The American people made their views on ending the war in Iraq abundantly clear on Nov. 7, 2006, firing the president's party's congressional majority. Later that week, President Bush proposed a "surge" of 20,000 additional American soldiers to be deployed in Iraq. Today, a majority in Congress supports withdrawal of almost all American military forces in the next year, two years, whenever is most immediately practicable. Now, President Bush is preparing us for the possibility of a permanant presence in Iraq.

The President has signed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 (summary)! The act gradually raises the maximum Pell Grant, which helps low-income students pay for college, to $5,400 by 2012, from $4,050 in 2006. And it cuts interest rates in half for subsidized college loans over the next five years. The nearly $20 billion in new funding is all paid for without tax increases, because the bill cracks down on excessive subsidies to the student loan industry.

The Center for American Progress has done a nice job illustrating data that the National Priorities Project just released on who's bearing the cost of the war. You can check out your state and see how much of the nearly $193 billion supplemental you'll be paying. But the thing is, for the most part, nobody's paying anything to finance this war just yet. We're just racking up more debt, and that'll have to be paid off from now until eternity.

Donny Shaw at the invaluable OpenCongress.org had an interesting interpretation of the SCHIP vote in the House: When the Democrats took over Congress in January, they passed new, hardcore budgeting rules known as PAYGO that require them to account for any spending increase by creating an equal increase in revenue elsewhere. With SCHIP, their fiscal heroism proved bittersweet; the revenue increase proposal they agreed upon ended up costing congressional Democrats the critical Republican votes they needed to get their proposal enacted.