Some random responses to today’s Café readers:
Thanks, Eric, for the reference to the “Reader” article on the mayor’s staff. I’m going to pick that one up at 7-Eleven along with the milk tonight.
No Vision writes: “Mark, I wouldn’t expect vision from anyone in this town.” We keep hoping that you are wrong, No Vision, but so far the evidence seems to support your position, not ours.
Edgar writes: “If the Chargers should ever announce an imminent departure, the public outcry would be thunderous. The great edifices of our city government would shake as from the force of an 8.0 earthquake. The spineless elders of the city would cower and immediately promise anything.”
I don’t know about this one, Edgar. No matter what, any solution to the Charger issue is going to involve an election. And regularly-scheduled general elections are usually several years apart — and you have to start many months in advance of election day by gathering signatures to get on a ballot. So I don’t see how any last-minute to save the Chargers would really work in the City of San Diego. The time to find solutions — if people want to find them — is now, not at the eleventh hour.
And Mr. Truman (who I take it from his post was not named after the famous Democratic President!) has taken offense at my term “purported exaggerations” as applied to Al Gore in 2000. Come on, now. I know there are always hold outs after every war (like the elderly Japanese soldiers who were still fighting World War II in the jungles of remote islands years after the war ended). But who, in 2007, can possibly defend the way Al Gore was covered by the media and treated by the public in 2000? At a time when terrorists were preparing to attack the World Trade Center, when George Bush was planning to drive the country back into crippling deficits, and when the alarm bells for global warming were already going off, how can anyone say that we were right in the 2000 campaign to be debating whether Gore invented the Internet (or only helped a lot), or whether he really did visit the Texas wildfires with FEMA Director James Lee Witt (remember the good old days when FEMA actually had a highly skilled director who knew what he was doing), or whether Gore was too boring to be president (while no one bothered to ask whether Bush was too incompetent to be president)? Let’s hope that during the 2008 presidential campaign all of us — media and public alike — keep our eyes on the big picture and the real issues.
— MARK FABIANI