Now Here’s a Chance to Raise the Hate Crimes Card

Coming soon to a police cruiser near you: the hate crimes card.

The Anti-Defamation League has drafted a nifty laminated card--bigger than the Miranda model, but just the right size to slip into a field notebook or clip to the visor of a patrol car--to help officers handle hate crimes.

Several hundred were given to the badge-and-uniform set at a hate crime conference in Sacramento recently, and by month’s end, cards will be in the mail to law enforcement in all 50 states.

The card was field-tested in California by the Los Angeles school police and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, which had something to say about everything from the card size to the typeface.

It bears 11 strategies (“Allow victim to use own words. Use interpreter, if necessary.”) and seven factors to watch, like telltale signs of a hate crime, and whether the crime took place on an ethnic or political red-letter day--like Cinco de Mayo, or Hitler’s birthday.

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1st Amendment frolics: They figure the landscape is being stripped, so why shouldn’t they do the same to themselves?

Four women protesting logging near the north-coastal town of Westport hit upon a new way to draw a camera in a protest-jaded age: a topless prayer vigil against clear-cutting.

The quartet’s leader, Dona Nieto, stood at a roadside bearing flowers, reciting poetry and, when the crash of falling trees reached her ears, shouting “Rape!”

“I think it was quite effective,” she said, “because we stopped them in their tracks a couple of times. Poetry is powerful and it turns out that breasts are pretty powerful, too.”

Speaking of powerful parts, legislators who return to Sacramento in January will be getting the gift of video: “The Grass-Roots Guide to Lobbying,” filmed in part on the Capitol premises and starring--in case they’re unrecognizable clothed--leading men and women porn stars performing impassioned scripts about civics and the 1st Amendment.

Michael Ross, the lobbyist for the National Cabaret Assn.--not the Liza Minnelli/Joel Grey cabaret--says of the 43-minute video, “We want everyone to know we’re proud of it; as a result of it not being a sex video, everyone can get good [civics] information.”

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Wedding-bell blues: The unexpected guests at Michael Grogan’s wedding rehearsal dinner were not his fellow lawmen. They weren’t guests--and Grogan isn’t a lawman. The feds burst into the Point Loma restaurant and hauled him away on charges of bank and wire fraud and impersonating a law enforcement officer.

Moreover, these same authorities say, the bridegroom’s real name is James Ruben Rowe and he was neither--as he evidently claimed--a former Navy SEAL nor a DEA agent.

And his Super Bowl ring from his supposed gridiron career with the New England Patriots? The Patriots have lost both times they went to the Super Bowl.

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One-offs: Two Millbrae radio DJs who dressed like convicts and went door to door begging residents to saw off their handcuffs as an on-air stunt were arrested on misdemeanor charges of triggering false emergency reports. . . . Secretary of State Bill Jones is investigating possible voter fraud on an Austrian-owned Web site selling more than 1,800 votes offered by voters, most of them Californians--at a price of $19.61 per vote as of Monday.

EXIT LINE

“She heard I was such a dynamic speaker, and she asked me to be her charisma advisor.”

--Gov. Gray Davis, speaking of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, an oratorical powerhouse who was the keynote speaker at the 14th annual California Governor’s Conference for Women.

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Debate Forecast

Politics and astrology were intertwined long before it was revealed that former First Lady Nancy Reagan relied on astrology to make important decisions concerning the presidency of her husband. Here is what the stars hold for the state’s two Senate

candidates, according to “Sydney Omarr’s Day-by-Day Astrological Guide” for Oct. 24, one day under consideration for debates.

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Dianne Feinstein, Democrat, Cancer

“The Pluto keynote, plus the third-house moon, bring a tendency to be careless in traffic and to associate with people who talk at you and not with you. Focus on the fine print, the subtle innuendoes, and a loud-mouthed person who attempts to intimidate.”

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Tom Campbell, Republican, Leo

“News you have been holding can be released, and you’ll be complimented on keeping a promise about a device that uses voice commands. Accept accolades without undue modesty. Add this: ‘I only did what any decent person would do!’ ”

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California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.