Thank you.

Bye.

It’s really Edith who decides when to do the nasty. She will squat down, sort of like a chicken, but laying with her breast on the ground. Then Archie does some puffing and huffing (literally, he makes this airy gulping noise) and circles around her. Then he stands on her wings.

Yes, it’s turkey sex in the ‘hood, complete with dirty pictures. A trip through the archives is well worth the time too.

A 43-day stretch without a homicide in Newark — the city’s longest such period in decades — came to an end Tuesday night in front of a bodega in the violence-prone South Ward, where the police said a young man was fatally shot in the head.

This was the longest period of time without a homicide in Newark since 1961, there was a 57-day stretch without any murders.

Shockingly, Oakland’s Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan gives an on-camera interview alleging that Paul Cobb, the Oakland Post’s publisher, called Chief Wayne Tucker and told him that Bailey was investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery, which led police to bakery members. Whether or not this is true, Jordan knows that Cobb has received several death threats and took them seriously enough to request protection from the OPD. It is outrageous that Jordan would finger Cobb as a “snitch” on national television under these circumstances. (Let’s hope that anyone who might wish to do Cobb harm will be watching the Oscars instead.)

To the credit of KPIX, they led the 11 o’clock news on Friday with a story critical of their corporate parent’s 60 Minutes report. Manny Ramos interviewed Cobb about his anger at Jordan’s claims. Cobb says that he did not provide Chief Tucker with the information, and that the OPD already considered bakery members the prime suspects before they interviewed Cobb. I have no idea whether Cobb told Tucker anything, but I can’t think of any reason for Jordan to go on national TV and say that Cobb pointed the police in the direction of the bakery. Is 5 minutes of TV time with Anderson Cooper worth putting Paul Cobb’s life in further danger for?

By failing to record the conversation between Broussard and Bey in an interrogation room the day after the murder, the Oakland Police may well have hurt the chances of getting a conviction in Bailey’s murder. Jordan’s turn in the national spotlight sounds like a further disservice to Bailey and the city where he built his career.

(The KPIX interview with Paul Cobb can be viewed here at their website.)

UPDATE: The Oakland Tribune also wrote about this in Sunday’s paper.

(This was created by Bob Franklin, one of BART’s Directors. His website is www.bobforbart.com)

This is standard stuff — with Clinton now perceived as the underdog, it’s to her advantage to call for more debates and hope that Obama makes an amateur error (she also thinks that debates are her strength, while campaign rallies are his strength, and most people agree with that assessment). But she didn’t exactly help her case today when the campaign announced that she’ll be leaving Wisconsin Monday morning instead of Tuesday morning, spending a total of about 48 hours there. People seem to think this means that she doesn’t expect to do well there, and is focusing her attention even more on the Ohio and Texas contests in early March.

Anyway, this reminded me of when Bill Clinton used to boast of stopping “drive-by deliveries,” by fighting for legislation that required insurance companies to pay for at least a 48 hour hospital stay after a mother gives birth. I wonder how Wisconsin voters feel about the “drive-by campaigning” that his wife is now doing in their state.

Well, a week later, the contrast looks even starker. While Oakland just had its most violent week of the year, Newark has now gone for its longest stretch without a homicide since 1963 — and the NYTimes article points out that the decline in murders is not only good for the victims, but it has freed up detectives to revisit unsolved cases, which may lead to arrests, which may lead to a reduction of further crimes, and so on:

As the weekend approached, with its promise of gunplay, law enforcement officials said Friday that they had passed a new threshold: 33 days without a murder, the longest stretch since 1963, when there were no homicides for 40 days.

As of last night, there had been two homicides this year; by this time last year, there had been 12. The number of shootings has also decreased, the Police Department said. In 2007, there 99 homicides in the city of 281,000.

In a speech earlier this month, the city’s mayor, Cory A. Booker, said the city would “set the national standard for urban violent crime reduction.”

Since homicide detectives have fewer new investigations to handle, the police said they were using the lull to try to resolve old cases. The Essex County prosecutor, Paula T. Dow, said her investigators were also looking at old cases, with the help of a new federal grant that would allow them to take a closer look at DNA evidence.

“When you keep adding on increased resources, manpower and strategizing, you’re going to reap results in the long run,” Ms. Dow said. By the end of June, law enforcement officials will know better whether a real change is under way, she said. “I’m hoping for the best.”

No one in Newark seems ready to declare any long-term victories yet, but even the most skeptical citizens quoted in the article seem cautiously optimistic. Contrast that with Oakland, where the most skeptical citizens are calling for the mayor’s job, and cautious optimism can hardly be found at all, except among city employees whose job it is to be optimistic.

So who are these 796 superdelegates, who have the potential to choose the Democratic Party nominee? Well, all Democratic members of Congress are superdelegates, as well as all former Democratic presidents (i.e., Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the only surviving Democratic presidents). Others are party officials, either in the Democratic National Committee or at the state level. One sometimes hears superdelegates referred to as “party elders,” which conjures up an image of wise and impartial guiding hands.

If that is your impression, then think again — ABC News introduces us to one superdelegate, Jason Rae of Wisconsin, who was being courted by Chelsea Clinton over breakfast this morning:

Rae may be a typical college junior but he is certainly not the typical DNC super delegate.

He is only 21 years old — he has never voted in a presidential election because he turned 18 after Election Day in 2004.

Since the race between New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is so tight, Rae has become a power broker of sorts, as both campaigns push hard to lock down the support of super delegates.

Rae said he and Chelsea Clinton talked about electability and mobilizing young people to get involved in politics. He said she spoke about what states her mother can carry in the general election and what demographics favor her candidacy. The two talked about how the campaign’s operations were going in the states and what she is seeing on the ground.

The breakfast lasted about 30 minutes. Rae said he had to hustle back to campus and get to his afternoon classes.

Rae was elected as a DNC member at the Wisconsin state party convention in June 2004. He was 17 years old at the time but there are no party rules that say a DNC member has to be of voting age. Rae ran against and defeated the president of the state firefighters’ union and a state legislator.

Rae has been called on his cell phone by former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who tried to woo him to the Clinton side and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who was pushing for Rae to endorse Obama.

Rae is presumably an extreme case. One assumes that almost every other superdelegate has voted in a Presidential election at least once in his or her life, but this is just one more example of the disturbing things you discover when you start overturning rocks in our fine democracy. Most elections are won by a wide margin, so we don’t have occasion to inspect the nuts and bolts of the process very closely.

Then something like the 2000 election happens, and suddenly you realize that someone really can win more votes than the other guy and still lose the election, or that a Presidential election can hang on hanging chads in a handful of counties in Florida. The same is true of the party nomination systems — in most cases, one candidate ends up running away with the nomination, so we don’t need to worry about whether a low-turnout caucus is really representative of the will of that state’s Democratic Party electorate, or whether superdelegates should really account for more than 15 percent of the decisive votes at a nominating convention.

As with so many things, the more you learn about how the sausage gets made, the less appetite you have for it.