Incoming Councilmember Rose Herrera is already stirring up drama on the 18th floor after she abruptly fired her senior policy analyst Mark Tiernan—two days before the holiday break. It seemed even more odd to some City Hall staffers, considering Tiernan was the lead man on Herrera’s transition team—and was her top pick for chief of staff. So what happened?

Sometimes, even bleak economic times like this, the Grinch doesn’t have a chance. Just ask Leannette M. Spence, assistant vice president and personal banker at the Bank of America in Cambrian Park. Last week, Spence had a customer who accidentally left her card in the bank’s ATM. When the customer called in to cancel it, she learned that a $200 cash withdrawal had been made at the same ATM immediately after she left, which led to all kinds of anxiety on her part: was there a way to track down who stole it? Could she get the money back in time for Christmas?

Just as Cindy Chavez was fading into the political sunset, the former councilwoman has been brought out of retirement to pinch hit for the South Bay Labor Council’s Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins to group to help sort out labor’s agenda at City Hall. (Someone’s got to count votes and rally the Laborites at City Hall.) Officially, she’ll be working for SBLC’s Working Partnership group, a nonprofit funded by foundation grants. (This according to the Mercury News — Chavez doesn’t talk to us much since Metro endorsed her opponent in the last mayoral election.)

Councilwoman Madison Nguyen was spot on when she said that her Wednesday night shindig at Motif restaurant felt more like a holiday party than a fundraiser for her No Recall campaign. Mayor Chuck Reed set a more serious tone when he grabbed the mic from Nguyen (who reminded everyone that there were no contribution limits in this campaign…”keep writing zeros,” she said ) and greeted the attendees, mostly public officials and elected leaders from around the Valley, who had spent the last hour sipping wine and stuffing shrimp on a stick in their mouths.

Apparently the New England Patriots worked up an appetite Sunday while demolishing the Raiders 49-26, so the following day, they drove down to San Jose to pay a visit to Morton’s Steakhouse. Lucky for the old guys on the team, it was “rookie night,” which means the newbies had to pick up the tab. And what a tab. A tipster informs Fly that the bill came to $30,000.

Dec. 14: Police arrest a suspect after a club fight.

About ten men were arrested at club closing time at South First and San San Salvador streets in the SoFA district early Sunday morning when several fights spilled into the street and a metal crowd control barrier toppled over. Police standing by quickly grabbed and handcuffed the suspected combatants to maintain order and assure a smooth, safe exit for patrons. After most of the clubgoers left the area, a journalist snapped two iPhone photos of one handcuffed arrestee in the middle of South First Street surrounded by six officers and being held face down on the pavement. An officer who appeared from a distance to be kneeing the suspect in the back decided that was a little too much of the First Amendment for him and ordered the iPhotographer out of shooting distance. The iPhotographer held up SJPD press credentials and snapped one more photo. The officer cited the photojournalist.

Among the thousands of out-of-state checks that flooded into California in support of Prop. 8 last fall was one for $9,999, from Plano, Texas. This contribution to the anti-gay-marriage cause came from Alan Stock, CEO of Cinemark, which owns two national movie theater chains. In coming weeks, Stock will likely be earning a lot more than 10 grand from gay men and their supporters.

Calling someone a communist isn’t exactly like launching the F-Bomb— unless you are a member of the local Vietnamese diaspora. That’s probably why KBLX, the San Francisco–based radio station, recently received some complaints from listeners who say they were offended when a programmer on a 1430 AM Vietnamese radio talk show used “profanity” when talking about Madison Nguyen, the embattled San Jose councilwoman who is facing a March 3 recall election.

The idea sounded so weird, it was as if someone had snuck a clip from The Onion into Fly’s Sunday New York Times. But there it was: NYT columnist Maureen Dowd, writing about the work of local newspaper reporters being outsourced to India. It seems that a Southern California publisher by the name of James Macpherson has hired reporters in Bangalore to write about everything from the Pasadena Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony to city politics. The smalltime operator even has a name for this neat trick of buying with rupees and selling for dollars: He calls it “glocal” journalism.

It gets better (or worse): big-time newspaper publisher Dean Singleton, owner of our very own San Jose Mercury News (and every other Bay Area newspaper but the Chron) has endorsed the idea.

AMT suddenly shuttered following cancellation of Tarzan.

In September, American Musical Theatre of San Jose threw a big, raunchy party for the ladies—a tuneful strip show known as The Full Monty. The audience, reported Metro’s critic, was full of white-haired ladies “snorting, choking [with] tear-inducing laughter.” There were tears but no laughter this Monday as AMT suddenly announced that it was going out of business. The company, which began life in 1935 (during another economic meltdown) as the San Jose Civic Light Opera, was no more.

Every time the economy tanks, police departments warn people to be on guard against the inevitable uptick in crime. The logic is simple: the more desperate people get for work and money, the more they turn to lives of crime to bring in some extra cash. Fly got a firsthand view of the phenomenon last Wednesday when we found ourselves right in the middle of a bust.

The president of the San Jose Downtown Association, the group that represents downtown San Jose business and property owners, has called for the establishment of a police advisory commission. Though his position has not been officially endorsed by SJDA’s board, Art Bernstein says it is consistent with the objectives of the group’s advocacy arm.

San Jose needs “a body in between the police and city council so that every time there are issues of concern to the community, it doesn’t take a city council meeting,” Bernstein told Fly. A “citizen’s advisory group” would fill that role best. In an OpEd in Sunday’s Merc, Bernstein cites recent initiatives to charge downtown businesses for policing costs and notes that police have become “more aggressive with permit compliance, code enforcement and the closing down of some of downtown’s bars and clubs.”

In the same way that some Vietnamese love to hate Councilwoman Madison Nguyen, San Jose cops appear once again to have turned against one of their own—Councilman Pete Constant. In the latest episode of Constant vs. the Police Officer’s Association, the POA is furious that Constant, who is a former cop, openly opposes their pick, Dave Bacigalupi, to represent them on the Association of Retired San Jose Police Officers and Firefighters board, which is directly involved in deciding retirement for officers, among other things.

In a video that was circulated among City Hall insiders last week, then-District 8 Council Candidate Pat Waite can be seen addressing a rally in favor of the recall effort against District 7 Councilmember Madison Nguyen. Word of the appearance set off a storm of controversy, and Waite immediately began to backtrack. He sent an email to Nguyen in which he performed a verbal tap-dance to explain that the “rumor” of his support for the recall was untrue.

Will the Measure B sales tax approval for BART completion go down the tubes, like the convention center expansion did in 2002, leaving San Jose with a blue striped circus tent instead of a real building? Both measures were approved by a majority of voters, but failed to capture the two-thirds approval needed for tax measures.

This time, the margin’s even closer: four-tenths of a percent shy of the magic number at 66.27 percent, according to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. (2002’s Measure F won 64.8 percent of the vote.)

It was a night of celebrations around Silicon Valley, from swanky spots in Mountain View and Willow Glen to the Fourth Street Bowl and the Popeye’s franchise on Santa Clara Street. San Jose Inside was on hand to record the historic night.