Elected Officials Get While Getting Is Good in Capitol

The gifts that keep on giving, or, every day is Christmas Day in Sacramento:

Elected officials harvested $206,712 in freebies last year, versus $133,357 in 1994, and while those excursions to Paris, Hawaii and China must have been all right, who wouldn’t covet those decorative miniature cotton bales bestowed on Assemblyman Charles S. Poochigian (R-Fresno)?

Try to envision Lt. Gov. Gray Davis in one of his four new Planet Hollywood T-shirts. What former lobbyist sent Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame) one rose each month? Where will Assemblyman Phil Hawkins (R-Bellflower) hang his McDonnell Douglas model airplane? And will Gov. Pete Wilson wear his leather tool belt with his blue elephant tie, a $115 gift?

Turkey jerky samples, $2.50 each, were handed out on both sides of the aisle. Free parking was a welcome stocking stuffer. Tickets for Disneyland, an Oscar gala and the circus were part of the largess, as were snorkeling, greens fees, wine in a tin, pencil boxes, a redwood seedling, wind chimes, first aid kits and teapots.

The pieces de resistance were the pieces: a $238 gun for Assemblyman Trice Harvey (R-Bakersfield), a $250 gun for Assemblyman David Knowles (R-Placerville), a pellet gun for Sen. Jim Costa (D-Fresno), and to Sen. David G. Kelley (R-Idyllwild), a black powder pistol, which will come in right handy should elections ever be decided at a distance of 20 paces at dawn.

Absentee Voters

Voting by absentee ballot in California primaries has gained in popularity, quadrupling since 1980. The Secretary of State’s office has no estimate of what to expect in the March 26 primary, the first since the party nominating elections were shifted from the Tuesday after the first Monday in June.

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TOTAL PRIMARY BALLOTS ABSENTEE % ELECTION (in millions) BALLOTS ABSENTEE 1980 6.8 343,875 5.0% 1982 5.8 326,213 5.6% 1984 5.6 418,109 7.5% 1986 4.9 426,133 8.6% 1988 6.0 572,057 9.5% 1990 5.4 808,838 15.0% 1992 6.4 1,073,071 16.6% 1994 5.0 1,011,563 20.4%

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Source: California Secretary of State

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Fast shuffle: Baseball cards, Iran-Contra scandal cards, serial killer cards, and now. . . . Two Fremont paramedics who say they thought that marketing “Cards of Death” could save lives must now concern themselves with saving their jobs.

Three thousand sets of nine cards at $8.95 per set were all ready to go, with photos of victims of various forms of mayhem on one side and on the other, messages about the deaths, from drunk driving to suicide, “actual photos,” it says on the cards, “of violent deaths that could have been prevented with minimal common sense.”

But the two were suspended with pay on Valentine’s Day, and their employer is investigating.

“They say I’m some sort of unmoralistic scumbag,” said one of them. “I feel like my reputation is already ruined.”

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Just call him general: His name is being bruited about as a running mate for Republican Bob Dole--at least in one form or another. California’s attorney general, Dan Lungren, was listed as “Lundgren” in an Associated Press story about the GOP veepstakes . . . and The Times’ city desk got a call from the New York Post to confirm that our attorney general is named . . . Dolph Lundgren.

No fear, Mr. L. The last Republican VP candidate named Dan had his own troubles with spelling.

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Cow cow cow cow boogie: For the cow who has everything, including seven stomachs--four calves.

Wynonna the polled Hereford gave birth to quadruplets at the Pagliaro family ranch in Petaluma, and while a beef specialist at UC Davis said “it would be easier to win the lottery” than to calve a foursome, no one put that question to Wynonna, who did not undergo fertility treatments at UC Irvine or anywhere else.

Her owner, Future Farmers of America member and California-Nevada Polled Hereford Queen Rebecca Pagliaro, named them, like their mother, for country-Western singers: Garth, Reba, Travis and Shania.

While the foursome will hit the country fair circuit this summer, their long-range plans are unknown, to wit, whether they will fulfill their beef-cow destinies and wind up on sesame seed buns.

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One offs: After four years of hosting seminars here on how to move your business out of California, the corporate raider group Trends 2000 is taking its show to new hunting grounds--New York--because Bear Flag Republic businesses are staying put. . . . Garden Grove is signing on to a proposal to raise a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast to balance the big verdigris lady of liberty in New York Harbor . . . actor and political activist Peter Coyote evidently forgot he was still a member of the Green Party when he was elected a delegate to this summer’s Democratic National Convention, so he got bumped from the roster.

EXIT LINE

“It’s not like King Tut’s tomb. But not all of us are King Tuts.”

--Cal State Dominguez Hills anthropology professor Jerry Moore, whose team has mapped 6,000-year-old Cochimi Indian village sites in Baja.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.