Health violations? Rally's temporarily closed? Say it ain't so, Slick Jeffie.

My fictional doppelgänger (sorry, Shane -- look it up) clued me into the Rally's tragedy. Personally, I think White Castle set them up.

Rogar has seemed a bit intemperate of late, but then again, it's an election year.

However, credit the anonymous Twitter troll for maintaining good relations with fast food chains. After all, come January 1, quite a few of Team Gahan's operatives will be transitioning from "your TIF suite is ready, Mr. Lanz" to "ya want fries with that?"

Rally's in New Albany temporarily closed due to health violations, by Brooke McAfee (Tom May Biblical Concordance)

NEW ALBANY — The Rally's at 401 Vincennes St. in New Albany was closed Wednesday by the Floyd County Health Department due to numerous health code violations.

During a routine inspection, a food inspector from the Floyd County Health Department temporarily closed the fast food restaurant around 2 p.m. Wednesday afternoon after finding four critical violations and numerous minor violations, according to Floyd County Health Officer Dr. Tom Harris. They "felt the food service was unsafe," he said.

Harris said the restaurant will be closed until it is cleaned, and the health department will conduct the same inspection in the morning ...

"In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 21st century."

Clear-headed, incisive and damning. Speaking for myself, the past two years have brought the greatest civics (and history, and economics) lessons for me since college, perhaps exceeding it.

Near the end, the author observes:

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

But if inequality is the straw breaking the escalator's back ...

Read this essay.

Our Miserable 21st Century, by Nicholas Eberstadt (Commentary)

From work to income to health to social mobility, the year 2000 marked the beginning of what has become a distressing era for the United States

On the morning of November 9, 2016, America’s elite—its talking and deciding classes—woke up to a country they did not know. To most privileged and well-educated Americans, especially those living in its bicoastal bastions, the election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect someone like Trump as president? Certainly not one they were familiar with, or understood anything about.

Whatever else it may or may not have accomplished, the 2016 election was a sort of shock therapy for Americans living within what Charles Murray famously termed “the bubble” (the protective barrier of prosperity and self-selected associations that increasingly shield our best and brightest from contact with the rest of their society). The very fact of Trump’s election served as a truth broadcast about a reality that could no longer be denied: Things out there in America are a whole lot different from what you thought.

Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the “real America” outside the bubble. In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 21st century.

It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.

The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it. (So much for the vaunted “information era” and “big-data revolution.”) Now that those signals are no longer possible to ignore, it is high time for experts and intellectuals to reacquaint themselves with the country in which they live and to begin the task of describing what has befallen the country in which we have lived since the dawn of the new century ...

Krugman: An economy "slowly healing," and a right-wing movement that "lives in an intellectual bubble."

Jack Welch being a prominent bubble inhabitant.

Truth About Jobs, by Paul Krugman (New York Times)

Is the U.S. employment picture getting better? Yes, it is ...

... None of this should be taken to imply that the situation is good, or to deny that we should be doing better — a shortfall largely due to the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans, who have blocked any and all efforts to accelerate the pace of recovery. (If the American Jobs Act, proposed by the Obama administration last year, had been passed, the unemployment rate would probably be below 7 percent.) The U.S. economy is still far short of where it should be, and the job market has a long way to go before it makes up the ground lost in the Great Recession. But the employment data do suggest an economy that is slowly healing, an economy in which declining consumer debt burdens and a housing revival have finally put us on the road back to full employment.

And that’s the truth that the right can’t handle.

If we'd just run the city like a deep fryer ...

Q - What did the New Albany councilperson say after the next election cycle?

A - You want fries with that?