Simon’s Numbers Way Up--the Number of Advisors

Is the Bill Simon campaign becoming California’s political Million Man March?

In recent weeks, the campaign has added to its original stalwarts and true believers some of the people from the Dick Riordan and Bill Jones campaigns--as a peacemaking gesture--and the designated hitters who’ve arrived from the White House, eager to have California in a GOP pocket again.

And now the campaign is reaching back to the Reagan administration--Gov. Reagan--with the addition of Lyn Nofziger, a World War II veteran and a first-string Reagan loyalist whose recent public profile involved his support for the medical use of marijuana, a position reached after the pain of his daughter’s ultimately fatal fight with cancer was relieved by marijuana.

Also among the new names on the organizational chart: John Peschong, a longtime California GOP power ranger and ally of George W. Bush’s Golden State main man, Gerald Parsky; former Gov. Pete Wilson; and Ed Rollins, who most recently advised Jones’ gubernatorial campaign, and before that, ran former congressman Michael Huffington’s self-destruct campaign for Senate and served as an unpaid advisor to Bob Dole’s presidential campaign. Rollins resigned from the Dole effort after a San Francisco political roast for Willie Brown at which he referred to two Jewish congressmen as “Hymie boys.”

Also getting their boarding passes: four new assistant campaign managers, a press operations director and a deputy press secretary.

All this the Davis campaign eagerly seized upon. “Does it occur to anyone else,” gloated Davis campaign-ops commander Garry South, “that he may now have more campaign employees than he has donors?”

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Elective Surgery

Summertime, and Los Angeles County’s health-care system is flat broke.

Not this summer--although it’s certainly true again--but the summer of the year 2000, when L.A. County’s leadership went, begging bowl in hand, to the White House to get help in scraping together enough dough to keep the hospital and clinic doors open.

It had been President Clinton’s emergency “this is the last you’ll get from me” billion-dollar bailout in 1995 that kept L.A. County government solvent (and may have kept its leaders employed).

But in 2000, the billion was running out and L.A. was back for more. The man standing in the doorway of the Roosevelt Room: Chris Jennings, Clinton’s health-care policy advisor. As one Angeleno recalled it, Jennings informed the county that its health-care programs hadn’t yet tightened their belts and didn’t deserve another bailout. Clinton-like, a second bailout did indeed materialize nonetheless, but with the proviso that the money would be less every year, meaning that by 2002, the county would have to cut programs--which brings us up to the here and now.

Today, George W. Bush is the name on the White House mailbox, and Chris Jennings is 3,000 miles from D.C.--working for the Service Employees International Union Local 660, the SEIU, which represents the 5,000 Health Department workers who are about to be laid off in the cuts supervisors approved last week.

That is how Jennings, who once told the county it had to make cuts, came to be standing on the steps of the Hall of Administration urging the supes not to make some of the same cuts.

How can this be? Jennings said the Clinton administration had not really wanted the county to cut health care when it left it with an $800-million hole in its budget. “It does not mean you have to move immediately and immediately take drastic actions to reduce health care,” Jennings said.

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End of Story

Many politicians tend to think of the press as a criminal class, but L.A.’s city attorney, Rocky Delgadillo, may have had better reason than most last week.

Delgadillo was waiting his turn to present an award at the L.A. Press Club’s annual awards dinner at Le Meridien hotel in Beverly Hills when a couple of members of the Canoga Park Alabama gang walked up to Delgadillo at his table.

Six teenagers serving at Camp Gonzales for juveniles were invited to the dinner by their mentors, some of whom work for the L.A. Daily Journal and advise the teenagers on their twice-monthly camp newspaper, Behind the Walls. Kid advocates Carol Biondi and Jo Kaplan, who support the camp’s mentoring program, paid for the six to go to the dinner, right down to their new suits.

The pair introduced themselves to Delgadillo and told him they’d like to be taken off the list of 500-some gangbangers put under curfew and injunction earlier this year in the west San Fernando Valley.

Are you still in the gang? Delgadillo asked.

Yes, they said.

Then I’m not taking you off, he responded.

