Last week, Pat Dando, who announced back in December that she would be leaving her post as Chamber CEO at the end of this month, decided to extend her stay in office. Her stated reason is that she wants to give the Chamber search committee more time to find the perfect candidate. What’s more likely is that she’s keeping the seat warm for Pete Constant.

San Jose’s biggest nightclub, Wet, is officially washed up. Caught up in the city’s clampdown on clubs following several incidents, owner Mike Hamod handed over the keys to the former Studio Theater at 396 S. First St. on Saturday.

Instead of going back to the bargaining table following Mayor Chuck Reed’s State of the City address last week, some San Jose police officers started looking for a one-way ticket out of town. 

David Satterfield doesn’t claim to be Don Draper, but you’d be a mad man to think the former Mercury News managing editor didn’t help soften the paper’s stance toward Team San Jose. Just a week after Team San Jose signed with Satterfield’s public relations firm, Sitrick and Company, Satterfield put together a meeting between the financially delinquent venue operators and the Merc’s editorial board.

Some meetings have too much at stake to leave to Skype, which is why Mayor Chuck Reed and a small convoy of local officials took a four-day jaunt to Japan last week.

A couple of days before Debra Figone finalized her selection of Chris Moore as the city’s next chief of police, councilman Sam Liccardo referred to the candidates’ race as “the elephant in the room”—Moore, acting chief for the last three months, is white while the other finalist, Oakland Chief of Police Anthony Batts, is black. The real “elephant in the room,” though, was an inflammatory online report by a small newspaper in Long Beach.

As young staffers for various South Bay Labor Council-backed candidates and office-holders, Rolando Bonilla and Ryan Ford learned a little bit about winning ugly. Recently, they also learned a bit about losing—and they just received another painful lesson.

A vandal who defaced the Quetzalcoatl sculpture in Plaza de Cesar Chavez this week may have helped align the piece with the intentions of the artist who created it. The notoriously monochromatic statue of the mythological Mayan plumed serpent now looks out at the downtown San Jose skyline with red eyes aglow. That is probably closer to what the renowned sculptor Robert Graham had in mind when he conceived the artwork.

Having handily knocked off Dolores Carr in November’s election, District Attorney Jeff Rosen has so far delivered on his promise to make changes big and small in his department. In addition to reinstating the Cold Case Unit, Team Rosen is reinvigorating the Government Integrity Unit, a do-nothing department under Carr, which has been renamed the Public Integrity Unit and put in the hands of John Chase. Rosen also circulated a memo that bars blanket challenges on judges—a pointed (and entirely symbolic) gesture referencing one of his predecessor’s most controversial ploys.

After receiving an invitation from acting Police Chief Chris Moore to address the troops at a series of shift briefings, Mayor Chuck Reed might have taken it as an opportunity to mend some fences. But according to several cops in attendance, the mayor did little to try and dispel the acrimony from the election season battles over Measures V and W. Instead, in the first meeting, Reed reiterated his judgment that San Jose’s finest were riding a “gravy train.

Will the last one out shut off the lights—and sound? Four downtown nightclubs—Wet, Pearl, Toons and Motif—have “closed for remodeling,” taken a break or gone dark for good in recent days. The closures follow a series of enforcement actions, and more could be on the way

This past summer, Cisco Systems, the biggest employer in Silicon Valley,  announced plans to build 2.5 million square feet of office space on 140 acres near its Tasman Avenue campus over the next 20 years. To help grease the skids with the city on this and other projects and initiatives, the San Jose–based network giant has hired longtime political aide Mike Potter. The local government affairs position is clearly a step up for Potter, who has pretty much had the same job for 15 years.

They’re calling him “RF Jay” at the district attorney’s office after a newspaper columnist compared him to late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. And deposed DA Dolores Carr probably wishes she hadn’t demoted the office’s newly named chief assistant, Jay Boyarsky, back in 2007. That move ultimately wound up costing her her job. Oops….

A visit to the website fordandbonilla.com is not as entertaining as it once was. For a few weeks this summer, visitors to the site were redirected to a cell-phone video capturing a heated exchange between San Jose political consultant Ryan Ford and council candidate Aaron Resendez, who was then running against Xavier Campos, the brother of Ford’s then-boss, Nora Campos. (Whew!)

The vid was blurry and the sound was bad, and it would have made no sense to any potential client shopping for services from Ford and his partner, Rolando Bonilla. But local insiders got a kick out of it—that was the point. The redirect was a prank pulled by another political consultant, Jay Rosenthal, who had registered the URL when he found out Ford and Bonilla were launching their enterprise.

Longtime local pol-turned-mass-transit-fanboy Rod Diridon suddenly has a fight on his hands. His pet project, the California High Speed Rail Authority, has come under attack from U.S. Rep. Jerry Lewis, soon-to-be head of the House Appropriations Committee. It’s not that Lewis doesn’t like trains—this is purely political gamesmanship.

Like most people paying attention to the District 7 council race, Fly was surprised that the runoff between councilmember Madison Nguyen and Republican furniture-store owner Minh Duong ended up being a squeaker. After the revelations about the Chamber-endorsed Duong’s pile of bad debts and financial screwups, Fly was expecting that District 7 residents would re-elect the increasingly independent Nguyen by a landslide. Not so.