not to recognize declared preliminary Palestinian statehood for the second time in 20 years.

While not passing a COBRA extension, Congress did manage to vote for an incredibly expensive second engine for the F-35, which the military says it doesn’t need and really doesn’t want. We are literally wasting billions on hardware the military is asking Congress to cut while causing economically besieged Americans to lose their insurance.