The pair suggested that if Delgadillo just gave them their little peace of Valley turf to run, there’d be more than a little peace; they don’t hurt other people, just other gangs, was their argument.

Delgadillo countered that they should quit the gang, get jobs and he’d take off the injunction. Sure, they want jobs, absolutely, but they told him they don’t want to leave the gang.

One also complained to Delgadillo of being hassled by cops because of the way he dresses. No, Delgadillo countered, it’s because of the giant “CPA” tattoo on your neck.

One of their volunteer mentors, the Daily Journal’s Katrina Dewey, said the guys were just reporting on a story for their paper. The 1st Amendment makes for strange bedfellows.

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Foreign Entanglements

For a time he was considered to be the heir apparent to Orange County’s then-sheriff, Brad Gates. But by the late 1990s, Assistant Sheriff Dennis LaDucer had cost the county nearly a million dollars to settle three of five sexual harassment suits filed by women in the Sheriff’s Department.

LaDucer was fired in 1997, and wound up with a big job in Bosnia, as deputy commissioner on the International Police Task Force.

Now, the head of the U.N. human rights office in Bosnia told a tribunal in England last week that LaDucer had been spotted in one of Bosnia’s most notorious brothels.

A U.N. spokesman told The Times that a prostitute said she saw LaDucer in the bar of a strip club/brothel, but “his presence was not corroborated,” and he was allowed to finish out his contract, which ended last November.

Madeleine Rees, who heads the U.N.’s human rights office in Bosnia, told the tribunal last week that the prostitute had identified LaDucer. The British employment tribunal was hearing a case brought by a former U.N. police officer, a woman who claims that she was fired after accusing colleagues of trafficking in Bosnian women as sex slaves, and that 70% of the profits of Bosnia’s brothels came from men on the international task force.

The U.N. spokesman said 15 Americans working for the agency have been shipped home for patronizing such establishments; sex trafficking is such a problem in Bosnia that the U.N. has a zero-tolerance policy.

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Points Taken

* Moderate Republican Brooks Firestone’s fourth annual state Republican Party alumni gathering at his Los Olivos ranch (alternate name, “Let’s Not Kill Each Other This Election”) drew Bill Simon as well as 2004 GOP Senate hopefuls Mary Bono and Doug Ose, both members of Congress. The event also served up Danish pastries from nearby Solvang and, natch, wine from the Firestone vineyards.

* You read here last week that Ron Hartwig, who was manager of Richard Riordan’s failed gubernatorial campaign, gave $1,000 to Gray Davis’ campaign; Hartwig also points out that he gave $1,000 to Bill Simon’s campaign, which explains why he’s big in PR.

* Seen at Arianna Huffington’s Brentwood home, at a launching party for the book “50 Ways to Save Our Children” by Cheryl Saban, wife of mega-media-mogul Haim Saban, was a cluster of gal-cabal power rangers: L.A. City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, L.A.’s Planned Parenthood president Nancy Sasaki, political top ops Donna Bojarsky, and L.A. school board member Caprice Young.

* With a calendar full of feel-good events, like the Multi-Cultural Festival 2002 in Westminster Sunday and Congress’ Horizon Award last week for working with young people, Arnold Schwarzenegger looks more and more like a candidate for--something.

* Rob Reiner, the father of the Prop. 10 four-bits-a-pack tobacco tax and head of the California Children and Families Commission, let it be known in a Town Hall speech last week that--even as L.A. County’s health-care system falters--work is underway to use Prop. 10 dollars “to deliver health care for every child age 0 to 5 in Los Angeles County and ... we’re going to get the job done.”

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You Can Quote Me

“You can actually bureaucratize a funeral procession? Never ceases to amaze me....”

--State Sen. Tom McClintock, the Thousand Oaks Republican, commenting during a hearing on a bill by Assembly member Joe Canciamilla--a Martinez Democrat whose family is in the mortuary business--that would regulate funeral processions, some of which evidently get unwieldy on public highways.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected]. This week’s contributors include Johanna Neuman and Nicholas Riccardi.