The Post has a nice, short history, going back a century, of Citibank’s record of going for broke and ending up broke.

The man who led the campaign against the Chas Freeman appointment is currently awaiting trial on charges of espionage.

It’s not on par with Kennedy-Nixon, Ali-Frazier, or Federer-Nadal. It’s more like the feuding cheerleaders in Bring It On. But I still feel kind of privileged to have the opportunity to watch the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer spat:

Late Update: In case you hadn’t heard, Cramer will be a guest on The Daily Show on Thursday.

Let the piling on begin! Michael Steele is facing heat from Sen. John Thune (R-SD) for the slow pace of staffing up at the RNC. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) flies into airport rage over missed flight.

What a guy.

Almost the entire Republican political strategy in 2009 has been to stipulate to President Obama’s popularity and get to work breaking down the popularity of “Congress” in general and congressional Democrats

in particular. President Obama, after all, isn’t their problem for a few years. 2010 is against their Democratic opponents in the Hill.

As I’ve noted on several occasions this year, the very poor approval numbers for ‘Congress’, which are so often noted by congressional Republicans, stand in stark contrast to the poll numbers for congressional Democrats, which have been pretty strong and vastly better than the numbers for Republicans.

But now, according to Gallup, we have a genuinely stunning surge in approval for Congress. Right? Who knew … Approval of Congress is up to 39%, a twenty point gain since January.

Most of the increase comes from Democrats. But not all. Since January, approval for Congress among Independents has risen from 17% to 34%.

Obama and the congressional Democrats have their jobs cut out for them — probably a more difficult set of challenges than any national politicians have faced in a generation, if not a few generations. But thus far every significant bit of polling data shows the Republicans’ opposition is failing abysmally.

A fun catch from our video wizard Ben Craw this morning on MSNBC. Mika Brzezinski went on at length bemoaning, rightly I think, the overuse of the analogy of the economy as a sick patient — except someone forgot to give Tom Brokaw the memo:

You’ve probably seen Paul Rieckhoff’s shaved dome on the cable nets at one time or another. He’s an articulate and engaging spokesman for U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts in his role as founder and executive director of IAVA.

I wanted to talk to Paul, himself an Iraq War veteran, about a spate of recent news stories on the struggles veterans are facing, from a spike in suicides among soldiers to new evidence on how widespread traumatic brain injuries are among this generation of veterans. And we’ll bring you that part of our interview later in the week.

But we ended up also talking at some length about President Obama’s deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan even before he’s articulated our strategic objectives there, let alone mapped out a strategy. Paul has some smart things to say about that, too:

Stephen Labaton has another article in the Times about banks that are fed up with federal meddling and deciding to give the Feds their money back. He makes the decent point that forcing weak banks to ease the terms of the outstanding loans may have the unintended effect of making the weak banks even weaker and pushing the federal government deeper into propping them up. And the article, implicitly, shows one real truth about the banking crisis, which is that a lot of the smaller regional banks are in decent shape — and are thus capable of paying the money back, as a few have.

But I think he’s either giving too much credit to, or perhaps has been taken in by, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, who have also made unconvincing noises about wanting to give the money back.

Here’s the key passage …

Some bankers say the conditions have become so onerous that they want to return the bailout money. The list includes small banks like the TCF Financial Corporation of Wayzata, Minn., and Iberia Bank of Lafayette, La., as well as giants like Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.

They say they plan to return the money as quickly as possible or as soon as regulators set up a process to accept the refunds. On Tuesday, Signature Bank of New York announced that because of new executive pay restrictions in the economic stimulus package, it notified the Treasury that it intended to return the $120 million it had received from the government only three months ago.

The key is ‘as quickly as possible’. A number of small banks are able to give the money back, because their balance sheets are in decent shape. But that doesn’t apply to any of the big banks, including Goldman and Wells Fargo, even though the latter especially seems in relatively better shape than Citi and BofA. Through direct infusions and the bailout of AIG, Goldman is in no position to swear off the federal government’s extraordinary assistance. Thus, their current policy of whining, claiming they’re going to give the money back and then saying, more or less, ‘we’ll get back to you on that’ when anyone asks when.