Liz Kniss termed out of her Santa Clara County supervisor seat at the end of last year, and it was assumed she would ride off into the sunset to finish her political career on Palo Alto’s City Council. During the budget cycle last year, the Board of Supervisors even gave her a parting gift of sorts, donating $47k to Palo Alto Animal Services—while she was running for that city’s council seat—even though it is not a county entity. But it seems Kniss may have been throwing around her own handouts in her final year on the board.

Is this nuts or what? Even though Supervisor George Shirakawa is under criminal investigation for misconduct in office, he continues to serve as chair of the Public Safety and Justice Committee. The committee oversees the very agency that appears on track to prosecute him: the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office.

San Jose’s police union leadership says it wants what’s best for its members. But how many members will be left if the Police Officer Association keeps on hosting other departments’ recruiters in its headquarters? In an ad in Sunday’s Mercury News, the Austin Police Department announced it was hosting two recruiting sessions in San Jose. After stopping by The National Hispanic University on Tuesday morning, the Texans moseyed over to the POA shop to hold court for three afternoon hours.

Jim Beall neither forgives nor forgets. After soundly squashing Joe Coto in last November’s election, Silicon Valley’s state senator has gone scorched-earth on anyone who failed to show adequate fealty during the campaign.

Those sounds in the background are rumblings that the District Attorney’s Office and Fair Political Practices Commission will conclude their separate investigations into county Supervisor George Shirakawa’s spendy ways sometime in the second half of this month. That could be why one of his longtime closest allies, Cindy Chavez, has been voicing her interests in the not yet vacant supervisor’s job.

Nobody likes to lose an election, but it seems Robert Braunstein—TV sports host and vanquished candidate in San Jose’s District 10 City Council race—has yet to call it quits. Braunstein is behind a south San Jose newsletter that is directing residents to local stories while also taking shots at his former campaign opponent, Johnny Khamis.

To keep people on task, the city’s IT department developed a prompt back in the Internet’s toddler years—circa 1997—to notify workers that they may be attempting to visit websites prohibited by city policy. Fly was then dismayed and downright harrumphed when it learned last week that the Metro-affiliated political website San Jose Inside provoked the prompt for city workers as if it was some sort of personal blog about cats and the things they fancy.

While everyone and their mom-in-law weighs a run for mayor of San Jose in 2014, Councilmember Don Rocha is considering calling it quits at the end of his first term. He insists no decision has been made, but the Cambrian councilmember has publicly and privately voiced his displeasure with some of his colleagues and their constant focus on pension reform, as opposed to public safety, libraries, community centers and street paving.

Any day now, the 2014 San Jose mayoral race is expected to start, with two Sicilian-Americans from wealthy families and a Vietnamese immigrant vice mayor formally declaring their intent to run. But in the coming months, several unexpected candidates could join Sam Liccardo, Dave Cortese and Madison Nguyen.

Turning the page on 2012, it’s also time to close out the final chapter on emails between politicos and Barbara Marshman, the opinionated opinion editor of the Mercury News.

The San Jose Police Department exodus continues unabated, with SJPD officer and former police union presidential candidate Jon Baker tallying the total at 18 resignations just this month. The Police Officers Association pegs the number at 23. Surprisingly, Baker is one of those resignations, as he will transfer to the Colma PD and will start there next week.

Campbell’s reputation as a sleepy town once known for prunes and Western wear shops—and more recently for its Oktoberfest and Mardi Gras parties—might need an update, as it can now be argued that it has become one of the Bay Area’s hot spots for progressive politics.

Fly isn’t the only one captivated by the professional diaries of Mercury News opinion editor Barbara Marshman. Two weeks after Metro revealed that Marshman made a quid pro quo offer of “lavish praise” to Water District candidate Barbara Keegan in exchange for her removal from the race, a shadow group called Political Record Strategies (PRS) made a request for all electronic communications between city of San Jose officials and Marshman, as well as the rest of the paper’s editorial board.

Earlier this year, a group of former elected officials lent their support to an initiative that would have secured funding for San Jose’s libraries. The initiative, which failed to make it on the ballot, had a number of critics, including one Mercury News editor known for sending ill-advised emails.

There’s blood in the water, and the number of political sharks circling Supervisor George Shirakawa’s not yet vacant seems to be growing.

Supervisor George Shirakawa says he doesn’t want his board colleagues, county staff or the community to be distracted by the “political lynching” taking place in regards to media coverage of his fraudulent expense reports. At its bi-monthly county Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, Shirakawa tackled the issue head on by saying he would release a formal statement sometime in the future.