Leonardo DaVinci, baseball player

No, seriously!  If you aren't already following the wonderfully named Braves' minor-leaguer L.V. Ware on Twitter, why not?  Don't know if he'll make the big club, but he is one of the nicest guys you'll meet in baseball.  I And I won't even charge him for that!

Sorry. Don't care about the presidential race yet. Because its August!

Some would have you believe that since Rick Perry is in, the 2012 presidential race is set in stone.  The media treat Perry as the Republican nominee-to be because, well, the numbers say he is.  The latest poll from PPP (a Democratic-leaning firm but, skeptical GOPer, extremely accurate) has Perry surging to a big lead over his closest rivals Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann, and the other guy from Texas that I won't name just to have fun with his vein-popping supporters.  Even when you include a hypothetical Sarah Palin candidacy, Perry is still on top.  But guess what? 

No, not chicken butt (sorry, my three-year-old was answering my question). Well, come to think of it, chicken butt is appropriate because neither it nor any presidential polling numbers matter at all right now.  Not when you are still a college football season away from the first caucuses and primaries.


It isn't that the presidential race doesn't matter at all, and the PPP poll has some interesting findings, not necessarily good ones if you are a Perry fan.  Among independents, Perry's favorable/unfavorable numbers are hideous - 29% favorable, 53% unfavorable.  The Texas gub also loses among independents in a head-to-head with Obama 49-43%.  I don't necessarily believe that last figure - honestly, about the only person Obama could beat head-to-head in an election today would be Gaddafi, or Qaddafi, or my favorite spelling, KaDaffy.
 

Obviously, the race for the White House is the center of the universe for the hard core politicos, even if that's because some of them are simply trying to gravy train their way into a job with whomever comes out on top.  But -  and this is "Breaking News" if you only watch the proud work of the plastic surgeons on Fox News or the never-ending "Something Else That's Bush's Fault" updates on MSNBC - the hard cores are not very numerous.  They may be loud, but like hockey fans south of Canada, there just aren't that many of them.  The people who actually decide elections, us independents, have more pressing things to think about 16 months ahead of the final vote.

First, college football season starts this week (on the 'scale of 10' importance meter, a 9).  Let's be honest; how would you rather spend your time?  Would it be watching  yet another "debate" where there are so many "candidates" that everyone has time for one good point - and that's if someone can shut the Newt Doggy Dogg the heck up?  Or would you rather be home on a Saturday morning, hot dogs, wings, pizza, and nachos on the way and ESPN's College Gameday setting the table for 12 hours of games?  Don't give me that crap about Michelle Obama and her "healthier menu"; you and I know darn well what the President and First Lady really like to eat.

Secondly, my Atlanta Braves are in a pennant race (importance meter, 9.5).  This wasn't supposed to happen this year, but the starting pitching has somehow held together despite Jair Jurrjens pitching better than he actually is, Tommy Hanson pitching hurt, and Derek Lowe breathing air.  Not only that, but Dan Uggla has also been the best player in baseball since the fourth of July, Brian McCann is being Brian McCann, newly acquired Michael Bourn may be the best lead-off man and center fielder in the National League, and Chipper Jones is duck-taped  and super-glued together for the stretch run.  No one has the guts to predict this, but the Braves actually have a shot at taking out the Phillies, whose bats aren't as good as they should be and whose bullpen has more holes than a Ben Bernanke speech.

Another reason some of us aren't paying attention to presidential politics: CM Punk.  My goodness, what that man has done to reinvigorate what had become a somewhat moribund WWE.  There are also three WWE shows on this week (importance meter, 47).  Listening to Punk and some of the other wrestlers when they are given carte blanche at the mic is infinitely more entertaining and, honestly, informative than listening to 90 percent of the babble on the cable news channels.

Finally, and less flippantly, presidential politics don't matter right now because many of us are too worried about taking care of our families.  Some independents have decent jobs.  Some collect part-time work for a living.  Some have been out of work for a long time.  Regardless of whether we are working or not, we worry about the future, about buying food and clothes for our kids, paying for our houses, paying down the debts we ran up during the good times (because some jack-bootie economists told us that running up debt was a good thing for the economy - some of the jokers are still saying that).  While the Republican candidates are busy blaming Obama for everything and Obama is busy still blaming George W. Bush, most folks would be happy if everyone in Washington showed some discipline for a change, shut up, got out of the way, and let the economy come back.

I will care about the presidential race eventually - I love the game of politics too much not too.  But if I don't freak out with my conservative friends about yet another boring Obama speech or if I don't have aneurysms with my liberal friends over the next half-dozen times they tell me Mrs. Bachmann is crazier than a typical four-hour period at Savannah City Hall, it doesn't mean I have completely tuned out.  It probably means I am too busy sharing in the excitement of my newly-potty trained three-year-old who wants to go to the bathroom yet again, and too busy working like hell to make sure that remains her bathroom for a very long time.

