Last week, Times columnist Joe Nocera asked a simple question: what is business waiting for? Why isn’t the private sector making a determined push to put people to work? He identified a few factors: the focus on short-term profits and concern about being at a competitive disadvantage; The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson took a wonkier look at the question. This weekend, the Times ran some responses that provide more insight.

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.

Like those who enjoy their car-chases, their full-frontal nudes, their dance-and-song ensembles, the strip of the populace tickled by the thought of Hank Paulson cringing over a toilet is now, evidently, sufficient to launch a movie.

Oh Harry Reid. We get what you’re trying to say in this Senate video, but sometimes things just come out totally wrong, you know? Like 36,000 people losing their jobs…isn’t that great. But we understand what you’re driving at, don’t worry.

Two moments of Glenn today, both from yesterday’s show. One that makes reasonable sense. One that really just doesn’t. The latter first. In his ongoing campaign against health care reform Glenn Beck pulled a new rationale out of his hat last night: Ben Franklin did not demand health care during the writing of the Constitution. So if Benjamin Franklin did not write public health care in to the Constitution 250 years ago HOW DARE WE?

It is perhaps a measure of the media cycles of the blogosphere that I consider the latest study from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism on last week’s news coverage to be encouraging. The coverage of the Salahis and Tiger Woods may have trumped health care, but it couldn’t hold a candle to Afghanistan