Bob Caesar's intrinsically sad battle against drug addiction treatment clinics -- and this supposed Democrat's heroic ongoing advocacy of the beautiful people.

From the last council meeting.

Those people dying from overdoses ... they're not our kind of people, are they ... and they just don't look good, do they?

America’s opioid epidemic is worsening (The Economist)

States are losing the battle against deadly drugs like heroin and fentanyl.

But we don't have this problem in New Albany, do we Bob?

Even Healthy-Looking Suburbs Are Dying From Drugs, by Laura Bliss (CityLab)

Some communities are much sicker than they look, according to our analysis of CDC data and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s new county health rankings.

 ... Drug mortality rates are notoriously shifty; according to the CDC, they’re likely undercounted in many counties, due to unresolved cases and misclassification. But the national trend is clear: Americans are dying too young from addiction—even in communities that otherwise appear healthy.

How long must we be saddled with the clueless (and corrupt) likes of Bob Caesar?

Video: "We've Reached the End of White Christian America."

Possible cause for encouragement at The Atlantic:

The United States is no longer a majority white, Christian country, and that is already beginning to have profound social and political implications. At 45 percent of the population, white Christians are a shrinking demographic—and the backlash from many members of the group against the increasing diversification of America has been swift and bitter. “People fight like that when they are losing a sense of place, a sense of belonging, and a sense of the country that they understand and love,” says Robert P. Jones, the author of The End of White Christian America, in this animated interview. “How do they reengage in public life when they can’t be the majority?”

Sunday long read redux: "For Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016."

Hillbilly Elegy was half the topic in this morning's previous post.

Sunday long read: "Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has."

If you're experiencing a snap judgment of how this interview with Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance is going to read, you're probably mistaken. I was. The best way to correct your assumption is to click through and read the story. Thanks to Bluegill for the link.

Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People, by Rod Dreher (The American Conservative)

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.

Sunday long read: "Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has."

Nothing glib out of me. Just read. A teaser appears here.

The Original Underclass: Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has, by Alec MacGillis and Propublica (The Atlantic)

Two new books—one a provocative, deeply researched history and the other an affecting memoir—are well timed to help make better sense of the plight of struggling whites in the United States. Both accounts converge on an important insight: The gloomy state of affairs in the lower reaches of white America should not have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has—and mobilizing solutions for the crisis will depend partly on closing the gaps that allowed for such obliviousness.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
By J. D. Vance

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans—the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate—obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts—Sarah Palin’s “real America”—who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity. A party losing touch with it was a party unmoored.