With a record budget deficit approaching $100 million and the limited sources of income dwindling in the recession, San Jose’s City Council is looking for creative ways to raise income. According to City Councilmember Nora Campos, “the only one of the items that even polled fair and that we may have an opportunity to receive some revenues” is the expansion of San Jose’s licensed card tables. According to Mayor Chuck Reed, the resulting tax revenues could be as much as $2-3 million per year.

Last Friday a thousand notables from high tech companies, public utilities, hospitals, local governments and NGO’s filled 96 tables at the McEnery Convention Center to hear about the State of the Valley according to the 2010 Silicon Valley Index, released by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.  “The Index has a lot of bad news this year,” said Russell Hancock, Joint Venture’s president.

Assembly Member Joe Coto has withdrawn his request for the state legislature to audit the San Jose Police Department for its use-of-force practices.

The news arrived in the form of a dear-colleagues email that was sent out yesterday by Roxanne Miller, the city’s envoy to the state legislature:

GOOD NEWS. .. I’ve just been advised by staff to members of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee that Assembly Member Coto this morning has withdrawn his request for the JLAC to audit San Jose’s Police Department’s use of force. The item will be removed from the February 17 Agenda of JLAC. Note: A request for audit could be renewed later this year as there will be two other meetings of the JLAC to consider audit requests in May/June or in August.

Rosemary Kamei emailed supporters and posted to her campaign website earlier today to announce that she is dropping out of the race for Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage’s seat. In a telephone intervew this afternoon,  she said she’d made the decision partly because of the crowded field.

“I thought long and hard about this after looking at the race and considering all the candidates,” she said. Pressed to elaborate, Kamei laughed. “There’s a lot of candidates! You know—they are good candidates, and for me personally, it was a decision I’ve made for myself. I chose to step down.”

Back in 2006, Jorge Trujillo was allegedly beaten up in San Jose by two strangers, Daniel Miller, 19, and Edward Sample, 20, wielding baseball bats. He managed to stumble away from the scene, and got over a mile away, bumping into cars along the way, according to police. Finally, someone called 911 and reported him to the police. When they arrived, Trujillo refused to speak with them or even let them approach, so the officers did what they were trained to do: they tased him. Trujillo died in hospital the next day.

With the murder trial underway in San Jose, the question being asked is to what degree did the tasing contribute to his death? Would he have died from the beating alone, meaning that Miller and Sample are guilty of murder, or was it the tasing that pushed him over the edge.

Embattled former superintendent Bob Nuñez made a surprise appearance in front of the East Side Union High School District’s Board of Trustees last night, publicly announcing that he thinks the district needs to address issues of fraud and intimidation within their own board and administration

One Charter Summit conference participant wrote “John Deasy rocked” on her conference evaluation form.  Who is John Deasy anyway? Dr. Deasy is the recently hired deputy director of education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and former superintendent of Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland. He was an afternoon speaker at Santa Clara County Office of Education’s Charter School Summit.

The East Bay Express is reporting that a Major League Baseball task force will present its findings on the A’s proposed move to San Jose to Commissioner Bud Selig on Monday. The Express reported this afternoon that Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums made the statement during a speech to the Oakland Chambers of Commerce at the Oakland Airport Hilton on Thursday.

Dellums also reportedly said he sent a message to Selig stating that a ballpark in San Jose or Fremont would result in more long-distance trips to games, creating more greenhouse gas emissions.

Have Americans lost their ability to exchange ideas and discuss politics without the equivalent of a high-school cafeteria food fight breaking out? Over the past few weeks, from San Jose to Washington, some of the language and rhetoric that’s been on display has been quite amazing.

You gotta hand it to Carly Fiorina. Love her or hate her, you can’t help watching her Internet-only ad, and that’s what campaign ads are all about—getting eyeballs. Described as everything from an SNL skit to what would happen if the kid from The Omen directed Teletubbies, it’s already gotten 375,000 hits in Youtube, and the number keeps going up and up.

The last time Dr. Patrick Phu Le showed up in the news, it was for being arrested after attacking a press photographer he accused of being a communist spy. Now, the longtime Vietnamese community activist and current candidate for the District 7 seat on the San Jose City Council has exactly one week to move to San Jose if he still wants to run.

This week’s Metro Silicon Valley cover story, excerpted here, discusses a stimulus plan authored by Councilmember Sam Liccardo and three colleagues, and the reaction of downtown businesses to the city’s efforts to reawaken a downtown economy that went off-track.

Peyton Manning vs. Drew Brees: Will one of these two quarterbacks end up as MVP of Super Bowl XLIV? Entirely possible. So is eliminating the achievement gap while increasing graduation rates for students in Santa Clara County. And the odds just got significantly better for all children in our public schools.

Photo radar helps augment traffic safety, as well as that of pedestrians and neighborhoods. A tweaking of the current policy to improve safety will not cost the state any money, and in fact will raise money while at the same time lowering emergency room health care costs. Speeding cars in our neighborhoods continue to remain an issue. The City of San Jose does what it can to manage speeding on our streets with the dollars we are able to allocate.

This is the Jan. 30-31 edition of San Jose Inside’s open forum, where comments on any topic are welcome. What’s on your mind?

Assemblyman Joe Coto (D-San Jose) isn’t happy with what he’s been reading about the SJPD in the news recently. Joined by Paul Fong (D-Cupertino), he is calling on State Auditor Elaine Howle to investigate San Jose’s police force