... because GM wants to send a billion bucks of it to Brazil. From the Latin American Herald [with h/t Last Free Voice ]: General Motors plans to invest $1 billion in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its home market, said the beleaguered car maker. According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government and will be used to "complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012." Yeah, as kavips likes to say, Congress Saves The World , huh?

If you can spare the time tonight, watch the 2nd part of Frontline series "Bush's War" tonight on PBS (9pm on Ch. 12 WHYY). Or you can watch it online : http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/ Part One, aired last night, was a simultaneously riveting and infuriating look at the Bush administration's (e.g. Dick Cheney) and the neo-conservatives' single-minded, utterly-duplicitous, inconceivably-manipulative machinations to plunge this country into the most perilous, costly, fruitless, and entangling foreign misadventure in our history. The bureaucratic-warfare politics and Machiavellian skullduggery laid out by first-hand witnesses from both sides of the issue are a monologue of proof that raw power is far too concentrated in Washington, D.C. and the power in D.C. is far far too concentrated in a unitary chief executive. The temptations of this level of power and the designs of evil men find too easy a nexus....as they did and still continue unabated. ...

. . . which would only fund the war in Iraq for just over 13 hours and 20 minutes (at $5,000/second), but in my never-ending quest to prove that we could do with a bit less government around the edges , this from Drug War Rant (via Alternet ): Earlier this month, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse announced plans to spend $4 million to establish the nation's first-ever "Center on Cannabis Addiction," which will be based in La Jolla, Calif. The goal of the center, according to NIDA's press release, is to "develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction." Not familiar with the notion of "marijuana addiction"? You're not alone. In fact, aside from the handful of researchers who have discovered that there are gobs of federal grant money to be had hunting for the government's latest pot boogeyman, there's little consensus that such a syndrome is clinically relevant -- if it even exists at al...