Asked to Report Progress, Lawmakers Couldn’t

Ever since California unmoored itself from a state budget, back at the end of June, the Stockton Record newspaper has been pushing its eight local legislators to reveal every day just what each has done to help pass the state budget. The results read a bit like “what I did over my vacation” shuffled with 12-step-program declarations.

Some of the statements by the six Republicans and two Democrats can slide into jargon: Charles Poochigian, a Fresno Republican, talked up an “alternative revenue stream,” and Linden Democrat Michael Machado strove to “better align state revenues with expenditures in the committee on fiscal restructuring.”

Rico Oller, a San Andreas Republican, likes to go for the punch line: “I told Davis lecturing Republicans on fiscal responsibility is like Madonna lecturing my mother on how to be a lady.”

The first few days must have been easy sailing, but as the standoff went on, one could imagine the daily scramble of legislative aides: What are we going to tell the Record today? There’s always the old “met with constituents,” but Modesto Republican Dave Cogdill said proudly, “I presented a bill that would enhance the value of our current state revenue.” To which one Sacramento aide asked, “Does it mean a $20 bill is really worth $30? What a GREAT idea! We’ll have this thing licked in no time!”

Lodging Complaints Over Yosemite Plan

George Radanovich, the Mariposa Republican and the only winemaker in Congress, is putting a cork in it. The Fresno Bee reports that the Mariposa County winery Radanovich began in 1986 is closing down because of debt.

That may not be the only operation Radanovich wants to shutter. He’s pushing his bill dealing with the thorny matter of how to keep Yosemite National Park from being loved to death by visitors. While a Park Service plan wants to decentralize campsites and limit cars to nudge visitors into buses, Radanovich’s bill would authorize new campsites and ditch the plan to limit parking spaces at one site.

And he wants to dismantle the 100-year-old LeConte Memorial Lodge, a national historic landmark, a Brothers Grimm-looking stone and wood cottage built under the leadership of Sierra Club founder John Muir, and once the residence of uber-photographer Ansel Adams.

“There is a value to every space in the Yosemite Valley that can be restored,” Radanovich said.

“Removing the LeConte Memorial Lodge from the valley is a perfect example of that. The Sierra Club only seems to value restoration of the natural landscape when it doesn’t happen in their backyard.” Radanovich suggests that the cottage could be relocated to someplace outside Yosemite.

The Sierra Club says the lodge gets more than 15,000 visitors yearly for its free lectures on flora and fauna, mountaineering, hiking and geology, its painting classes and educational walking tours, and after-dark storytelling sessions.

There are, it says, “plenty” more “aesthetically, historically and culturally insignificant structures in the park for which removal would make much more sense” than the LeConte Lodge.

Like concession stands?

On the Road Again and Again

If they’re selling tour T-shirts, they’d better come in extra large: the John Kerry presidential campaign has announced the 106 cities on his “Kerry in 2004” meet-up tour, including 16 in California, and one in London -- yes, that London.

The Kerry campaign is sinking its feet into Golden State soil with the appointment of Andrei Cherny as policy development advisor and speechwriting director for the national campaign. Cherny lost the race for a Valley Assembly seat last year, was a senior aide to Al Gore in the White House, and senior policy advisor to former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg.

Kerry’s also planting seeds in Iowa, appointing Laura Capps, former Clinton speechwriter and communications aide, and the daughter of Santa Barbara Democratic Rep. Lois Capps, to be communications director for Kerry in Iowa, where the January caucuses are the first candidate shakeout in the presidential primaries.

Greuel’s Baby Is Right on Schedule

Dean Schramm, the husband of Los Angeles City Council member Wendy Greuel, may want to consider starting the Psychic Dads Network.

The couple were choosing announcements before the recent birth of their son when the clerk asked them to fill out one with hypothetical information just to see how it would look.

Schramm, a literary agent, wrote down that it’d be a boy, born July 4, and weighing 7 pounds two ounces. Pool bettors, pay up: Thomas Weston Schramm was born just before midnight on the Fourth of July, at 7 pounds, 2 ounces.

He’s already giving evidence of an ear for politics, at least his mother’s style. He was being tended by a nanny in Greuel’s City Hall office as audio of the City Council meeting was piped in, and the moment Greuel began to speak, an aide said, young Thomas’ eyes lit up and he squirmed with excitement. Greuel said of her son: “He has become a political animal at an early age -- born on the Fourth of July and listening to his mom on the squawk box.”

Between squawks of his own, of course.

Points Taken

* Newport Beach GOP Rep. Christopher Cox wants the Secret Service to apologize to Times cartoonist Michael Ramirez for “profoundly bad judgment” for using “federal power to attempt to influence [his] work....” An agent showed up at the paper because of a Ramirez cartoon that takes off on a classic Vietnam War photo of a police official shooting a man in a Saigon street. Ramirez says his version shows that Bush is being made the target of political assassination.

* Dennis Kucinich campaign volunteers were striving to make the obvious parallels around town and the country on opening day of the film “Seabiscuit” Friday, handing out “longshots can win” Kucinich-for-president fliers to moviegoers attending the film.

* The Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda presents “Hollywood Fashion Revisited” in an Aug. 7 revue, with 1950s styles including ensembles worn by sisters Tricia and Julie Nixon and mother Pat Nixon; tickets are $50, including lunch -- a price that would probably have paid for that “respectable Republican cloth coat” that Nixon said his wife owned instead of a mink. Said coat is not evidently in the fashion show.

* She was voted unanimously onto the board of LA’s BEST, the city-assisted children’s after-school program: Rikki Klieman, attorney, author and, as the wife of chief Bill Bratton, the LAPD’s first lady.

You Can Quote Me

Rep. Brad Sherman: “...If spending is fixed, is there any tax cut that is good when a country is running a deficit?”

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: “You mean to say, is there a tax cut that pays for itself? I doubt it.... I would prefer to find a situation in which spending was constrained, the economy was growing, and tax cuts were capable of being initiated without creating fiscal problems.”

Sherman: “I would prefer to find a world in which Julia Roberts was calling me, but that is unlikely to occur.”

-- Partial exchange between Sherman, of Sherman Oaks, and Greenspan at a House Financial Services Committee meeting.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected]. This week’s contributors include Patrick McGreevy.