John Lennon once sang that "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." So, it seems, is politics. The news this morning that two of Wall Street's most storied firms, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., were following their distinguished former competitor Bear Stearns toward extinction was met with misery and fear in living rooms and conference rooms across the country--and rightly so. "The biggest reshaping of the financial industry since the Great Depression," wrote Bloomberg News. "Catastrophe," added the New York Post. But something tells me that Barack Obama's brain trust didn't...