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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 …

John McCain: I’m no maverick. I never said I was!!!

The 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls gather in New Orleans later this week for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

It’s not easy being a Christian militiaman.

One of the nine alleged Hutaree militia members charged in Michigan for plotting to kill police there reportedly became irate at police in Ohio last year when they refused to press charges against his mother, who had confiscated his AK-47 and pistol — which he said he desperately needed to protect himself from an Ohio crime family whose bad side he was on because he had tried to marry a Macedonian woman who was supposedly held captive on an island in Lake Erie by another crime family.

Got all that?

His mom, god bless her, took his guns away because she thought he was mentally unstable.