Winning Is Everything in Fantasy Politics Too

Football fans! Facing the dreary post-Super Bowl months? Here’s a suggestion:

Instead of fantasy football, how about fantasy politics? It’s now as close as the Internet. The Cal-Access Web site, https://www.ss.ca.gov, now lists financial reports of both candidates and propositions, and come May, the dishy details of lobbyists’ expenses will be added as well.

Details heretofore available only on paper at the secretary of state’s office will also be just a few keyboard taps away. So start assembling your favorite campaign teams: candidates, big-bucks contributors, campaign wizards, ballot initiatives, and who’s putting their money where their mouths and billboards and sound bites are.

Send your candidate up against the competition! Chart the RBIs (Resources Brought In)! Compare donors by ZIP Code, by occupation! Is your pol winning in Barbra Streisand’s ZIP Code but losing in the pickup-truck belt? Hurry, only six campaigning weeks until March 7!

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Bitter medicine: Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa showed up outside Sacramento’s Mercy General Hospital last week to encourage trouble-free elections in Thursday’s union vote.

But Villaraigosa ran into a little trouble himself. In a letter to the hospital, Villaraigosa says that when he tried to greet employees outside, he was “cut short” by a security guard who ordered him to “make way” and “move on.” When employees invited him into the cafeteria after the press conference, the guard blocked their way, Villaraigosa said, and went after a woman taking a picture of the group.

“These occurrences deepen my concern,” he wrote, “that the anecdotal reports of management interference of the worst sort are only too true.”

A hospital spokeswoman told the Sacramento Bee that the hospital wasn’t notified that Villaraigosa was coming, and because the hospital is private property, the group could have been told to leave but was allowed to hold its news conference.

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Bearish on ursines: Here’s an attack ad about attacks. Using videotape made by poachers, state Senate candidate Skip Daum has made a TV spot charging Assemblyman Rico Oller (R-Cameron Park) with “unsportsmanlike” conduct for hunting bears with dogs.

The ad, unveiled in Chico, shows a pack of dogs attacking and treeing a bear. The bear falls out of the tree, apparently after being shot. Daum called hunting bears with a pack of dogs “unsportsmanlike” and savage, an indicator that Oller lacks the character to hold public office. If he were elected, says Daum, he would ban the use of dogs to hunt bears.

Oller’s campaign manager says that while the assemblyman has killed seven or eight bears, he usually uses his dogs to tree a bear, and then he photographs the ursine.

The men are facing off in the GOP primary to replace term-limited Sen. Tim Leslie, whose 1996 initiative rolling back restrictions on hunting mountain lions went to the dogs.

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Gone west: Former Assemblyman Tom Umberg, who for years was the only Democrat elected to state or federal office from Orange County, is leaving his post as one of the highest-ranking Californians on Pennsylvania Avenue. The No. 2 man in the White House’s drug policy office under drug czar Barry McCaffrey, Umberg worked to cut the flow of drugs from Latin America and beyond.

“It’s time for my family to return to California,” Umberg says. He cites the drug office’s achievements, “but my daughter will be a senior, and we’d like her to spend her last year of high school in California.”

His kids may find SoCal figuratively “cooler” than D.C., and their father, who will be practicing law, may not miss the warmer political climate, either.

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One-offs: A Cal State Monterey Web site designer said he was guilty only of “extreme humor” when he posted a computer message urging opponents of handicapped parking to “do something nasty” to those in wheelchairs. . . . Termites passed judgment the only way termites know how on a controversial and oft-vandalized wooden sculpture of a man and a woman, a gift to Palo Alto from its Swedish sister city. . . . An Alameda man who rescued wandering dogs several times in the last year has launched a Web site, https://www.FreePups.Com, as a way to match up the lost, the found and the foundlings.

EXIT LINE

“If your hands are tied and your money is disappearing, you’re probably being robbed.”

--Jim Hart, longshot candidate for San Diego mayor, on why he wants the district attorney’s office to probe city finances.

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.

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Teenage Abortion Rates

Saturday marked the 27th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws banning abortions. The availability of abortion services continues to vary dramatically from state to state. California has the nation’s sixth-highest legal abortion rate for teenagers.

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Source: The Alan Guttmacher Institute, New York, based on a 1996 survey.

Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times