All my friends keep asking me, “Arthur, why do you say you’ll never eat another chicken sandwich from Subway?”

I frequent all the cheap sandwich shops near my downtown corporate office. Yesterday I wanted an empanada and beans & rice from Julia’s, but they weren’t selling beans that day. So, since lunch was a bust from the start, I decided to cut my losses and go for a cheap $5 footlong sandwich from Subway.

I now question whether this is ever a good choice.
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According to the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, 34 people voted for a write-in candidate in ANC 6B08 yesterday. That might mean 34 people voted for Arthur Delaney, the pro-single-beers candidate.

Unfortunately for single beers, over 800 people voted for four-term incumbent Neil Glick. He sent an email bragging about it to his family and friends with a little note to Arthur Delaney at the bottom.
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From the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics website: Incumbent Neil Glick has 39 votes. “Write In, if any” has two votes…only one of three precincts reporting.

This afternoon Southeast Capitol Hill resident Arthur Delaney kicked off his write-in campaign for a spot on the local advisory neighborhood commission. Delaney, who is me, is campaigning entirely on a pro-single-beers platform for 6B08.

Lately, the local political establishment is united in its insistence that corner stores not sell single cans or bottles of beer and malt liquor. Delaney has two simple questions:

1. What is a person supposed to do if he or she wants a beer but can’t afford a six pack?
2. What if a person just wants one beer?

The answer to these questions is that a person who has ever been or ever will be in either situation must vote for Arthur Delaney in 6B08 tomorrow. Arthur Delaney has the necessary maverick qualities to begin to reverse the nannyish tide that will outlaw single sales in early 2009.

After the jump, more details, plus Arthur Delaney’s first campaign video.

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Yesterday a Superior Court judge denied a request by the D.C. Attorney General’s office to seal exhibits entered into public record by two UDC professors as part of a FOIA lawsuit. The professors sued for the Department of Corrections’ emergency plans at D.C. Jail, the city said releasing them would cause a terrorist attack, and then, after it turned out you could get the withheld document from the department’s own website via Google, the District government demanded that the court force the professors not to tell anybody.

This absurd FOIA battle was the subject of a Sep. 22 City Paper story. The document is no longer directly accessible from the D.C. government’s website, but please feel free to download it from the Washington City Paper’s website.

The D.C. Jail went into lockdown the same day the story came out. The Department of Corrections insisted that the lockdown was routine and had nothing to do with the story, which was very alarming, because if the department believes its own statements about the security threat posed by the release of this document, wouldn’t you expect them to put the jail in lockdown or something when the document was publicized? Or maybe in this case the most alarming thing would be to know the government believes its own statements.

The D.C. Jail is on lockdown. A Sept. 24 release announces that the Department of Corrections (DOC) has instituted a “non-emergency security procedure” at the D.C. Jail until October 6. Inmate movement is restricted. A sign on the visitor’s door says the lockdown started on Sept. 22 and that no visitors are allowed.

DOC spokesman Anthony Diallo says there was no incident or emergency at the jail. He says the two-week lockdown has been planned for months and is in effect so guards can perform random checks for contraband items, cigarettes and stuff like that.

Legal visits are still allowed. A law student at the jail today said inmates reported that the lockdown is not routine–something happened inside the facility–but the student said client confidentiality disallowed providing further info on what happened.

Ann Keep, director of the nonprofit Visitors’ Service Center, says lockdowns do happen from time to time, sometimes precipitated by violence in the facility, but as far as Keep has heard this one is routine.

On a completely unrelated note, the City Paper on Sept. 22 reported on the DOC’s efforts to suppress an emergency planning document sought via the D.C. Freedom of Information Act. The department said releasing the document would “encourage an act of terrorism” at the jail. Turned out the thing was readily available from the department’s own website all along.

Sometime over the weekend the plan finally disappeared from Google’s easily accessible cache of PDF documents. Of course, you can still get the document from the Washington City Paper’s website.

The autopsy report is in for Christopher Savage. According to the Office of the D.C. Medical Examiner, Savage died of “acute intoxication” from the combined effects of “Methadone, Morphine, Hydrocodone, Diazepam/Nordiazepam, Carisoprodol and Meprobamate.” Manner of death: accident.

Savage died on his friends’ couch in the early a.m. of April 19, a few hours after he’d been beaten by muggers in Adams Morgan and only five days after he’d left an unhappy life in California to make new friends and start a new job in D.C. Those last five days were the subject of an April 30 City Paper story.

The D.C. Department of Corrections says releasing Program Statement No. 5031.1A will “encourage an act of terrorism.” Why, then, did the department make the document readily available on its website, where anyone in the world could look at it?

Read all about it in this week’s cover story. Take a look at the document, too, and see if you think it encourages terror.

