I'd been hearing that the Federal Reserve's estimates for how much capital the banking system would need were quite a bit lower than the IMF's. More evidence that the stress tests are optimistic and that Geithner is a Wall Street stooge! But James Surowiecki digs deeper into the numbers and finds that they're actually quite close. "Unless you think the I.M.F.’s estimates are unrealistic or softballed," he concludes, "it’s simply wrong to call these results a whitewash."

I'll be on Ed Schultz's MSNBC show tonight around 6:30 Eastern. It will be a milestone in television history, and you don't want to miss it.

A bunch of readers have written in to ask why I haven't commented on pollster Frank Luntz's "leaked" memo advising Republicans on their efforts to oppose health reform. The basic answer is I don't think it's an important document. I could have written the whole thing myself just by reversing-engineering one of Rudy Giuliani's speeches. And it's "leak" feel a bit meta to me. It's theoretically a strategy document for Republicans, but it's being used less to inform their approach than to give the press a reason to write that they have a strategy. And so they do. "Healthcare denial horror stories from Canada & Co. do resonate," Luntz advises. That means, I guess, that conservative politicians will continue using them, as they have for the past two decades? Elsewhere, Luntz suggests that Republicans "define the crisis in your terms...If some bureaucrat puts himself between you and your doctor, denying you exactly what you need, that’s a crisis." Attacking bureaucrats! Where does Frank...

Tim Geithner's announcement that banks who wanted to repay their money early would have to also leave the FDIC's low-interest lending program received a pretty favorable response the other day. Banks shouldn't be able to leave only those government programs that impose regulatory constraints. No banks with benefits ! But as Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin explain , they'll still be getting government help: While the banking industry will remain on federal aid for the foreseeable future, officials also said they would now allow some of the healthiest banks to repay the government's initial capital investments. Nine of the 19 banks were found to have sufficient capital reserves. Firms that repay the government no longer face restrictions on executive compensation. Applicants will first be required to show that they do not need the shelter of a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. program that helps banks raise money at lower interest rates. But banks may continue borrowing from the Federal...

There's been a lot of speculation over reports that the administration held the stress test results while the banks argued for more lenient treatment. But the Washington Post is the first paper I've seen with specifics on those conversations. Citibank, for instance, "successfully pushed to lower the amount of common equity it needs to raise to $5.5 billion by applying $52.5 billion from capital it has not yet reworked. It also was able to get a credit for the sale of a unit that has not been completed." Those aren't particularly crazy arguments. But they're unbalanced arguments. There are basically three poles in this debate: Independent analysts, who tend to think the situation is darker than the government does, but who arguably have some tendency to err on the side of gloom because they don't bear the downside risk of their solutions. The banks, who argue that the situation is much better than the government projects, but who have a strong tendency to err on the side of optimism...

Of late, Arlen Specter has been engaged in something of a crass-off against, well, himself. His argument for switching parties was that he'd lose the Republican primary. His argument for consistency was that he would still oppose the interests of the very voters he was now courting. But www.SpecterfortheCure.com is something of a new low. The site promotes "a bold new initiative to reform our government's medical research efforts, cut red tape and unstrangle the hope for accelerated cures." That "bold new initiative?" Arlen Specter's reelection campaign. "Senator Arlen Specter," we're told, "intends to build a bridge over the valley of death," which sort of implies that if he loses the Democratic primary, he might decide he's "simply not going to subject my 29-year record in the United States Senate to a primary electorate of living humans," and return with a mighty zombie horde who will look more favorably on his candidacy (Arlen Specter, D-Hades). But later on, the web site gives a...