<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Coalition Promises Senator an X-Rated Giveaway

What’s that long line forming outside state Sen. Charles Calderon’s office?

And when do they put up the “You must be 18 to enter” notice?

Calderon (D-Montebello) introduced a bill for a 5% tax on porn and X-rated material sales, to fund battered women’s shelters, rape crisis centers and counseling for sex crime victims.

The businesses that deal with such material formed the Free Speech Coalition, and to persuade Calderon that porn has no bearing on the crime rate, they will play salacious Santas on Tuesday, delivering to Calderon’s office an assortment of steamy videos, skin mags, computer games and strip-joint passes.

Coalition chairman Jeffrey Douglas contends that if Calderon watched “adult entertainment before he attacks it,” he’d see that it “virtually never depicts rape, battery or violence.”

If he ever sees it.

Press aide Pilar Onante says it’s all destined for the dumpster. But if visitors happen to be there when it shows up, “they can take whatever they want. We don’t want it.”

(Cue theme song to “Rawhide.”)

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Immigrants on SSI

Benefits for more than 315,000 legal immigrants in California now receiving Supplemental Security Income--the federal program for poor people who are elderly, blind or disabled--end in August unless they become U.S. citizens. Here are the 10 counties with the most legal immigrants on SSI:

County: Recipients

1. Los Angeles: 129,985

2. Orange: 21,734

3. San Diego: 21,663

4. Santa Clara: 17,792

5. San Francisco: 17,412

6. Alameda: 13,533

7. Sacramento: 11,869

8. Fresno: 10,409

9. San Bernardino: 8,817

10. San Joaquin: 7,460

Source: Social Security Administration

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Psychic scribes network: On the same day that “XXX” will mark the spot in Calderon’s office, state Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside) has called a news conference about repealing Smog Check II, to which event he has invited “all news mediums.” If we news mediums are any good at all, we won’t have to show up--we’ll already know what he’s going to say.

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Gore more years: In a sendup of himself and his metier, Vice President Al Gore’s deadpan remarks to a joint session of the state Legislature waxed nostalgic about the Gore presidency--all five minutes of it.

President Clinton’s first term expired at noon Jan. 20, as Gore was being sworn in for a second term as vice president. Because Clinton was not sworn in again until 12:05 p.m., Gore was technically a five-minute president.

They were, Gore reminisced, “a very special five minutes for me, for my family, and, if I may be so bold, for America. . . . I like to think that Americans in general and Californians in particular will look back fondly on the Gore administration.

“During the Gore administration, our nation was at peace at home and abroad. We had economic prosperity. Low inflation. And the economy grew. We created 3.1 new jobs during the Gore administration, 1.2 of them here in California.

“Historians will also record, and I say this without fear of contradiction, that there were fewer crimes committed on my watch than during the presidency of any other president, Republican or Democratic.”

” . . . During my entire administration, I did not allow the passage of one single unfunded mandate for the state of California. I think it was partly for that reason that by the end of my term, a chant had swept the nation, ‘Five more minutes. Five more minutes.’ ”

Maybe Gore’s angling to host the Oscars. More likely he’d be asked to pose for one.

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Don’t retread on us: It can’t be liberal guilt because he’s a Republican.

Assemblyman Brooks Firestone, the Los Olivos grandson of the tire pioneer Harvey Firestone, is carrying a bill to create incentives and disincentives to encourage recycling the 30 million used tires the state discards every year, joining the 30 million already piled up hither and yon, legally and illegally.

Can’t burn ‘em--they pollute something fierce, as Canadians learned a while back when an illegal 14-million-tire heap caught fire. Mosquitoes domestic and foreign breed in ‘em. So do snakes. In short, they’re 30 million nuisances, and California levies only a two-bits-per-tire discard fee where other Western states make it a buck or more.

Firestone’s office calculates that about 18 million get recycled--some into electricity--but the other 12 million are not. (How many bear the senator’s family name is not known.)

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One-offs: Hoping to discourage panhandling, Marysville offers drivers the option of feeding parking meters and the homeless with 10 optional donation meters that flag “thank you” when someone drops in a quarter . . . A winning $5 charity raffle ticket bought a Manteca teenager the boom button, which he pushed to dynamite four silos at the abandoned 80-year-old Spreckels Sugar Co. . . . Vandals in an agrarian demolition derby smashed up several tractors and tore up a cotton field in western Fresno County.

EXIT LINE

“It is difficult to understand why he would not have noticed [that] he actually chewed the head of the mouse.”

--San Luis Obispo Superior Court Judge Barry Hammer, ruling that he did not believe an Atascadero man’s lawsuit claim that a mouse had been baked into a McDonald’s apple turnover he bit into.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.