DAVID MASTIO AND KELSEY RUPP: Pentagon fueled Ferguson confrontation. “The Pentagon might not have boots on the ground in Ferguson, Mo., where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by police on Saturday, but it does have wheels on the street. Michelle McCaskill, media relations chief at the Defense Logistics Agency, confirms that the Ferguson Police Department is part of a federal program called 1033 that distributes hundreds of millions of dollars of surplus military equipment to civilian police forces across the United States. The materials range from small items such as pistols and automatic rifles to heavy armored vehicles such as the MRAPs used in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

This is something I’ve been writing about for years.

Meanwhile, Jim Bennett emails with a “twofer” solution: “Have the feds take back all the armored vehicles they’ve given to police departments and send them to the Kurds.”