Our current view on The Pandemic here at newsfromme.com is Guardedly Optimistic. We're impressed with the speed and scope of the vaccinations but feel that there are too many folks and elected officials who think it's over…too much unmasking and public gathering.
I'm as vaccinated as a person can be right now and I still wear a mask and keep a good distance from others when out in the wild. When people ask me if I expect to go to this or that public event in the future, my answer is still "We'll see" and I don't put much stock in anyone's predictions of when things will be "normal" again. I don't even believe in anyone's notions of what will constitute normality. Clearly, a lot of things have changed forever.
I'm not watching politics much but every time I peek, I see Donald Trump throwing his little Sore Loser "I won in a landslide!" fit. A lot of those who back him up seem to me to not really believe he won but they do believe that's a good position from which to operate. And as Matthew Rozsa notes in this article, a lot of Republican leaders are trying to have it both ways. They want to keep Trump voters angry about "The Steal" without insisting that there was one.
The Trump/Hitler analogies in that article go too far, as all Anyone/Hitler comparisons usually do. But I'm going to quote this one paragraph because I may want to refer people to it at a later date…
It isn't really necessary to go through every specious Trump claim with a fine-toothed comb. He already had the opportunity to do so multiple times, and he lost on every single occasion. His own attorney general, William Barr, investigated Trump's claims and found that Biden had won legitimately. Republican leaders in the key states whose results would need to be overturned for Trump to win admitted that he had lost. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Trump's assertions had no merit. He filed dozens of lawsuits and lost every single one that asserted fraud, as well as nearly all of the ones in which he did not claim fraud. (More than two-thirds of the 60 cases he brought to court did not claim fraud at all but appear to have been PR stunts; he won only one of those, a Pennsylvania case over technical procedural issues.) Many of those judges were Republicans, including some appointed by Trump himself.
And I'd add one more big point to that: Before the election, every single poll major poll — including the Fox News Poll and those from other agencies that skewed pro-Trump — showed him losing by a significant margin…and then he lost by a significant margin. Explain that conspiracy against him along with the dozens of others.
These days, I'm probably more interested in what's going on with the San Diego Convention Center. The center's website now lists "Comic-Con Special Edition" for November 26-29 — four days instead of three. That's Friday through Monday but perhaps the idea is that Monday is a teardown/moving out day and not a day the convention would be open. The calendar there also shows so many other conventions booked that it's doubtful the Comic-Con people could switch to any other dates later this year.
And it says the "Special Edition" — details of which I understand are still very, very "iffy" ‐ would have an attendance of 130,000. I seriously doubt they'll be trying to make it that large.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has transferred about 300 teenage girls who had arrived this month at the San Diego Convention Center to a facility in Texas to make room for younger children. The San Diego Convention Center, which is currently being used to house unaccompanied minors who arrived in the United States to seek asylum from their homelands, reached capacity last weekend at about 1,450 children — all girls ages 13 to 17 and some younger who were accompanied by their teenage siblings.
I am resisting the compulsion to go down there and host panels for them. And if I read the news correctly, the homeless folks who have been occupying another part of the convention center are now being relocated elsewhere and it will soon cease to be a place for them.
Also in the meantime, the San Diego City Council is grappling with the question of last year's Measure C, which was a ballot proposal to raise the local hotel tax to finance a major expansion of the convention center along with several homeless programs and an awful of much-needed street repairs. The initiative garnered 65.24% of the vote but it technically needed two-thirds…
…or did it? There are currently all sorts of court challenges and arguments saying that it only needed to surpass 50% or maybe that it came close enough…or something. The Mayor and City Council are (mostly) saying yes, it passed, let's go ahead with it. Further discussions and court decisions are pending.
The forecast for the 2022 WonderCon is that it will take place for real at the Anaheim Convention Center and the dates circulating are April 1-3, which is not Easter Weekend. I place no stock in predictions but if I did, that would seem like a pretty safe one. As with everything in this dispatch, we shall see.