In a snapshot primer for what may be expected in next year’s GOP gubernatorial race, Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine and Secretary of State Karen Handel had a mini stump speech face off of sorts.

It was like a football game between two bitter rivals, played on Handel’s home turf on Thursday morning. The field was the parking lot of Roswell’s Killer Creek Harley-Davidson Motorcycle dealership, and the venue was a Washington D.C. send-off rally for those who were riding to the nation’s Capital to personally oppose President Obama’s health care reform proposal.

First up was Oxendine. His speech was fiery, passionate and riveting. Mixing in his statewide positions on topics like the Fair Tax, he brought the house down.

After a few benign speeches from other area politicos, it was Handel’s turn. Her speech was flat, listless and relatively uninspiring.

Final score: Oxendine 70, Handel 3. It was a blowout. 

For the life of me, I just don’t get the Handel for Governor campaign. She is clearly over-matched in this race. Her supporters keep telling me I don’t get it. Maybe I don’t. But the audience did. Oxendine got votes, Handel didn’t. I believe Oxendine may outpoll her in North Fulton County.

IT’S P-O-L-L-A-K, STUPID!

Roswell Council candidate Jim Pollak called Wednesday to inform me that I had misspelled his name again in last week’s Beacon. He politely told me I have spelled his name a number of different ways in the past month, none of them right. “My wife told me she met a friend of ours who thought it was someone else who was running for city council, and not me, because my name was spelled wrong,” Pollak said.

Never one to doubt myself, I went back to past Beacon issues to check it out. Needless to say, I was aghast to discover that I had managed to mangle his name on every occasion I wrote about him. In fact, I spelled it 97 different ways in two months! It’s like I created an editorial Rubik’s Cube with his namesake that only a 7th grader in China could ever hope to solve.

So I am sorry, Jim. But now we have it right…I think.

WATER WARS

As the battle for Georgia water rages across the southeast, with shortages looming on the horizon, I can’t help but wonder where all that bottled water comes from. Are we stealing it from Alabama? It’s everywhere!

My wife is incessantly on me to drink more water; she is always plopping those bottles on my desk that she buys at Office Depot. Truth be told, I never touch the stuff. First off, I am not going to swig water from an office supply store. Who knows what they put in those bottles?

I get plenty of H2-0, anyway, because my two primary beverages are coffee and beer. Both have lots of water, and both are now cheaper than the silly bottled water that she buys. I’m talking Maxwell House and Pabst Blue Ribbon, my two favorite brands, respectively. A 12-ounce can of PBR is less than a bottle of office supply company water. And if you buy a 36-pack of the big boy 16-ouncers you really save a bundle, Clarke Howard style.  Plus, Pabst has vitamins in it, like hops, and vegetables, like barley and wheat. As for the coffee, it comes from beans, another vegetable, and you get to put milk in it. Even kids drink milk, so it has to be good for you. I don’t see anybody putting milk or veggies in water bottles. I get the eight food groups right there.

And if health and cost savings aren’t enough, I have also developed a scientific theory that drinking too much bottled water causes hair loss in middle-aged men. I have only 27 strands of hair left, so I can’t take the risk. Besides, I have hard political evidence to back up my claim.

Take Brandon Beach, GNFCC CEO and a candidate for State Senate, D-56. He is always drinking water, and he carries one of those obnoxious bottles with him wherever he goes. Beach has less hair than me.

Now juxtapose that to Georgia House Speaker Pro-Tem Mark Burkhalter. I never see him walking around with bottles of water in tow; he drinks lots of coffee instead. And he’s got tons of hair swirling around every which way.

So I rest my case.