Larry Got It Half-Right

I used to think Larry Peterson, the Savannah Morning News' political columnist, was about as crazy as my idea to produce "The Tony Bourdain-Paula Deen Variety Show", complete with their weekly culinary rendition of "She's A Little Bit Country, and He's a Little Bit of a M@%#@&$ing Piece of Spoiled Foie Gras."  But when Larry out-predicted me in the 2008 elections by the victory margin of a Florida-Savannah State football game, it turns out I was the crazy one.  Mr. Peterson, I confessed publicly, was very intuitive, which makes his latest column puzzling.  His premise on the future of Georgia Democrats is, I think, spot on, but his history on how we got here is severely lacking in perspective and accuracy.

There is no doubt that Democrats in Georgia and across the South have been in a downward spiral for a couple decades.  But to say, as Mr. Peterson wrote, "Decades ago, Republicans exploited white southerners’ angst over civil rights to erode their longtime Democratic loyalties," is too simplistic and, on many levels, inaccurate.  That's a nice way of writing what only a handful of the most yellow of the Yellow Dog Democrats still believe these days; a Democrat in the White House passed civil rights legislation, so all the racist Southern Democrats immediately became Republicans.  No matter how you write it, it simply isn't true.

To be sure, it is true that one of the biggest names in past racial bigotry, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, lent a huge Southern hand to Richard Nixon when the ex-Dixiecrat became a Republican.  But Thurmond actually started riding the elephant in 1964, helping Barry Goldwater carry Thurmond's home state.  A lot of good that did Goldwater during his blowout loss to LBJ.  Sure, four years later South Carolina's electoral votes went to Nixon, but Nixon didn't need those eight votes to beat a very weak Democratic nominee in Hubert Humphrey.

Any one with any sense of history knows two things: first, a large percentage of South Carolinians back than would have jumped off the old Cooper River Bridge clothed only in a Confederate Flag if Strom Thurmond told them to.  Secondly, Strom, as was his wont, was doing nothing more than looking out for number one - he was playing his cards in an effort to be a long-term influence in Washington, and he won.

There are those who believe Ronald Reagan continued the GOP's surreptitious bigotry, beginning with his "state's rights" speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi early in the 1980 campaign.  However, the so-called "racial code" of the speech has been discredited repeatedly (he campaigned for the African-American vote before the National Urban League immediately after the speech).

Regardless of whether one believes Reagan was a closet racist, the fact is that Democrats continued to dominate Southern politics throughout the 1980's, holding most of the governorships and state legislatures.  This did not start to change until 1994 when Republicans won control of Congress over issues that had nothing to do with race.  A host of Southern Democrats, including Congressman (and now Governor) Nathan Deal and his predecessor as governor, Sonny Perdue, switched parties to jump on the GOP gravy train.

While Mr. Peterson was wrong to imply that white bigots were the main reason for Republican ascendancy in the South, he was absolutely right about what will likely happen to Democrats in Georgia via redistricting.  There will still be black-majority districts mandated by civil rights legislation, but this will come at a price for white Democrats like Congressman John Barrow.  Thus Mr. Peterson's opening sentence, "Redistricting likely will make the Georgia Democratic Party blacker — and to the extent that it’s possible — the Republicans whiter," will most likely come true.

Mr. Peterson again gets a little too simplistic with his reasoning.  "Blacks mostly see it (big government) — especially at the federal level — as benign. White Southerners are apt to view it as an obstacle."  If this were completely true, Republicans would have taken control of the South 50 years ago.  Perhaps that is true in 2011, but it is only one of many issues that helped turn the South Red over time.  Still, Peterson is correct that the way the districts are drawn will be a huge obstacle for Democrats, regardless of their color, to overcome in the near future.

Ironically, the saving grace for Georgia Democrats may turn out to be the man who used to be one of them.  Governor Deal may be the least-inspiring political figure since, well, Governor Perdue.  With Georgia's unemployment rate higher than the already-high national average, Democrats could have an opening to exploit in a few years.  This is especially true if Deal gets too busy taking cheap flights on the airline to which he gave a massive tax break and if Deal's lackeys keep blaming the feds for the jobs problem rather than promoting policies that help businesses hire people.  (Oh, is that what that Delta tax break was supposed to do?  My bad.)  Democrats won't exploit that opening, however, if they again make the mistake of nominating someone who already dropped the ball in the governor's office as their standard bearer, as they did last year with Roy Barnes.

Democrats may be down in Georgia right now, but it is not because of racial politics.  Racial politics will also not matter at all when the party makes a comeback, as all political parties do.  The politics of jobs and the economy, always first on the minds of most voters these days, will be the main driver in determining those future winners and losers.

