I don't want some of what they're smoking

The Los Angeles Times reports that literally just days before the conclusion of an 8½-month racketeering trial against Big Tobacco, a culmination of an effort spanning years, the government's lawyers have cut the demands they are making on the tobacco companies by over 90%.

Without explanation, government lawyers late Tuesday asked U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler to order an industry-funded five-year, $10-billion smoking-cessation program - instead of the 25-year, $130-billion program they had outlined previously.

So instead of an average of $5.2 billion a year for 25 years, the feds now want the companies to pony up $2 billion a year for five years. Frankly, not a lot of money for the industry: The six American tobacco companies spend twice that much every year on advertising a deadly, addictive product linked to over 400,000 deaths in the US alone every year.

And it's also not a lot of money for an industry that has over the last eight election cycles given over $54 million in political contributions, 75% of it to Republicans. That's an investment that seems once again to have paid off.

Footnote One: Eight Senate and House Democrats have demanded that the inspector general of the Justice Department investigate this sudden, last minute, and astonishingly large concession to the tobacco giants. They

expressed concern that top political appointees were overruling the trial lawyers to shield the industry from an expensive loss. ...

Regarding the call for an investigation, [DOJ] spokesman [Eric] Holland said the inspector general "will, no doubt, consider the request."

Uh, huh. And just what will he consider it?

Footnote Two: In their summation, mouthpieces for the profit barons of the real killer weed argued that

[c]igarette makers did not violate the anti-racketeering - or RICO - statute, but even if they did ... the remedies [urged by the government] were improper.

Or, as my mother used to describe that sort of argument,

Neighbor One: My lawn mower was broken when you returned it to me.

Neighbor Two: I never borrowed your lawn mower and besides, it was broken when you loaned it to me.