Who wouldn't want to own a bank

An unidentified man appearing at a Palin-McCain event in Waukesha, WI appears to have the current Republican administration's number.

"I'm mad, I'm really mad," he shouted at John McCain. "It's the socialists takin' over our country."

While the man may have thought he was referring to Barack Obama, he could just as well have been talking about President George W. Bush. A pair of Bloomberg financial reporters compare and contrast:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown opted to spend $87 billion to partly nationalize at least eight British banks.

Yesterday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who crafted a more complicated $700 billion plan to buy financial firms' bad debts, signaled he may follow and invest directly in banks.

Brown, who spent years shedding Labour Party policies that called for nationalizing the "commanding heights" of the economy, won plaudits from bankers and even rival lawmakers for the rescue plan.

Paulson doesn't rule out more direct measures to help banks once he sets up a new office to run the rescue and hires fund firms to help manage the assets.

"It is the policy of the federal government to use all resources at its disposal to make our financial system stronger," Paulson said yesterday in Washington. "We will use all of the tools we've been given to maximum effectiveness, including strengthening the capitalization of financial institutions of every size."

Brown described his move as one others will want to follow. "We have led the world today," he said.

Glenn Hubbard, a former chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush and now dean of Columbia Business School in New York, agrees.

In other Obama news, General David Petraeus expressed positive support for the U.S. engaging in diplomatic talks with the Taliban.

Members of the Taliban, you may recall, are not only enemies of America, they're the enemies of civilization as we know it. And that's not much of an exaggeration, if it's an exaggeration at all.

My fellow prisoners, will John McCain now mock General Petraeus's foreign policy views, just as he did those of Barack Obama?

One never knows, given that he's changing his position on just about everything else from day to day, and even from hour to hour.