Update: Effingham Commission Chairman referendum

Well, not really an update, as I am still waiting for some answers from State Senator Buddy Carter.  I asked him a couple days ago whether local legislation was absolutely necessary for the county to hold a referendum on removing the commission chairman's position or if that referendum could be brought about via a petition drive.  He told me he didn't know, but that he would find out and get back to me.

For now, my original point still holds:  why in the blue heck do we need state lawmakers to tell us whether or not we can have a referendum on an issue that affects all of three state lawmakers?  A petition drive I could at least understand as long as the signature threshold isn't outrageous. 

And, to answer a friend's question from the other day, NO, I am not about to lead any petition drive for anything.  Unless Georgia needs an official state cigar, which of course is taboo these days thanks to the Tobacco Nazis.

More to come when I get some answers from the Senator.

"Green" housing is uglier than a bowling shoe

(picture courtesy of Effingham Now, a Savannah Morning News publication)

I don't know Charles Davis from Adam.  I'm sure he and I could have a beer or whatever he likes to drink and get along just fine.  But Mr. Davis, I'm sorry; your "green" home may have locked down the championship belt for the ugliest thing in all of Effingham County, Georgia

Normally, I am very much in favor of anything that helps me reduce my "contribution" to the cost of Georgia Power's new nuclear plant being built by another company.  I am not anti-nuke - it is a viable "clean" energy source, more viable than most.  It is the deception by Georgia Power and their political class enablers in Atlanta that bother me just a smidge.  So when I saw a story in Effingham Now about a new "net-zero energy" house built in my hometown of Guyton, Georgia, I was curious.  I would have started to read the story, but my eyes immediately were locked on a picture of the house on the paper's front page; locked because it was as if I were watching a mash-up of a train wreck, the Hindenburg crash, and a Jean Claude Van Damme movie.

I couldn't stop looking at it.  The horror!  Guyton's "green" home was net-zero energy because energy has enough sense to stay away from such ugliness.  Half of what I was looking at was a piece of a red storage shed, or perhaps an old British phone booth on steroids, with an umbrella sticking out from the top (this turned out to be the "guest house", about the size of my bathroom).  The other half resembled part of a double-wide plucked from Low Ground Road just around the corner from my house, tricked out with some fancy new siding.  This is the home of the future?

After rinsing my eyes out and taking them to the garage to find some sandpaper so I could buff out any remnants of the hideousness, I returned to the article to see who in their right mind would build such a thing.  It was, indeed, Mr. Davis, president of Earth Comfort Company in Rincon.  Davis' company makes energy-efficient buildings, so naturally he wanted to live in an energy-efficient home.  Nothing wrong with someone wanting to do that.  Don't try to tell me, though, that it is the "home of the future." 

First of all, the look.  Ugly things work for some folks; some people like well-done steaks, and Paulina Porizkova married Ric Ocasek.  But most people want a house to look like, well, a house.  There are already a myriad of styles of housing and some degree of beauty in most.  I'm sure Mr. Davis thinks there is plenty of beauty in his pair of boxes, but folks I know want a home to look like home.  To be sure, the pictures of the interior of the house were very nice as it was decked out with furniture from IKEA, which has surpassed ABBA as Sweden's greatest export. When Mr. Davis and his partners in the construction of his Frankenstein (modular home builder Clayton Homes) figure out how to pair their greenness with an exterior that looks like a place where the kids could play a one-person game of catch with a tennis ball, then the "home of the future" talk can start.  At least it can when the price comes down.

The total cost of land and Mr. Davis' 1,300 square feet (1,000 for the main shoe box, 300 for the guest Jack-In-The-Box):  $256,000.  When you can buy the same size home in parts of Effingham County for less than half that (40% of that in some areas), you are not marketing your product to very many people.  True, you have "net-zero energy" costs, at least you do in the beginning.  The picture from the article that stood out for me included an executive from Georgia Power.  He will deny it, but it looked as if he were salivating at the prospect of finding some way, any way, to get money out of Mr. Davis' pocket book.  It is the modus operandi of monopolistic utilities:  preach conservation, then find an excuse to raise your rates because too people are actually conserving.

If Mr. Davis and his ilk (miss hearing you use that word in Memphis, Mike Fleming) bring down the cost, then "green" housing might catch on, even if it does look like a bad Lady Gaga costume.  And by bringing costs down, I do not mean via hand outs or tax breaks from the government, which fail every time (see the recent slew of bankruptcies in the "green" energy industry, despite untold millions in government help).  That said, I would never wish any ill will on someone trying to make it in a business in which they believe, so good luck Mr. Davis.  I just wish you'd build a DaVinci rather than a pointy public art sculpture next time.