In Roll Call’s analysis, the districts represented by Republicans Lynn Westmoreland, Tom Price, Phil Gingrey, Austin Scott, Rob Woodall, Tom Graves, Paul Broun and Tom Graves will continue to be represented by Republicans – ditto for the Democratic seats of John Lewis, Hank Johnson, David Scott and Sanford Bishop.

There will still be some interesting races next year, regardless.

The election that everyone will be watching is in the 12th Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. John Barrow has been targeted by Georgia’s Republican leadership.

Barrow no longer resides in the district, now that Savannah and Chatham County have been drawn out of it. The black voting age population in the 12th District will shrink from nearly 43 percent to about 33 percent, and several Republican-leaning areas will replace that black population.

From the Roll Call article:

Under the new lines, a little less than 60 percent of voters would have cast their ballot for McCain in 2008. (Obama won Barrow’s current district with 54 percent of the vote.) The changes make winning another term substantially more difficult for Barrow, a co-chairman of the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition.

Still, Barrow is a wily survivor who managed to remain in Congress after Georgia’s 2005 redistricting drew him out of his first district. He is known as a hard worker and a smart campaigner, so the new lines alone are not enough to close the book on his Congressional career. Also, the fact that Obama will be on the top of the ticket in 2012 should help increase Democratic turnout all over Georgia.

The black voters carved out of the 12th District are mostly in the 1st District of Republican Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah, whose district now has a black voting age population of 28.9 percent. Roll Call writes:

Should Kingston retire, this is the kind of district Democrats would take a serious look at if they were facing a 2006-style wave election in their favor. But given how 2012 is shaping up, Kingston should easily win re-election.

The one open seat in Georgia will be the Hall County-centered 9th District covering the northeast corner of the state. The new congressman will almost certainly be a Republican, but the GOP primary will be a lively one.

From the Roll Call article:

The early frontrunners are tea-party-affiliated talk-radio host Martha Zoller and state Rep. Doug Collins (R), who has early support from a good chunk of the Georgia Republican establishment. Zoller hired Joel McElhannon, a well-regarded GOP operative, as her general consultant. Collins brought on Chip Lake, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland’s former chief of staff, as his general consultant. Brian Miller, former Sen. Zell Miller’s (D) grandson, is managing the Collins campaign. Deal won’t endorse in the race, but many vendors who worked for his 2010 campaign have signed on with Collins.

Republican Rep. Tom Graves will be running in a drastically reconfigured district that will be re-numbered as the 14th District. With all of the new territory added, he could face a significant challenge in the GOP primary.

Roll Call writes:

Graves may pull a primary challenger or two in this newly drawn and newly numbered district that includes about half of the territory he currently represents. Two potential opponents include former Paulding County Commission Chairman Jerry Shearin and businessman Steve Tarvin.

“He just doesn’t meet my values and principles,” Tarvin told Roll Call, adding he would decide on a bid in the next month. But even Tarvin admits it will be difficult for any potential opponents to get to the right of Graves’ voting record. Republicans in the state said Graves is seen as likely to be re-elected, despite the potential primary challenges, in what will remain a very comfortable GOP district for years to come.

The latest example of this mindset was on national display last Friday night on Bill Maher’s cable TV show, where one of the guests was U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah.  In the midst of a general discussion of evolution, Kingston declared that he didn’t believe in such elitist, liberal ideas.  “I believe I came from God and not from a monkey,” Kingston said rather proudly.

Here’s a transcript of the evolution discussion:

Maher:  Do you believe in evolution?

Kingston:  I believe I came from God and not from a monkey, so the answer is no.  I do not believe in it.

Maher:  I’m sorry, but if you don’t understand that humans and monkeys came from a common ancestor, that is risible in the 21st century . . .

Kingston:  I don’t believe that, uh, a creature crawled out of the sea, I don’t believe it, a creature crawled out of the sea and became a human being one day.   I think there’s adaptation and I think that’s actually what they’re talking about.   Where’s the missing link?  Where’s the missing link in all this fossil information?  I just want to know what it is. If it happened over millions and millions of years, there should be lots of fossil evidence, but they haven’t found it . . . I know there is adaptation, and there is a difference between adaptation and evolution.

Kingston’s refusal to believe in evolution puts him squarely in the mainstream of Georgia politics.

It was just a few years ago that Kathy Cox, at the time the state school superintendent, attempted to delete all references to evolution from the state’s science curriculum (she later retreated in the face of withering media criticism).

Although it was little noted at the time, Cox also tried to delete from the curriculum other references to such widely accepted concepts as plate tectonics and the “Big Bang” theory that suggest the earth is more than 6,000 years old – concepts that creationists and the Christian right disagree with.

Oddly enough, Cox obtained her bachelor’s degree not from some crackpot bible “college” in Florida but from Atlanta’s own Emory University, which I always found exceedingly strange.  But there you are.

Of course, when you compare Cox to other of our elected officials she sounded almost erudite.  There was once a Republican legislator from White County named Ben Bridges who got caught up in a controversy after his name was put on a memo that claimed the teaching of evolution was part of a “religious agenda” perpetrated by Jews.

The anti-Jewish memo was drafted and distributed by Marshall Hall, whose wife Bonnie had run Bridges’ election campaigns.

The memo Hall drafted stated that “Indisputable evidence – long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternative ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion.  This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two milennia.”

Hall’s memo added that “evolution science has a very specific religious agenda and (as with ‘creation science’) cannot legally be taught in taxpayer supported schools, according to the Constitution” (link to the full text of the memo here).  The memo urged legislators to introduce bills that will “stop the misuse of billions in taxes now funding a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student.”

The memo was sent to legislators in several states, including Texas, where Rep. Warren Chisum (R-Pampa) distributed it to his colleagues along with a cover letter (link to it here) that said, “I am acquainted with Representative Bridges through my work as Chair of the NCSL Agricultural, Environmental and Energy Committee, and greatly appreciate his information on this important topic.”

Hall also operated a website called fixedearth.com (link to it here) that claimed the earth “is not rotating . . . nor is it going around the sun.”  Hall’s website contended that “An electromagnet and computerized sensor hidden in its display stand cause the Earth to levitate motionlessly in the air.”

Considering all of the above, it’s amazing that they aren’t providing leeches to the students enrolled at the Medical College of Georgia.