San Jose Inside

There must be a better way of dealing with California’s budget crisis and $8 billion deficit than by laying off teachers as part of an across-the-board 10 percent spending cut. Our schools are in a pretty sorry state as it is due to inadequate funding. Many teachers that I know have to supply their students with classroom necessities and pay for them out of their own pockets. Now many of these dedicated educators are going to be getting their pink slips.

After my last column on the Mexican Heritage Plaza (MHP) a few months ago, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had missed something and things didn’t add up to some of the conclusions I reached at the time. I spent what time I could spare over the summer searching and researching the matter over the Internet and my hunches were confirmed by what I found.

City Hall Diary

Open space is a very important quality-of-life issue. With so much development happening everywhere, we need to remember to include open space in our plans. I attended two outdoor events this week that reminded me about how important open space is, especially where there are trees. Both of the events were located in pristine areas.

The turmoil in the economy caused by the subprime lending debacle is far from over. The stock markets may be somewhat stabilized temporarily by the intervention of European and Japanese central banks along with the U.S. Federal Reserve pumping in billions of dollars borrowed from the Chinese, but the overvalued real estate markets will most certainly take a tumble as a result of bad loans and a tighter fist in the banking industry as a whole. There is still a subprime lender shakeout to come as many are in deep trouble due to “lack of liquidity,” i.e., there are no buyers funneling cash through their complicated systems. To add to their problems, it was reported yesterday that the big banks have stopped institutional lending against subprime portfolios.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s decision to decertify electronic voting machines manufactured by Sequoia and Diebold is a welcome one. There are serious security concerns associated with these machines that the manufacturers have not addressed, forcing Bowen to take this action. Among other things, it has been demonstrated that the machines can easily be hacked, employees of the manufacturers can gain access to the machines, and they provide no paper trail for each voter for a hand count in case of breakdown.

“Greed is good” is the line most people remember from Oliver Stone’s film, “Wall Street.” Of course, the moral of the story is that greed isn’t good and it can put you in prison and leave you penniless. Unfortunately, this lesson has been lost on corporate America, Wall Street and the interdependent real estate and mortgage industries. (Just look at the ridiculous level of CEO pay and the soaking we are getting from everybody from the oil companies and food importers to drug manufacturers and the health insurance companies.)

If, as the old strategist suggested, politics is war by other means, then we are seeing something new in the epic battle between the reformers and the fixers in San Jose; namely, the introduction of legal assaults to buttress the crumbing coalition of lobbyists, developers and labor that has ruled and nearly ruined our city in the past decade. You wonder how gullible, or actually, how dumb these people feel the rest of us are.

It’s all over, apparently, without a bang or a whimper. Nary a shot was heard. The Sopranos has concluded and the charges against the former mayor have been dropped. The penultimate episodes of both have been seen. The stories of Ron Gonzales and Tony Soprano are both inconclusive. Many, thinking they are over, are dissatisfied.

Budget Cuts to Mental Health Services in Question

Varmints are in the news again this week as renegade squirrels descended on a sleepy South San Jose school on Wednesday and attacked several students and a room mom during snack time.

Most Agree Scandal-less City is “Boring”

In a recent poll commissioned by the Mercury News after a dramatic drop in subscription renewals several months ago, 79 percent of those surveyed say that without the sensational news of the scandalous Gonzales administration, there is no reason to read the paper anymore.

Partnership Could Give Legal Status to Thousands of Mustelids

In an unlikely partnership that has Ferrets Anonymous members grasping victory from the jaws of defeat, the South Bay Labor Council and the illegal ferret group have joined forces, setting a precedent that has other lobbying organizations redefining what it means to recruit.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday—as a change of pace from our regular critical analyses and discussions of problems—I thought we might have an open forum on what our bloggers like best about living in San Jose and Santa Clara County. In the heat of our political and ideological battles, we sometimes forget how fortunate we are to live in such a special place. I’ll go first to start things off.

Say They Won’t Accept Jim Beall as Family

Several direct Neanderthal descendants have filed suit against a group of scientists that claim they have found DNA that proves there is a link between the extinct cavemen and Homo sapiens.

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SanJoseInside.com has acquired a previously sealed mayoral grand jury testimony and posted a partial transcript below.

The testimony begins with Deputy District Attorney Julius Finkelstein questioning Mayor Ron Gonzales about his role in the Norcal deal.  WARNING: it is shocking, sometimes offensive but mostly sounds like Aaron Sorkin’s movie A Few Good Men.