As Fly operatives head to DC to keep an eye on Silicon Valley’s vain and connected, they are noticing that the Obama presidency is already having a positive effect on the economy.

News that Saratoga developer Ante Bilic is moving forward with plans to convert a Gilroy restaurant into a topless bar has set South County tongues wagging. Some locals are worrying aloud that the proposed Showgirls nightclub would be a crime magnet. Others seem to find some humor in the situation.

Silicon Valley citizens will now be able to crawl out of wrecked train cars in a calm, organized fashion with the recent installment of large safety signs inside all of VTA’s Light Rail cars and buses. Posted in the last few weeks, the new signs give detailed instructions on what passengers should do in case of an emergency, including how to press a button to talk to the vehicle operator, and how to exit a train in a tunnel (Fly’s head’s hurting already).

It was a little surprising to learn that City Councilwoman Madison Nguyen was recommending Pat Waite for an open seat on the planning commission. Considering the fact that Waite, who lost the District 8 council race to Democrat Rose Herrera in November, had stood in front of a group of Vietnamese Americans before the election and told them he was looking forward to helping them with their effort to recall Ngyuen.

It was somewhat ironic that Councilwoman Nora Campos couldn’t make it to the Rules Committee meeting Wednesday because she was stuck in a meeting regarding the proposed San Pedro Urban Square Market. Ironic because while Campos was talking with the Elections Commission, her colleagues were refusing to help her in her lonely effort to defeat that plan. Updated 3:45

If the vote to ban gay marriage in California did anything for the conservative Christian movement, it confirmed that they have just enough political clout to get by in a blue state. It clearly boosted San Jose’s Values Advocacy Council, which worked hard to pass Prop. 8 in the November election. The group isn’t stopping there.

So Leon Panetta has no experience in intelligence, huh? Could have fooled San Jose attorney Bill Gates, who sat at a desk facing President-elect Obama’s choice for CIA chief for two years in the 1960s at Fort Ord. Gates and Panetta worked together in a military intelligence unit in 1965 and 1966, before Panetta launched a career in politics by joining the staff of U.S. Senate Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel, a moderate California Republican whose head was handed to him when he refused to kowtow to the party’s nascent right wing.

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.