Lots of terrible stuff happened in the Trinidad neighborhood Friday night. A 13-year-old boy was killed and six others were shot, according to reports. NBC4 and WTOP are on top of the story today. Police tell NBC4 they might reinstall those controversial checkpoints because of the violence. (Never mind that the checkpoints were for some secret, specific reason.)

UPDATE: The checkpoints are back.

The Washington Nationals are withholding stadium rent from the city because, they say, the stadium isn’t finished. Well! I’ve been to a couple games, and I see a fully-functioning stadium. And it costs $11.50 for a beer and a bag of peanuts!

Fellow D.C. taxpayers, listen to my plan: So long as the Nationals withhold money from the city, I’m going to withhold money from the Nationals. The stadium allows outside food. So next time I’m offered a free ticket (which happens weirdly often), I’m going to smuggle all the beer I need by hiding it in a bag along with peanuts and other legitimate items. I predict that this will have no effect whatsoever on the franchise’s deadbeat doings, but I will enjoy myself righteously. Join me!

The Washington Post’s Shankar Vedantam has a killer angle today on the D.C. handgun ban: An old study found that D.C.’s suicide rate dropped off big time soon as the city enacted the ban in 1976, because handguns make it real convenient for a guy to shoot himself when he gets a suicidal impulse. I highly recommend the article.

President George W. Bush greeted Rolling Thunder bikers on the South Lawn of the White House Sunday. After brief comments, the prez ditched his jacket and tie to pose for photos in a biker vest presented to him by Vietnam vet Artie Muller, president of Rolling Thunder. Bush thanked Muller with a hard-but-friendly slap to the shoulder.

Muller winced. Nerve damage from a shrapnel wound gives him a ton of pain whenever his shoulder is touched. He even wears metal spikes on his jacket to remind people not to grab him there.

“I do that every year, don’t I?” Bush said.

Muller nodded. “Yes.”

Several parents of students at the Coeus International School have told the Washington City Paper that the school is closing after the end of classes in May. Coeus founder and headmaster Daniel Hollinger, when questioned by a reporter at the school this afternoon, refused to confirm or deny that classes will not be held in the fall.

Hollinger founded Coeus in the fall of 2006 after being ousted by the board of trustees of his previous school, Rock Creek International, which closed last year under financial distress. With Coeus, Hollinger ditched the usual non-profit model used by most private schools. He told the City Paper last year that he hoped being able to attract investors would eventually allow the program to expand on a global scale.

Coeus is located on the sixth floor of an office building on Connecticut Avenue near the Van Ness Metro station.

The University of the District of Columbia’s law school is surging in the U.S. News & World Report specialty ranking for the “clinical training” category. The UDC David A. Clarke School of Law, which won full accreditation from the American Bar Association only three years ago, has tied Stanford for 13th place (and clobbered 19th-ranked Harvard) on the 2008 list.

“It is a very big deal,” says dean Shelley Broderick, who notes that UDC law is the only law school in the United States without its own building (the school operates on two floors of a building at the university’s Van Ness campus). “If you look at how richly resourced the other programs are, you know we’ve got it going on at UDC.”

A legal clinic is a teaching method in which law students, under faculty supervision, learn the trade by representing actual clients in court. Broderick says that UDC requires more clinical credit hours than any other school in the country. The school’s predecessor, the Antioch School of Law, pioneered clinical legal training from its co-founding in 1972 by current UDC faculty member Edgar Cahn. Most law schools nowadays offer a clinic of some kind.

Broderick hopes the national recognition will “help us win the hearts and minds of those funding major capital projects” so the school can have its own home. She says the school wants to share a space near D.C. court buildings with other providers of legal service to the poor.

In February, D.C. police up and decided that they would watch video feeds from their surveillance cameras live, in real time. Chief Cathy Lanier told the Washington Post she thought her department under-utilized its cameras. “I thought, ‘Why the heck aren’t we watching them?’” she said.

Here’s why: The law suggests that you aren’t supposed to watch. Check out this tidbit from Title 24, Chapter 25 of the D.C. Municipal Regulations:

When CCTV is used to combat crime, recordings may be passively monitored, meaning that the video feeds may not be monitored in real time, and recordings may be viewed by MPD personnel where there is reason to believe that the viewing may help solve a crime.

Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Traci Hughes says the law doesn’t forbid real-time watching.

“The statute says may, not shall,” Hughes told the Washington City Paper. “It’s a matter of legal construction. Because the statute says may, it does not prohibit the Chief from actively monitoring the cameras.”

Art Spitzer, legal director of the local ACLU, doesn’t like Hughes’s reasoning.

“I don’t think any judge would buy her argument,” Spitzer writes in an email. “There is a difference between may and shall, but ‘may not’ means ‘no.’”