Morning News Round-Up -- 2.26.09: Spring (Training) has Sprung...

In case you missed it yesterday, Watch Dog noted that the recent bad weather had the effect of sprouting some new grassroots efforts: Baseball San Jose (to promote baseball) and Books Not Filters (to fight the so-called Values Advocacy Council and Ball Gag)...

It isn't just a grassroots baseball effort however. Former Mayoral candidate Michael Mulcahy, Councilmembers Liccardo, Oliverio, and Kalra, and others seem to be in a planning mode as well...Are downtown pieces (finally!) all coming together? These folks think so...(FYI: The A's tied (?) the Brewers yesterday 3-3.)

One of the overlooked, but beloved, pieces of a complete downtown San Jose, is the Sainte Claire News Stand. They are reopened next to Cafe Trieste and are having a grand opening party tomorrow night...the owners are perhaps the nicest people in Silicon Valley.

If you murder someone in the UK and want to get out of dodge and never be found again, apparently San Jose is not the place you want to go to...Jaswinder Singh Rana found that out yesterday.

A Gilroy High School teacher was arrested for sexual assault of a 14 year old who was not his student. The teacher met the girl on Tagged.com -- a social networking site. (The brain trust of Constant/Pegram must be working overtime to try to figure out how to make political hay out of this...insert your own brain/Constant/Pegram joke here _________)

Here is something new to Watch Dog -- the Saratoga City Council is adding a fee to the garbage rates in order to pay for road repairs...interesting concept. Perhaps they should also put up tolls for the thousands of massive SUVs that cruise Saratoga's tiny streets...

Just as San Jose is changing the way Police interact with downtown nightclub/bar goers -- Campbell (the party capital of Silicon Valley?) is changing their rules about downtown (drinking) festivals too...

The National Cheerleading Competition is a big deal to some folks -- including a group of students from Morgan Hill's Sobrato High School. But these (devastated) students won't be able to go because their coach turned in the paperwork 2 weeks late. Watch Dog is certain there is a an After School Special-type lesson in this story somewhere about being on time...

Surprise, surprise. A city-wide fiber optic network built by the City of Palo Alto is not likely to happen -- it seems -- after a decade of hoping and wishing and studying. It turns out it is expensive to build and maintain such things...really? (Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network figured out the same thing about a County-wide wireless network and apparently gave up on that effort...)

Or, perhaps it isn't the money, but the fact that Palo Alto-based utility-type things sometimes seem to be (perhaps) corrupt. The Palo Alto Utilities Department is being investigated by the US Department of Transportation for conspiracy to alter records...

And from the part of the media landscape that isn't imploding (blogs)...

Revealed gives the blow-by-blow of Tuesday night's Council meeting -- which, as always, is a pretty compelling read. Revealed has often pointed out racially insensitive remarks that sometimes appear in the "Comments" section of San Jose Inside -- but I guess when Revealed makes fun of Italian-Americans, that's ok. Not to sound too much like Dale Warner, but...

Erin Sherbert at the Metro/Inside digs a little (well, a lot) deeper into San Jose's Vietnamese community describing the competing business interests of the Yes on Recall and No on Recall folks. Surprise, surprise...one Vietnamese business owner has a strip mall called Little Saigon and another has one called Vietnam Town...

Finally, we never got around to talking about Mission City Lantern's love affair with Watch Dog. Thank you, James. We appreciate your kind words and we feel the love -- but Herb Caen we are not.