Okay, not beeellions. But definitely millions. Here’s our press release about 2010 audience growth numbers. The toplines: March audience numbers up 79% year over year. Quarterly audience numbers up 48%. Visits from social networking sites up more than 1300%.

And now, as they say, back to the news …

The federal probe into the collapse of AIG is unlikely to yield criminal charges, CBS reports.

Are Michael Steele’s problems ‘about race’?

Questions like this are always wildly over-determined. Things are never one thing or another. And Steele spends so much time acting like such a clown and, it seems, spending pretty profligately at the RNC that the criticisms of him have plenty of basis. But I also don’t think that there’s any question that his race is in the mix. Read More

Are Senate Democrats willing to go the reconciliation route on other big policy initiatives? That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

A very interesting look at how passage of Health Care Reform has shifted momentum in a big way on financial reform. Noam Scheiber says that Republicans and the big banks are hoping big concessions on an independent consumer financial protection agency will lead the White House to focus less on some less visible but still very significant reforms.

Michael Steele to go on GMA tomorrow morning for first interview since getting the RNC behind the private jet/faux-lesbian topless dancer movement.

Robert Reich says it’s time for the Fed to come clean about the demise of Bear Stearns.

We’re going to be putting out a press release about this next week. But I wanted to share with you in advance some numbers about TPM’s growth over the last year.

In March, year over year, TPM’s audience grew by 79%. Put more concretely, TPM had 79% more unique visitors in March 2010 than we did in March 2009.

For the 1st quarter of 2010 as a whole, the growth rate was 48%.

As you can imagine, we’re pretty excited about those numbers. First, because we think it shows we’re providing a quality and breadth of news coverage that people are hungry for and trust. Second, because those numbers mean more resources which we’re going to be able to use to hire more reporters and fine-tune and upgrade everything about the site that has brought us this far.

If you’re new to TPM, thanks. We literally couldn’t have done it without you. If you’re an old-timer, thanks just as much. Because you got us here. We’ll have more details next week.

Can you pick Dwight Eisenhower out in this 1909 Abilene High School team photo? Admittedly, you’ve got more of a sporting chance if you see the full size picture. Click the picture to see it along with the rest of our Presidents (and a couple who really wanted to be prez) and Baseball slideshow.

I’d never realized the vast but untapped humor reserves in this simple, factual phrase: “former half-term governor Sarah Palin.”

Drill, baby, drill.