Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney called in to Laura Ingraham‘s radio show Friday, where the host pressed him on when, if ever, he’ll release his tax information to the public.

This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough took a moment to vent about about the in-fighting within Washington.

He pointed out an article in the New York Times that, as he described it, said that the mess we’re currently in where the economy and jobs are concerned is “worse than a recession.” The paper reported that, post-recession, incomes fell 6.7 percent between June 2009 and June 11, compared with a fall of 3.2 percent between December 2007 and June 2009, or during the recession. And, then, he gave Washington a piece of his mind.

In the midst of all this depressing talk about the economy, there is, at least, a sliver of hope. And that sliver is plastered from top to bottom with Louis Vuitton logos. The very, very rich are evidently still very, very rich and, as the result, sales of luxury goods are going strong, with some retailers even marking up pricey items.

Here’s something to get you in the holiday spirit: According to Catherine Rampell at the New York Times, last quarter’s corporate profits were the highest on record. “American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter,” Rampell writes—the largest amount since the government began tracking earnings more than 60 years ago.

As “The Apprentice” begins its 10th season on Thursday night, it’s embarking on new territory: the tough economy. Since the show’s past few seasons have been “celebrity” versions, the show hasn’t had the same focus on ambitious, hardworking professionals trying to push forward their careers. So Donald Trump and producer Mark Burnett are returning the show to its roots in hopes of helping one person turn his or her career around during hard times.

It was one of the biggest stories of last week, an irresistible metaphor-made-real. While Wall Street was having its way with the US economy, employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission were literally playing with themselves. What wasn’t widely reported, though, was that the story was several months old, and was revived by opponents of financial reform, who thought it would be an effective counter to news of the SEC’s fraud complaint against Goldman Sachs.

The media loves one-year anniversaries, hundred-day anniversaries — any excuse to zoom in on the thing they’ve been covering all along. This week’s one-year anniversary of the financial crisis — a gold mine for business magazines! Or a call for gold spray paint, if you’re BusinessWeek.

Sure, we’ve been getting lots of coverage on “the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression” going back to the market crash of last fall, but recently, the news is getting personal – it wants to know about you and your personal riches-to-rags experience. And they’re doing everything they can to make it as easy as possible for you to tell them all about your financial struggles – so that, in turn, they can tell you about your financial struggles!

Maybe you’ve been seeing the stories on the front page of the New York Times this week heralding the news that just ten months after the economy fell out from underneath us Goldman Sachs made a huge profit last quarter. Clusterstock’s John Carney attempts to help us understand what the heck is going on.