I’ve been sitting on this post for a while.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. You hear that a lot, and it’s true. Chatham, Sauganash, Bronzeville, South Shore all have distinct characters, histories, and loyalties. What they increasingly share is a Walgreens closing. ABC7 ran a story last month about Chatham residents furious over the upcoming closure of the Walgreens at 86th and Cottage Grove. The story is mostly a string of quotes from upset residents, and the upset is real. One man managing kidney transplants and diabetes who takes 14 pills a day, a woman in an electric wheelchair who lives down the block. These are sympathetic people facing a genuine inconvenience, maybe worse.

But the story raises questions it never bothers to ask. I did some quick checking, the kind of thing a reporter could do in twenty minutes. After this closure, Chatham still has three major chain drugstores and several independent local pharmacies. This is not a pharmacy desert. The nearest replacement Walgreens is 1.3 miles away, and Walgreens is even offering 90 days of free prescription delivery to ease the transition.

Here’s some useful context ABC7 didn’t offer: I live in Sauganash, a neighborhood with a very different demographic profile than Chatham. Right now, today, I am as far from my nearest Walgreens as Chatham residents will be after the closure. Nobody is writing outrage stories about Sauganash.
One alderman called this “pharmaceutical genocide.” Another called for charging Walgreens with “first degree corporate abandonment.” That’s vivid language. But Walgreens isn’t a public utility. It’s a company that expanded aggressively into neighborhoods across Chicago for decades, then, when shrinking its footprint made business sense, started closing stores. That’s what large national chains do. They have no covenant with the neighborhood. They never did.

The actual story here isn’t Walgreens’s betrayal. It’s that somewhere along the way, communities stopped patronizing local pharmacies and shifted their loyalty and their prescriptions to national chains that were cheaper and more convenient. The local pharmacist who knew your name and would make a delivery in a pinch got replaced by a corporation that optimizes for shareholder value. When that corporation decides your neighborhood is no longer worth the trouble, you discover that the relationship was always one-sided.

Chatham’s anger is understandable. But the lesson isn’t that Walgreens owes the neighborhood more. It’s that neighborhoods can’t outsource their civic infrastructure to companies whose headquarters are in Deerfield and whose loyalty runs exactly as deep as the profit margin.

Tomorrow (at an ungodly hour) I have my second cataract surgery scheduled. I don’t have as much foreboding about it as I did the first but I don’t look forward to it nonetheless.

My left eye, the one that has already been operated on, is presently in a bizarre inbetween state. There is a notable difference among the vision using that eye alone, the vision using both eyes (with or without glasses), and the vision with my right eye (with or without glasses). With my left eye without my glasses I can read from a distance of about nine inches or closer but the lines of print are sort of wavy. With my glasses I can’t read at all using that eye. With my right eye I can read fairly normally with or without my glasses. My vision is slightly fuzzy now with or without my glasses.

Colors as seen by my left eye are noticeably different. They’re brighter, clearer. As seen by my right eye I now perceive a sort of yellowish tinge to them.

I suspect that this “inbetween” condition will continue for the next month (at least) until I get my new prescription glasses. That will make my regular considerable volume of reading that much more difficult if not completely impossible.

For someone like me, accustomed to spending much of every day reading, that prospect is more disorienting than the surgery itself

Although reading is difficult for me at this point, I’ve been trying to remain current on President Trump’s trip to China. It saddens me that so much of the commentary might well have been predetermined, written before the president set out. Rather than reading commentary I suggest you read the news reports (such as they are). Here’s CNN’s report on Trump’s reception on his arrival:

President Donald Trump has just landed in Beijing to an arrival ceremony replete with the pomp and pageantry the US president is known to appreciate.

In a show of the importance of the trip, China’s leader Xi Jinping has dispatched a high-level official to lead the welcome delegation — Chinese Vice President Han Zheng.

Han is widely seen as Xi’s envoy for diplomatic events and last year attended Trump’s presidential inauguration. He is a retired member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Chinese Communist Party’s top-most decision making body.

Other officials on the ground include US Ambassador to China David Perdue, his counterpart Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng, and China’s executive vice minister of foreign affairs, Ma Zhaoxu, according to the White House.

The US president will also be met by 300 Chinese youth in matching blue and white uniforms who marched along the tarmac holding Chinese flags, along with a military honor guard and a military band.

