Think U.S. bankers have it tough with the new executive compensation limits? Check out what Conservatives in Britain are proposing for bankers there.

The economic stimulus package has been passed by both houses of Congress and is set to be signed by the President on Tuesday. But while the voting is complete the debate rages on. And what about the next item on the president’s early agenda – the banking crisis and the question of nationalization? All that and more in today’s Sunday Show Roundup …

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

BREAKING: Ken Starr anticipates partisan rancor in any Supreme Court picks Obama gets to make. That and the day’s other (less predictable) political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Israel is reportedly on the brink of releasing Marwan Barghouti from prison, in an effort to bolster Fatah and Abu Mazen ahead of a possible prisoner swap with Hamas.

It’s the right and the smart thing to do. And with Netanyahu probably on the brink of a second premiereship, right and smart are both going to be in seriously short supply.

There’s been an alternative theory afoot in recent days which holds that Tim Geithner’s ill-received bank rescue plan wasn’t so much a plan as a holding pattern; and that the ‘stress test’ for banks may be the back door through which we move toward some sort of nationalization of at

least some of the big banks. Nouriel Roubini suggested something like this just after Geithner’s speech. And now it seems that Obama too is leaving himself a decent amount of semantic and policy wiggle room to pursue such an approach.

Last week Ron Brownstein published an article based on an interview he and four other columnists were granted with President Obama. And now E.J.Dionne has published a detailed transcript of just what Obama said on the issue of nationalization.

The upshot is that Obama would not rule out Swedish model nationalization, though he clearly wants to avoid it. And the opposition to nationalization which Obama made clear early last week seems, in this interview, to be at least in part a matter of semantics, or subject to enough subsequent revision and experimentation as to bring us to the same end result. But this is a case where reading the precise words he used is key.

Shorter John McCain: Obama needs to do a better job of letting us jerk him around.