Primary election special: If your name is "Michael Brown" does it matter who you are?

Mike DeBonis of the Post reports, in "Orange ekes out straw poll win in his own backyard," that Phil Mendelson, one of the City Council's only independent voices and the Democratic candidate that I support for the At-Large seat in the Sept. 14th primary, lost the Ward 5 straw poll to another candidate named Michael Brown, presumably because people thought they were voting for the guy who claims he was an All-Met basketball star, but wasn't, according to Dave McKenna of the Washington City Paper in this article, "D.C. Councilmember Michael Brown's Athletic Identity Theft: He Was Never A High School All-Met."
Holy s***.

I mean before you read any further, I have to disclose that I think a lot of the people in Ward 5 are wacked, judging by my experience as a volunteer and then for one year (about) as program manager for the now-deceased Brookland Main Street program.

These people are advocating for undergrounding the electrical wires on Brookland's 12th Street now, after the street construction already has been done. See the article from the biased local publication Brookland Heartbeat, for more on that story, "12th Street Power Lines,"

Where were they during the design of the street construction program? They were busy screaming and carrying on and telling DDOT that they and their design and their contractors were f*****.

That doesn't strike me as an efficient method for getting DDOT to go up against Pepco on their policies and outlandish charges (a City Council study estimated a cost of undergrounding wires at about 1/8 of the cost that Pepco quotes) to get them to do something that costs money.

I know when you're a public servant that you are supposed to help people, but as Professor Donald Shoup says, [when you have limited resources, it's best to focus resources] "on the people who are already helping themselves."

There are plenty of other wacked stories I could recount. Suffice it to say that Suzanne and I looked at a couple of houses in Brookland, but then said no #$%^&*()#$%^&*( way were we going to live in Ward 5 or Brookland.

So this election result doesn't surprise me at all. These are the same people who believe that because Ft. Lincoln residents live in Ward 5, that they have more right to participate in and knowledge about Florida Market (at Florida Avenue and 6th Street NE, about 3 miles away), than the people who live across the street, but in a different ward, Ward 6.

Still Phil better be printing up lots of flyers with the photo of the white Michael Brown...