For the GOP, Jones Is Still the One to Keep Up With

The lines are being drawn--not in the sand, maybe, not yet, but certainly in the hospitality suites.

At their convention in San Diego this weekend, the California Young Republicans are eagerly anticipating spending “quality time” with California Secretary of State Bill Jones, and probably not just because Jones is picking up the tab for the vino and queso meet-and-greet wine and cheese bar Friday evening.

Jones is the declared Republican in the field in the 2002 governor’s election, although mega-millionaire Bill Simon Jr. is warming up on the sidelines.

And much dust has been raised by the stampede of elected California Republicans to draft recently unemployed Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, whose party allegiances are considered suspect by some GOPsters.

That’s in part because of Riordan’s policies--he’s pro-choice and favors some gun controls, among other things--in part because of donations he and his wife have made to Gray Davis’ reelection campaign--a $10,000 one from Nancy Daly Riordan as recently as March--and in part because of statements like the one Riordan made last summer at the Party of Lincoln’s national convention in Philadelphia: “Gray Davis has positioned himself brilliantly. He is going to be very hard to beat.” (That, of course, was before the lights started winking out all over California, every place but the city of Los Angeles.)

Great Moments With Mr. Cheney

Who made that new heart device, Disney’s imagineers?

Vice President Dick Cheney was en route to a town hall meeting intended to shed light on the energy problems of California and points east.

Aboard Air Force II, he more or less announced, straining his laryngitis-afflicted voice, that his wife, Lynne, would “do most of the talking today.” She obligingly described her husband’s utterances not as talking but as “sort of croaking.”

From laryngitis it was an easy line of inquiry into the general health of the vice president, the daytime medical soap opera that people in D.C. watch faithfully. And how was the veteran of four heart attacks feeling, anyway?

The ordinarily sedate V.P. startled the questioners by jumping up and down and grinning to demonstrate his pink-of-health state.

“Oh stop it!” said his wife, and then, to reporters, “I’m getting him out of here. Bye.”

How to Get a Pol’s Attention

The scene: the state Senate Appropriations Committee.

The time: last Wednesday.

The action: a hearing on the Utility Rate Stabilization Act of 2001. Blah blah blah kilowattage blah blah blah cogeneration . . .

Then suddenly--drama. Democratic Senate leader John Burton, a basketball lover from way back, interrupted testimony with the electric news:

Forward Chris Webber would remain with the Sacramento Kings.

The entire room burst into cheers and applause.

Energy blackouts may have darkened the rest of California but what’s darkened the capital was the rumor that Webber might hie himself to the Indiana Pacers.

All This, and Frequent Flier Miles

The Bush administration’s energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, wasn’t always a voltage guru. In a prior life, he was a senator from Michigan who lost his seat and, like Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft who also lost his Senate seat, landed on his feet--or rather, in a chair in the Cabinet Room.

Veteran campaigner that he is, Abraham flew to San Francisco last week for a speech on energy policy--”How 21st Century Technology Can Solve Our Energy Challenges”--and then, what the heck: as long as he had flown out to California on official business and on the taxpayers’ dime, he took off a little time, took off his Cabinet hat and flew down to LA., where he put on his fund-raiser hat.

At a Century City luncheon the next day, Abraham made another speech to the 30 or 50 people who had not only paid $500 each for this lunch, but who couldn’t so much as nibble an hors d’oeuvre without having paid another $5,000 to join the Republican Presidential Roundtable.

The luncheon dough went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to aid those still enrolled in Abraham’s alma mater, the U.S. Senate.

Quick Hits

* Orange County muckety-muck George Argyros was very much absent from the ambassadorial nominees the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been churning out and passing along for confirmation. The big-bucks GOP donor and even bigger-bucks developer is the Bush administration’s choice for ambassador to Spain, but the Washington Post says that news reports of allegations that Argyros’ management company unfairly held onto security deposits from perhaps thousands of tenants make it “unclear if this one’s going anywhere any time soon.”

* California First Lady Sharon Davis has accepted $2.5 million from the Stanford family--Stanford, as in Stanford University, the Union Pacific Railroad and so forth--to restore the landmark 1860 Stanford mansion and grounds in downtown Sacramento.

* San Joaquin County will be protecting more than 100,000 acres of endangered species’ habitat over the next 50 years in a plan that would keep the land mostly in private hands.

* A San Francisco motorcyclist is circulating petitions to end the off-hours and weekend $3 toll for motorcycles on the Golden Gate Bridge.

* Trial lawyer and Thousand Oaks City Council member Ed Masry--better known as Erin Brockovich’s boss--is described in the latest New Yorker magazine as “nearly catatonic” during a city debate over RV parking, but fully alert when it came to attacking developers. Masry found the story “cute,” but took issue with being compared to actor Charles Laughton, suggesting that Tom Cruise was a more accurate simulacrum.

Word Perfect

“It’s the equivalent of saying you’re going to study cancer and then going to a hospital that treats only heart patients.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer’s comment on the fact that of the many Bush energy emissaries dispatched across the nation last week, none was sent to California.

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Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Mark Barabak, Megan Garvey, Dan Morain, Margaret Talev and Jenifer Warren.