The bill for Afghanistan could run into the trillions, as another suicide bomber hits another U.S. convoy. IPS fellow Miriam Pemberton, who studies the military budget, wrote that the era of Bush-style spending isn’t quite over.

Noam Chomsky has to settle for talking to Birzeit University by teleconference in Amman, after he’s denied entry into Israel.

The racial wealth gap has “more than quadrupled over the course of a generation,” according to a new study. Dedrick Muhammad has been studying this for awhile and has said that we need a huge shift in focus if we’re going to narrow this gap.

Undocumented students stage a sit-in at John McCain’s office, calling on him to support the DREAM Act so they can obtain scholarships and work their way through college while going through the process of legal residency.

The Dept. of the Interior, despite the BP oil mess, still continues to approve offshore drilling plans in the Gulf of Mexico without environmental review. The Center for Biological Diversity is suing Sec. Salazar to stop this.

CBPP says that the growing budget shouldn’t be an obstacle to passing the jobs bill: “Most of the provisions in this bill, which is now in the final stages of development, are strictly temporary measures that will stimulate additional demand for goods and services and create jobs while the recovery is still struggling to gain traction; they are not permanent measures that add to the long-term budget deficit.”