Contrast that with President Obama’s reception nine years ago, as reported at The Guardian:

China’s leaders have been accused of delivering a calculated diplomatic snub to Barack Obama after the US president was not provided with a staircase to leave his plane during his chaotic arrival in Hangzhou before the start of the G20.

Chinese authorities have rolled out the red carpet for leaders including India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, and the British prime minister, Theresa May, who touched down on Sunday morning.

But the leader of the world’s largest economy, who is on his final tour of Asia, was forced to disembark from Air Force One through a little-used exit in the plane’s belly after no rolling staircase was provided when he landed in the eastern Chinese city on Saturday afternoon.

When Obama did find his way on to a red carpet on the tarmac below there were heated altercations between US and Chinese officials, with one Chinese official caught on video shouting: “This is our country! This is our airport!”

President Xi and his advisors know exactly what they are doing and whom they are dealing with. The Chinese president is performing simultaneously for a domestic, an American, and a global audience. Had Xi treated Trump the way Obama was treated in Hangzhou, many observers would have interpreted it as a deliberate signal that Washington was expected to approach Beijing as a supplicant rather than a peer. The risk for Xi in that is that Trump might have arrived at the same conclusion.

What is clear at this point is that both President Xi and President Trump want something. The open questions are what do they want and who wants it more?

I found a number of aspects of this Politico poll interesting. Let’s ruminate about some of them.

The first question was about whether people thought there was “too much money in politics”. 80% of Harris voters thought so; 77% of Trump voters agreed. I would say that qualifies as a consensus.

While I agree that there’s too much money in politics, I suspect my interpretation of that is different from most. Let’s consider spending in presidential elections since 2008:

And it’s not just presidential elections. Here’s a comparison of the campaign spending in the Democratic primary for U. S. Senate:

Not only was the spending high but note, too, that there’s very little relationship between the amount of money spent and winning an election.

I’m open to explanations for why that be. Here’s my speculation. Campaign spending is shaped by people whose incentives reward spending not efficiency and that is more true for Democrats than Republicans.

I also wonder what correctives people would support? Limits? Disclosure? Public financing? Overturning Citizens United v. FEC?

Here’s another topic on which quite a few people agreed: 61% thought that billionaires wielded too much power in politics (75% of Harris voters agreed). I agree with that, too, but, again, I suspect my interpretation is somewhat different from that of most people. I doubt that billionaires are wielding power by buying candidates or their elections (other than their own elections, of course). I think it’s more subtle (and less defensible) than that. I think that politicians and their consultants are trying to curry favor with the ultra-rich to get them to donate to their campaigns, provide jobs for them, etc.

Here’s a final area of agreement I found somewhat surprising: a majority of Americans (53%) see “special interest” money as corrupting politics rather than as an exercise of freedom of speech. I was unable to identify what was meant by “special interests” or the breakdown of opinion between Harris voters and Trump voters.

The SCOTUS decision in Louisiana v. Callais continues to trouble me and to explain why we need to dig into the history a bit. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, Louisiana’s population was, as it is now, roughly one-third black. The state had eight Congressional districts. All were held by Democrats—remember, that was the era of the “Solid South”. None of Louisiana’s Congressional representatives was black.

Today the situation is quite different. Louisiana has six Congressional districts. Four of those districts are held by Republicans, two by Democrats. All of the Republican Congressmen are white while both Democrats are black. Today’s two black Democratic seats are primarily made possible by the wild racial gerrymandering, a picture of which I’ve already shown.

In 1965 the absence of black representatives was the result of racial exclusion; today, the alignment of race and party means that representation is largely a byproduct of partisan geography.

The following table illustrates the challenge:
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If a non-gerrymandered map were drawn that did not cross parish boundaries, the greatest likelihood would be that Louisiana would be left with no Democratic seats. If Caddo parish in the north were bundled with other adjacent parishes with a large percentage of black voters, it’s possible that one seat with a black majority could be eked out.

The questions this raises are at the heart of the controversy over redistricting in Louisiana.

• Does not being able to elect a candidate of your choice impair your right to vote?
• Does not being able to elect a candidate of the race of your choice impair your right to vote?
• Does not being able to elect a candidate of the political party of your choice impair your right to vote?
• Does not being able to elect a candidate of the political party and race of your choice impair your right to vote?
• If you answered “Yes” to any of the above, why is that different in Louisiana than it is, say, in Illinois?

