How to avoid saying sh*t when you're choking on it

I'm spending the afternoon going back and forth between the Nationwide race at Daytona and the news channels. My idea of a perfect day.

I like this Ali Velshi character who hosts a program on CNN called "my money" or "your money" or whatever. Turns out he's from Obama's tribe in Kenya, which took me by surprise because I thought I was googling a fat white guy. That new flat screen really does distort stuff sometimes.

Anyway, while Danica is slipping back in the field Ali's got David Frum on and they're having a chit-chat about the supposedly explosive new book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart.

Murray likes to make waves by writing books wherein he proposes ludicrous explanations for self-evident phenomena. Coming Apart focuses on the relative decline of America's working class since 1960. Oddly enough I've pegged the high-water mark for America's working class to the Teamsters Master Freight Agreement of that era. If Murray read this blog he wouldn't have had to write this book.

Frum apparently has a few bones to pick with Murray about his analysis of the decline of America's working class. He makes the point that there's really nothing new in Murray's book. He's right on that one.

Frum also makes the interesting point that there needs to be an analysis of why the lot of the working class improved so much from 1910 to 1960, and has been in a slow fade ever since.

Not once was the word "union" mentioned in the chat with Frum.

Exit Frum and here comes Ali's next guest, demographer-sociologist-all-round-smarty-pants Richard Florida.

Wouldn't you know it, but Velshi then has the exact conversation with Florida he just had with Frum, except he doesn't seem to realize it.

The conversation turns to how our society could turn tens of millions of shit jobs into good jobs. They dance around the problem for a few minutes. After exploring re-education and life-long learning and all the usual claptrap about the brave new world and the knowledge economy, they hit a dead end of sorts.

While any given individual can be educated for a high-skill well paying job, it just means somebody else is doing the shit job; the minimum wage stuff in nursing homes and restaurants and so on. How do we turn those into "good" jobs?

To my shock, Florida finally uttered the word "union". I was aghast!

The mainstream media is on the cusp of discovering something that's been painfully obvious for at least a hundred years;

UNIONS IMPROVE THE LIVES OF WORKING PEOPLE!

Mario Monti: most important man in the world

Actually, when Time magazine put him on their cover, he was only the "most important man in Europe".

Well, if this blog had a cover, we'd fix that caption. Obviously an oversight by the folks at Time.

So why is this Goldman Sachs advisor and un-elected Prime Minister of Italy the "most important man in Europe/the world?

Damned if I know. Seems to have something to do with his links to Goldman Sachs.

After all, they're the mega-bullies who've engineered the current economic crisis, and they're also profiting most handsomely from it. I shouldn't say Monti was not elected. Goldman Sachs elected him to be the democratically elected leader of Italy.

Getting their boy on the cover of Time must be something of a coup.

But I can see why Berlusconi had to go. His insatiable appetite for teen tarts was becoming a bit of an embarrassment.

So now Mario has his big test in front of him. He has to tame those commie-infected Italian labor unions. You know the ones. All about a living wage and paid holidays and the usual smorgasbord of union demands.

Enough of that!