San Jose Inside

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.

When a bright, eager, socially conscious 21 year old tells his family and friends he wants to go into teaching, he most often gets this retort: “Damn…that is a total waste of the good money your parents spent on sending you to college and a squandering of your talents and skills.” How sad. When I told my parents I wanted to be a teacher in 1973, they were proud of my career choice.

You never know what you’ll find in the California Room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library. Every time I invade the place, I wind up staying at least an extra 30 minutes, because the room is so utterly jammed to the gills with crackpot historical miscellanea. I always wind up rummaging around for something I wasn’t even planning on looking for in the first place. If you aren’t familiar with the cargo of books, pamphlets, maps, old newspaper clippings and photographs within its walls, you should be.

For more than three years, I have had the pleasure of being the editor of San Jose Inside. It has been a lot of fun and I have learned much about myself and our community and fellow citizens. That’s why today is a sad day for me as it will be the last time I will write as a regular contributor to the site. Alas, I must give up the editorship of SJI to make more time for other projects.

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.

Well, we are no longer the safest city in the US—we lost that title two years ago. But much like that absurd slogan, “America’s 10th Largest City,” which some lunatic believed would set us up for great international renown, this title too is not worth the banner that it’s printed on. When it comes right down to it, who cares what a few magazine writers and the guy who makes the banner think? High time to set aside childish things and look to what is important in our city

Saturday, Dec. 6, marked one the most anticipated boxing matches in recent history—dubbed the “dream fight:” pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao versus the sport’s golden boy, Oscar De La Hoya. The fight was, quite unexpectedly, a drubbing. Pacquiao, the smaller boxer, who was not favored going into the fight, handily destroyed the bigger and older De la Hoya, forcing a stoppage going into the ninth round. It was a mauling. It looked like a video game where one guy plays all the time, and the other guy is still trying to figure out what buttons do what.

By Joseph Di Salvo

California spends a lot of money on education—more than $65 billion from all funding sources in 2007-08 for K-12. Yet nearly 40 percent of Latino youth and African-American youth drop out of school prior to high school graduation. Silicon Valley’s drop-out numbers are a little higher than the state average. How disdainful is this in the land of the wealthiest and most educated people on the planet?

Every serious baseball fan who has traveled a bit has seen the benefit that can come from economic development projects like the San Jose Public Market. During the 1980s and ‘90s, many American cities invested public money to build baseball stadiums in the hope that they would stimulate economic activity. There are now vibrant neighborhoods surrounding ballparks from Washington D.C. to Denver. Often controversial when proposed, these neighborhoods now stand as testament to the wisdom of public-private partnerships in pursuit of urban development. The only downside seems to be the preponderance of newspaper headlines saying (you guessed it): “If You Build It, They Will Come.”

Last week, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom held a press conference to promote the city’s new campaign to encourage San Francisco residents to keep their consumer dollars in San Francisco. “SHOP SF-Get More” provides San Francisco residents with incentives to do their Christmas shopping within city limits so that San Francisco receives the tax revenues. Where’s San Jose’s “SHOP SJ” campaign?

By Erin Sherbert
Madison Nguyen rolls up in a Lexus SUV and parks behind Lighthouse Café, a popular Vietnamese coffee shop off King Road. She greets a handful of volunteers, rattling off a few words in Vietnamese as she unlocks the door to the headquarters of her anti-recall campaign. It’s pure coincidence that this small space next door to the coffee shop is the same spot where Nguyen hosted her 2005 victory party, the night she was elected to San Jose’s City Council.

The city of San Jose already had a structural budget deficit without the economy crashing. Our ongoing expenses are higher then revenue coming into the city. Throw on a recession, and the numbers just get worse and our options more drastic to manage a $65 million shortfall. Do we balance the budget by more service cuts to the neighborhoods? Postpone hiring police officers? Delay opening new libraries and community centers? Outsource non-core services? Work furloughs? Layoffs? Eliminate any program or service that overlaps with other government agencies?

The reality is clear and trying to hide from reality is not going to help. Decisions will most likely be ugly, politically unpopular and emotionally draining.

Anything you’ve got to say, about anything at all, this is the place to say it. It’s SJI’s weekly roundup of random intelligence and opinion.

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.

Accepts Job at New York Times

Just minutes after Columbia University awarded its 93rd Annual Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Investigative Blogging to SanJoseInside’s own John McEnery IV, the prominent blog site’s featured and most decorated writer accepted a new post as editorial director of the New York Times, effective immediately.