<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Emotions Break Loose Amid Political Blockade

Both of them will be in court next month--the disabled activist who tried to arrest an Assembly aide, and the aide whose boss is himself a quadriplegic. Rocky Burks organized the Capitol protest against budget cuts for the disabled; a score of them, in wheelchairs, on crutches, wearing black armbands, blockaded the governor’s office. Donald Wilson, 26-year-old aide to Tom Bordonaro (R-Paso Robles), the only Assembly member in a wheelchair, ran the gantlet to deliver a letter from his boss to the governor. It was when the aide tried to leave that matters fell apart, and accounts diverged:

Frank Smith--who is 44, weighs 108 pounds and has cerebral palsy--contends that Wilson “walked over everybody. I stood up. He grabbed me and forced me backward. If it weren’t for my wheelchair, I would have been on the floor.”

At the elevator, Wilson encountered Burks, who tried to put Wilson under citizen’s arrest. Instead, says Burks, Wilson threw him against the elevator door. Burks asked police to arrest Wilson; Wilson says Burks assaulted him . Both men were charged with misdemeanor assault.

Wilson says: “You got a bunch of activists who want to make a name for themselves.”

Burks says: “I didn’t touch the guy. I got a migraine. My back is killing me.”

Bordonaro says: “Just because someone is disabled doesn’t mean that they’re incapable of assaulting another.”

For the record, the Central Coast conservative sides with the disabled in this budget item. “Living in a wheelchair is very expensive. There are costs that one would not believe.” Like lawyers’ fees.

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Children and Medi-Cal

Medicaid, the federal health care program for the nation’s poor and the largest single health care program for children, is a target of congressional budget-cutters. California, where it is called Medi-Cal, is second only to the District of Columbia in the percentage of children affected. Here are the top five states and District of Columbia. Figures are from the National Assn. of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions and estimate the percentage of children covered by Medicaid and the number of recipients in 1993.

% Covered Recipients* District of Columbia 41.1 62,543 California 28.3 2,496,224 Louisiana 28.1 433,958 Mississippi 28.0 267,998 West Virginia 27.8 185,819 New York 26.4 1,474,713

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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The anapest wars: Writer Calvin Trillin aired this quatrain in the Nation about White House hopeful Gov. Pete Wilson, headlined “Pete Wilson Prepares to Meet the Voters.”

“He’s milking his scapegoats with great satisfaction:

He says he’s rescinding affirmative action.

He’d starve out the immigrants--all but a fraction.

His eye’s on the prize, and his conscience in traction.”

The response, commissioned by California Dateline from Wilson staffer Dan Schnur:

“So Trillin weighs in from the ivory towers,

Speaking for liberals--to whom Clinton still cowers,

So the Clintons may chide and Trillin may chortle

But just 12 months ago, Kathleen Brown looked immortal.”

(Anapest is the form of poetic meter that our versifying duelists use. Has anyone alerted the Nobel Prize committee?)

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Up a tree: The word bohemian used to be as disreputable as liberal is now. But undeterred, House Speaker Newt Gingrich will show up at the annual Bohemian Grove retreat near the Russian River this month--just a few hundred of the richest and most powerful men in America playing camp and power-bonding in secret, doing guy things like peeing on the vast redwoods. This is in perfect keeping with what Gingrich taught in his Mind Extension University course: that men “are basically little piglets; you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it . . . a male gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.” Think again about abolishing the Endangered Species Act, Mr. Speaker; there aren’t any giraffes left to hunt in Monte Rio.

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Rebel without a car: The man whose name has been Hollywood trivia since a spectacular fatal Porsche crash 40 years ago has died. Not James Dean--the other driver. Donald Turnupseed’s 1950 Ford was turning onto California 41 near Cholame on Sept. 30, 1955, when it was struck by Dean’s silver-gray Porsche Spyder hurrying toward a car race in Salinas. Turnupseed was then a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and he never after gave interviews about the fatal crash, whose date became the title of a movie. Only once did he talk to a reporter, hours afterward; he said he never saw the Porsche hit his Ford.

Turnupseed died of lung cancer at 63. He was 23 in 1955; Dean was 24. The Porsche vanished from sight in 1960.

EXIT LINE

“Putting us in a situation where we have to wear everything like a military code takes away our personality.”

--Conductor Jerry Fontenot, on the probably doomed rule imposing a polyester-blend uniform dress code on San Francisco cable car conductors.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.