San Jose Inside

The volunteers who gave us our country back.

Guests started to arrive in force at the Silicon Valley for Obama victory party at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View at around 7:30 pm. The election had already been called. He had won.  And everyone was ecstatic. They walked in looking more stunned than happy. Who could believe it?

The shindig attracted some high-tech politicos and local elected officials, but mostly it was about the campaign volunteers. Silicon Valley for Obama, chaired by former State Controller Steve Westley, had been enormously successful.

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.)

Two speeches last night, the Obama acceptance speech and the McCain concession speech, surely give us all a new and deserved reason for feeling very good about our nation, and feed our hopes to turn the page on history, a period that we do not want to revisit and must change.  We received the type of conclusion to this often savage election that we so desired.

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.

I am feeling patriotic today. The historical significance of this national election is something we have never seen before, and I love the feeling of optimism, that perhaps a change will be made today in our country that will affect our lives for the better.

Even if there is little a new President can do to get us out of the gaping hole that “W” put us in, it’s nice to have that positive feeling. Even if it’s for a fleeting moment. 

Paper To Abandon San Jose?

The San Jose Mercury News recently reported that it’s considering pulling up stakes in San Jose.  On Oct. 18, the newspaper reported that it might move many of its offices to another location.  Publisher Mac Tully said, “We would be interested in staying in San Jose and we would keep all of our options open.”  How nice.

I seem to remember that when the Mercury News was purchased a few years back that the new owners assured that nothing much would change.  Here are a few “hits” (and misses) surrounding Dean Singleton, the architect of the Mercury News’ “makeover.” 

Last week, I visited the Rules committee to present a memo that Councilmember Constant and I wrote asking that the Council hold off on adopting a citywide Inclusionary Housing policy.
 
I first blogged on this topic on December 17, 2007 in a post titled ”Coming Soon: Affordable Housing Citywide.” The Council is set to vote on Inclusionary Housing on Dec 9. The proposed policy would mandate that 20-25 percent of all new housing in San Jose be priced below market rate. If the Council adopts such a policy it may raise the price on the market-rate units, which squeezes the middle class. It also may affect the home resale values down the road. There were two other councilmembers (besides myself and Constant) who opposed pursuing this policy during our current housing meltdown.

Measures L and M address two controversial local issues: fire station construction and amending the city charter to allow the leasing of park lands to community groups.

Council again snubs citizens with dismissal of Independent Police Auditor.

Let me take a stab at the job description for the next San Jose Independent Police Auditor. I think I’ve got it.

Qualifications are as follows:
• Must have flexible definition of “independent.”
• Must be willing to satisfactorily explain any police activity as “the norm,” regardless of glaring empirical evidence to the contrary.
• The successful applicant can multitask—listening to and tracking problems with police practices, while refraining from offering any logical policy recommendations.
• Applicants who properly fit in city council and police union pockets are encouraged to apply.

Note: This is a temporary position, contingent upon applicant’s ability to never initiate, affect, or be rumored to be in the vicinity of law enforcement oversight.

Nerds Claim Their Conditions Worse Than Slaughterhouses

Thousands of high tech cubicle dwellers have taken to the streets in protest over Proposition 2 and what they feel is an unfair bias towards the welfare of barnyard animals and a societal insouciance towards the conditions they are being asked to endure.

“My house was foreclosed on, my car was repo’d and I lost my Starbuck’s card,” said one disgruntled cubey. “And we are going to spend millions of dollars giving futons to cattle?”

These two local tax measures have already inspired some comments in other contexts on SJI. The pro-tax arguments are presented here to further stir the pot. 

Silicon Alleys

“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”
—Victor Hugo

When people yak about the beginnings of Silicon Valley, a few component parts usually enter the conversation: Hewlett-Packard, Stanford Industrial Park, Varian Associates, Lockheed, Fairchild, etc. When it comes to the medium of radio, people usually begin with Lee de Forest, who invented the vacuum tube amplifier in Palo Alto around 1912 or Charles Herrold, who basically started the first radio broadcasting station out of San Jose in 1909.

But what truly makes history a rocking subject to study—no matter what part of the social static you may be from—are the forgotten stories, the failures and those individuals whose contributions have long since been overlooked.

Nancy Pelosi talks tech in Mountain View

At Google headquarters, as elsewhere in Silicon Valley, the term “disrupter” is commonly used to describe technological innovations or companies that force evolution. Nancy Pelosi found a novel way to repurpose the word during a visit to the search-engine giant’s Mountain View campus Monday.

“Our founders were disrupters,” Pelosi said. “They disrupted the status quo.”

Food for Thought

I have been on vacation the past week and the one question going through my mind as I sat on the beach has been: Is our eight-year-long national nightmare nearly over, or has it just begun? One thing is for sure, the Bush II era will end at noon EST on January 20, a massive failure by any standard of human history. The inheritor of the Bush Republicans’ terrible mess will be faced with the daunting task of pulling the country back from the precipice it has been driven to by the horrendous misjudgments of a shallow president, his deregulatory-feasting party of the wealthy elite, and international political theories of a small group of neocons led by a vice president who has hacked our Constitution and international treaties to bits in pursuit of empire and brutal, Roman-style dominance of the less powerful.