Sheila Bair, Chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, is supposedly one of the few at least halfway sensible federal regulators who actually warned about the banks’ risky behavior and maintains a healthy skepticism of the laissez faire ideology that shielded their predatory behavior both before and after it tanked the US and Western economies.

Michael Gerson of the Washington Post Editorial page really phones one in today. I know it is the day after Thanksgiving and there is a tendency to just rehash old arguments in an effort to get a column or blog post out, but really this is beautiful example of false equivalency and intellectual laziness topped with a cherry of partisan world view.

There is a particularly egregious sheen to the shilling of education that the for-profit institutions exercise.  When it cheats the educational system out of badly-needed funding while taking advantage of potential workers, it is a crime.

On Tuesday we learned that the much-heralded “peace talks” NATO orchestrated between the Afghan government and Taliban officials had included several meetings with an impostor claiming to be Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour. This news appeared to place General David Petraeus in a very bad light, as he had even been described as having “facilitated the talks by allowing Taliban officials to fly to the meetings in safety.” Little wonder, then, that the Washington Post felt obligated to engage in some Petraeus image rehabilitation. They happily did so today by trying to place the blame for the impostor on the British. The New York Times was quite happy to join in on this effort, contributing a “no comment” from British intelligence and quoting a passage from the Post article describing “the British as more aggressive than the Americans in pushing for a political settlement to end the war.”

Lisa Keen wisely wonders what lies ahead for a Democratic party that fails to deliver for a core voting bloc they may have taken for granted one too many times.

When the public trust is lost, the basis for our system as a whole is destroyed. Without trust in a lawful and valid financial system, the public will not take the necessary step of investing.

A brief look at what’s happening in the news on the morning after Thanksgiving 2010.

From a tragedy, four miracles happened.

Johnny Carson and Doc Severinsen — Thanksgiving, 1979, from The Tonight Show.

Did you get to the theater this holiday? Do you have plans to see a movie between now and the end of the year? Do tell here in comments.