Personally, my preference would be for all Congressional districts throughout the United States to be determined algorithmically to be compact and not cross jurisdiction boundaries to the greatest degree possible AND for there to be at least three times and possibly four times as many Congressional districts as there are at present. Either of those would require an act of Congress (which I think is unlikely) or a Constitutional amendment (which is even less likely).

However, I do think we need to recognize just how different things are than they were 60 years ago. Not only are black voters not suppressed as they were then but the makeup and nature of the political parties are drastically different. But that’s a topic for a different post.

After my cataract surgery it’s hard for me to read. Using my left (operated on) eye only it’s too fuzzy with or without my glasses. Using my right eye only with my glasses I can read without difficulty but keeping my left eye closed while I read is a strain on its own.

Since my ordinary daily schedule includes an enormous amount of reading, that restricts my daily activities pretty strictly. In a typical day I would read several hundred emails (mostly uninteresting) and scores of editorials, columns, articles, and blog posts. If I don’t maintain that pace, my Inboxes (multiple email addresses) get cluttered quite quickly. I’m barely able to maintain a quarter of that now.

I continue to look for good legal analyses of Louisiana v. Callais. The best I’ve found so far is from Edward Foley at SCOTUSBlog. Suffice it to say he doesn’t think much of the majority decision. Here’s a snippet:

Alito’s opinion for the court in Callais is an altogether different matter. Unlike Shelby County or Brnovich, Callais is an abomination.

Callais purports to interpret VRA’s Section 2, but it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section 2 is that the 1982 amendment to the section’s text creates a “results” test for determining whether there is liability under the section, replacing the “intent” test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section 2 claims. As the text states, no “standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed … which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” Yet Callais defiantly converts Section 2 back to an intent inquiry rather than a results analysis.

In various passages in the Callais majority opinion, Alito denies substituting an intent test for the statute’s explicit “results” standard, saying that evidence of intent is only to be considered as relevant to the results determination. Specifically, he says that the court’s “interpretation does not demand a finding of intentional dis­crimination,” while acknowledging that “it imposes liability only when the circum­stances give rise to a strong inference that intentional dis­crimination occurred.” But the bulk of Alito’s opinion belies that the consideration of intent is at all limited in the way he suggests. Instead, it is manifest that intent has become the touchstone of the entire Section 2 inquiry. When discussing the specific facts of the case, Alito faults the Section 2 claimants for “fail[ing] to show an objective likelihood of intentional discrimination based on the totality of circumstances.” Moreover, when setting forth the threshold perquisites that any Section 2 plaintiff must establish before having any chance of prevailing, Alito categorically states that plaintiffs must “demon­strate that the State’s chosen map was driven by racial con­siderations rather than permissible aims.” It’s undeniable that “driven by racial considerations” is an intent, not results, requirement.

It continues in that vein.

Most of the commentary I’ve read has focused on the policy aspects of the decision rather than the legal ones so I found an analysis that relies more on the law refreshing. Perhaps more will appear over time.

I was pretty woozy after my cataract operation and the following day. My left eye aches a little, with occasional more serious aches. In our post-operative consultation my ophthalmologist said that everything I was experiencing was within normal limits and I was cleared to return to my ordinary activities with a few limitations. Eyedrops four times a day. Don’t bend over. Don’t rub your eye.

The vision in my left eye is noticeably better than it was—it’s actually a little better than the eye which hasn’t been operated on. For the next three weeks (at least) I will be in a strange transition world in which my old eyeglasses don’t work for me as well as they once did but changing my prescription would be premature. I’ll probably avoid driving for the duration.

I wouldn’t be doing as well as I am without my loving, supportive wife. She faithfully puts my eyedrops in, is my driver, and reminds me to observe my limitations.

I hope to be able to post a little.

Posting may be a little less frequent over the next several weeks than I have expected of myself. Over the last 22 years I have written more than 22,000 posts. That’s more than 1,000 posts per year, nearly three posts a day for 22 years.

Tomorrow I’m getting cataract surgery on my left eye and, honestly, I’m apprehensive about it. I realize that’s irrational but I grew up with the knowledge that my dad’s grandfather had been blinded by a botched cataract surgery. That was more than a century ago and an enormous amount has changed over the last century—that’s why it’s irrational of me.

Whatever the outcome I probably won’t feel like posting tomorrow and I suspect I won’t be able to see well enough to post. The reason for that is, well, I wear glasses and the operation will in all likelihood change my prescription. The present plan is one eye tomorrow and the other in two weeks. That suggests that for the next month things will be, shall we say, in flux.