You may have heard by now, if you follow East Bay headlines, that Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums has decided not to seek re-election. This comes as a great surprise, and disappointment to CityBrights blogger Zennie Abraham. " This blogger predicted he would run and this blogger was way wrong... It's too bad and really sad to see a man I've admired over my life go out this way."

Dellums broke the news in an emotional private meeting with supporters at the Oakland Marriott yesterday, amidst the brouhaha elsewhere in the Bay Area over the Prop 8 decision. Zennie in particular sees his quiet bowing out as "stick[ing] his head in the sand" and admitting failure.

Though Dellums was initially credited with lowering crime rates in Oakland and beefing up the police force, he's recently criticized for being a mostly absentee leader who allowed others to run City Hall day to day and rack up multi-million-dollar deficits while he renegged on a promise to take a pay cut, and failed to pay some $250,000 in back taxes for 2005-2007. He also was largely absent during recent negotiations to lay off a large piece of the police force he helped to beef up when his tenure began.

Citizen journalist and onetime e-friend of SFist, Zennie Abraham (we hope he's forgiven us for that Oscars incident, but we digress), was taking a break from World Cup mania and walking down the street recently when he had an epiphany about solving the Gulf oil disaster: What about oil-eating bacteria? He does a little investigating, finds a firm in Florida that makes the stuff, and wonders aloud why Florida governor Charlie Crist hasn't called on the company yet. Then, wouldn't you know, Crist pays a 40-minute visit to the firm. Coincidence? Perhaps not.

City Brights blogger and SFist fave Zennie Abraham (who, inexplicably, is no longer a featured City Brights blogger and whose blog now must be dug up about six links deep) can't figure out why the Oscars aren't showing him a little respect as a member of the online press. In the past, he's gotten some sort of press credential to cover the Saturday before the Academy Awards in Los Angeles (or something), and this year he is shocked — SHOCKED — that he was not invited to apply for a credential, and thus far has not been able to score one. In the video above, and in this blog post, Zennie describes his daily reach, both for blogging and vlogging, and wonders aloud how the Academy could so thoughtlessly snub him. (We should note that while he cites getting 25,000 video views per day, this video in question, which has been up for three days, has only garnered 261 views on YouTube. But perhaps his metrics are coming from elsewhere.)
CORRECTION: Zennie contacted us to clarify that he was, as he explains in the video, invited by AMPAS to apply for a credential, only to be rejected later in what he feels was a discriminatory process. It appears there is some discrepancy between who they invite to apply and the 3,000 members of the press to whom they grant credentials.

Our old pal Zennie editorializes today on his City Brights blog about the "negro" comments made by Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid in regard to Obama's candidacy back in '08. Zennie says that Reid's comments may have been racist, but the man is not, and he goes on to make the (somewhat spurious) argument that, "Much has changed since Barack Obama became the 44th President of The United States, specifically attitudes about race and the overall willingness to talk about race and racism." He also brings up the fact that many (older) African Americans didn't believe Obama could get elected, which was racist in itself.

You may recall avid YouTube enthusiast Zennie from this post regarding the "outsize" buildings in the futuristic San Francisco skyline shown in the upcoming Star Trek film. Well, as it happens, the East Bay denizen's addiction to vlogging did not start and certainly did not end with that arguably minor work. Allow us to point you to his latest opus, in which he takes us to the San Francisco Giants' opening day at AT&T Park, but not without an initial tour of something called BART and something called the N-Judah.