Man, if there was ever a Senator who should not ask strangers "do you know who I am?" it is David Vitter of Louisiana. And yet, that is what he said at Dulles last week.

We are happy with his magical budget, and some of his hires, but let's not kid ourselves: Obama's new Iraq plan is pretty McCain-ish, right? So maybe we'll go join the Enraged Liberal Blogger PAC!

The Stimulus Bill is really long! And it's full of "numbers" and stuff! This is why no one is going to vote for it.

Congress lived the dream today, just straight-up yelling at some bankers. Watch and enjoy the shaming and grandstanding!

Now we get the "Obama won and is back on top" pieces, right? Because the stimulus looks like it'll sail through the joint committee. But the bill is—oh no!—smaller.

Breaking: Val Kilmer is wandering around a US Congressional office building by himself, for some reason. [Politico]

The Fairness Doctrine is not coming back, except as a boogieman spectre for Republicans to get riled up about and tone-deaf Dems to occasionally mention to give those Republicans material.

The Senate votes today on the economic stimulus package which will (temporarily?) stave off utter doom. If it doesn't pass by a huge margin, Obama's "work together" agenda is a total failure! Time to panic!

• The chief executives of nine Wall Street banks have been "summoned" to Washington to testify before Congress next week. [BN]
• UBS has held talks with Wachovia about combining their wealth management units; this comes amid the news UBS tried to sell its brokerage unit to Morgan Stanley late last year. [NYP, Reuters]
• After repeatedly saying it wasn't a possibility, Citigroup is now contemplating backing out of the $400 million deal to name the Mets' new stadium. [WSJ]
• Under pressure to boost lending, Citigroup says it will spend $36.5 billion to issue new mortgages and make credit card loans. [AP]
• Credit Suisse is cutting bonuses by 55%. [BN]
• What's BofA been doing with its bailout cash? Hosting parties. [ABC News]

Watching the cable news, one might get the impression that Republicans aren't a completely powerless minority party. They're still opinionating like it's 2004 out there!

The internet took over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, and her Youtube account, and the video evidence (cats! everywhere!) will shock you.

It's semiofficial! Roland Burris, hero, will be the new junior senator from Illinois.

So this is what congress has been up to lately! They just finished a two-year investigation into steroid use in professional wrestling. The most important finding?

Here is one of those "evergreen" stories that you can run anytime, when things are good or when things are miserable (or on the weekend!): those jokers in congress just gave themselves a raise.

Yesterday was Alaska Senator Ted Stevens' worst birthday ever: he turned 85, and lost his reelection fight! You commit seven little felony counts of fraud and making false statements, sheesh. The AP called the race for Democratic challenger Mark Begich last night, as he leads by 3,724 votes, with 46.58% of the Alaska electorate not even caring that their million-term senator is a convicted felon and voting for him anyway. Now we officially don't have to write about him anymore, until Alaska voters give his corrupt son Ben a seat in congress. Now the magical 60-seat majority is up to Al Franken's recount (possible!) and the Jim Martin/Saxby Chambliss runoff in Georgia (difficult!). Then the Democrats will do everything you've always wanted them to do. [NYT]

Good news for Ted Stevens: the convicted felon and United States Senator from the Great State of Alaska won't face an embarrassing expulsion from the world's greatest deliberative body. GOP Senator Jim DeMint totally promised this morning that he had enough votes to expel Stevens from the Senate, and then, in a close-door conference meeting, everyone decided to just wait until the votes in Stevens' reelection race are all counted. Stevens is currently down a thousand to his Democratic challenger, so hopefully Alaska voters will save Stevens' Senate colleagues the trouble of doing the mind-bogglingly obviously right thing. [Roll Call]

Wow, here's a clip that doesn't make you envy Neel Kashkari. The hawk-eyed Ferrari lover who's been assigned to run the government bailout of our dead financial system took a little trip up to Capitol Hill today to speak to Congress about how all that money is being used. Rep. Elijah Cummings did not appreciate Neel's tone! "Let me tell YOU something," he hollered at Neel, whose eyes went wide. He recovered well though. Neel, you are one unlucky sacrificial lamb, buddy. Watch the rage of Cummings below:

Hah, adorable Congressman Barney Frank was on NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me. They quizzed him on Bill O'Reilly's amazingly titled new memoir, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity. If you like being a smug liberal, you'll love this link to a public radio broadcast. [NPR]

What role did race play in the crisis that led to the proposed bailout? What role did it play in the defeat of the bailout? The first topic has been argued and discussed for a while now—with vicious theories first proposed by far-out wackos bubbling up to "respectable" media people and even some congress members. But today brought a number of more reasoned responses to those who'd "blame the Blacks" explicitly or implicitly. The second question, though, hasn't been touched on. How did black congresspeople vote? And, uh, what about the Jews? You can see the result in that handy chart above, along with an explanation of What It Means. (It's not purely pointless provocation.) Oh no! The financial sector exploded! The market is, uh, failing! "What do we do" is the response of, like, economists. Politicians know the important question is "WHO DO WE BLAME." So liberals jumped on deregulating Conservatives and President Bush and evil Wall Street fatcats and so on. Conservatives, oddly, also blamed most of those people, except for a small but vocal subset who blamed this collapse of everything on... poor black people?

Nate Silver runs some numbers and finds that 30 of 38 congressmembers in tight reelection races voted NAY on the bailout. Stupid voters, always wanting to doom the economy! And stupid congressmembers, always wanting to get reelected! "By comparison, the vote among congressmen who don't have as much to worry about was essentially even: 197 for, 198 against." AND: "among 26 congressmen NOT running for re-election (almost all of whom are Republicans), 23 voted in favor of the bill, as opposed to 2 against and one abstaining." [538]