Yesterday, Governor Schwarzenegger announced a special election for November, 2005.  Since it’s an off year event, it will cost California taxpayers somewhere between $45 and $80 million.  That’s a lot of dough – enough to furnish a new San Jose City Hall.

Today, County Supervisors will name the County Government Center’s courtyard after Jim McEntee. (link)  It’s an appropriate tribute to a great person. 

We had guests from my wife’s hometown of Baltimore visit us this weekend.  We did the standard tour:  San Jose, San Francisco, and Monterey.  While our visitors enjoyed all three cities, their photo journal of this trip will disproportionately feature locales to the North and South.  San Jose is just not a “post card” city.

If it’s Sunday morning, it’s cartoon time around our house.  But this past weekend, I wrestled control of the television from my kids to watch Howard Dean on Meet the Press.  They like Dean and once brought him chocolate chip cookies when we were working in my downtown San Jose office.  But they weren’t sticking around for the show.  Maybe if he screamed, they would have.

If you want to analyze how something modern fits within the grand sweep of American history, pose the question and use a Founding Father.  If you want to suggest that democracy and freedom are at stake, use Thomas Jefferson.  Even if it’s a pretentious effort, it’s an excellent way to rebut Larry Stone.

Today, the San Jose City Council could decide to raise their salaries.  It’ll be an interesting vote because five of ten councilmembers are likely to be in competitive races for higher offices next year.  No candidate likes to accept a raise.  I’ve seen polling on this.  It’s like putting a stick of dynamite in your pocket and handing your opponent matchsticks.

Let’s say you work at City Hall or the state house or the White House.  Let’s say you have a story that you know will get to the press soon and you’d prefer not a lot of people see or hear it.  Let’s say you’ve decided it’s better to give it to a reporter instead of having the story discovered.  You make the call to a daily reporter on Friday – a.k.a. “take out the trash day” in the world of press secretaries and communication directors.

I will participate in a Commonwealth Club panel discussion tonight about the blogosphere.  I need your help.  Anyone with an intelligent comment to today’s blog, gets a free ticket to the discussion.  My blogging colleagues at San Jose Inside are not eligible. The “intelligent comment” standard would eliminate each one of us anyway.

If you really want to know about the history of something, you can look it up.  But most people don’t.  That’s why having people around who provide institutional memory is critical, especially for the paper of record in our town – The Mercury News.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I’ll be way over the limit for what’s considered good blog length (250-300 words) with this posting.  But since I spent the last three days in bed with a fever, this is the best I can do for this week—probably just as well since pictures are better than words when it comes to architectural discussions. 

When you work at a high level in City Hall you get offered lots of freebies:  game tickets, use of vacation homes, and discounts on expensive birthday gift items.  If you accept something, you have to declare it on an official report.  Then it looks like a bribe, intended or not.  Or you could simply take it and hope that the DA’s office never finds out.  This is a risky move.  (See councilman, former:  Gregory, Terry).  That’s why my personal rule was to politely decline or pay for gifts.  I was good about doing this during my two year’s in the mayor’s office—with one exception.

I was excited when I heard that Mayor Ron Gonzales was headed to Spring Training to make his case to Major League Baseball this weekend that San Jose is a major league city.  Then, I went to his website and … gulp … saw the photos.

Will Los Angeles elect a mayor whose name will be regularly misspelled by school kids, news reporters, and, heaven forbid, bloggers?  Antonio Villaraigosa—yes, correct spelling—could become California’s most notable Latino politician in May.  For a sense of his challenge, let’s jump in our blogospheric time machine and go back to San Jose, 1998.

You take lethargic leadership, add uninspired vision, mix with low key personality, and throw in a couple city hall ethics scandals.  Then, you stir with an election.  What do you get:  a mayor on the verge of losing his job.

The last time the founder of Craig’s List visited San Jose was over 2 years ago to attend a science fiction convention.  Conclusion:  if San Franciscan Craig Newmark won’t drive an hour South more frequently than that, we need more things to do in San Jose to attract nerds.  Note to Convention Center boss Dan Fenton:  call the Star Trek convention organizers.

Governing Magazine just published a management report card on the fifty states.  For California, there’s good news and bad news.  First, the bad news:  we get a C minus—tied with Alabama for worst in the class.  Now, the good news: when we order double lattes at Starbucks in this state, we don’t get asked, “shall I leave some room for grits?” Joking aside, this is not a report card you want to bring home to mom and dad, Governor Schwarzenegger.