Bright Lights, and Two Kinds of Bites

More Dispatches From the Dim Bulb Front Republicans love watching Democratic Gov. Gray Davis sweat out the power crisis, and the fact that neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney has visited the Golden State has not escaped GOP strategist Mike Madrid, who says, “The last thing anybody would want to do is step onto the Titanic when it is sinking.” That was before Bush announced a late May visit to California, which brought this volley from Demo strategist Mark Mellman: “Having told California to drop dead, it’s unseemly to pay a condolence call--especially on Memorial Day.”

* When the Govster himself acidly threatened to visit the district of every legislator who voted against his power bailout, a politician from Orange County, where every legislator but one voted against Davis’ plan, volunteered to squire him around personally. Since the county’s 1994 bankruptcy, says Irvine Assemblyman John Campbell, “Orange County residents know fiscal irresponsibility when they see it.” But Davis is not--unlike the Orange County fiscal managers in those days--getting his advice from psychics and astrologers.

* They come from different parties, but they’re Californians first: San Diego Democratic Rep. Bob Filner says Prez Bush’s energy plan “just proves that GOP stands for Gas, Oil and Pollution.” And Simi Valley Rep. Elton Gallegly wants the Bush administration to know that he’s really a good Republican, honest, even though he has ad-libbed off the White House script by wanting caps on energy prices. As his spokesman pleaded, Gallegly “doesn’t like price caps either. But when a patient is hemorrhaging you have to apply a tourniquet.”

Just Call Him Antonio--Everybody Else Does

When strangers and acquaintances alike refer to Los Angeles mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa by his first name, Antonio, it may be because they like him--or it may be because they can’t pronounce his last name.

The name flummoxes people who introduce the candidate, and even stymies professional broadcasters. “Villa-gorosa” has been the most common misspin, or a truncated “Villa-gosa.” Mayor Richard Riordan, who can sometimes be flub-tongued, finally got it right at his gala ceremony endorsing Villaraigosa.

Villaraigosa is a compound of the candidate’s surname, Villar, and his wife’s, Raigosa, and even the candidate has been heard to say “RAY-gosa” instead of the linguistically meticulous “RYE-gosa.”

Greg Nelson, chief of staff to council member and former mayoral candidate Joel Wachs, explains it thus: “Most people just stop short after they say ‘Villa . . .’ They give up. They don’t go on. I guess they don’t want to embarrass themselves.”

Perhaps the weirdest enunciation of the five syllables comes from those who, like a talk radio host, have given up altogether, and fallen back on a familiar five-syllable approximation: “Belalugosa.”

Justice Mosk, Back to Back And speaking of Bela Lugosi:

When Justice Stanley Mosk last month wrote for the California Supreme Court that only the heirs to celebrities have a right to sell their images unless the product in question is art and not just a “literal” depiction, his ruling was 180 degrees from one he made on the same subject in 1979, when times and the law were different.

The state high court has declared that a man who sold his drawings of the Three Stooges on T-shirts and lithographs was not making art, just money.

Mosk was on the same court in 1979 when it ruled in Lugosi vs. Universal that the right of publicity (and its profits) does not extend beyond the grave. That case had been brought in 1963 by Bela Lugosi Jr., who saw his late father’s old studio making money from his image.

In 1984, five years after the Lugosi ruling, the Legislature passed the Celebrity Rights Act, giving celebrities’ heirs ownership to their images 70 years after death.

Lugosi Jr. is now a Los Angeles-area lawyer who points out that it was the 1984 law that Mosk and his colleagues recently supported conditionally, extending the right of publicity--like the life of movie vampires--beyond the grave.

B-1 Bob’s Bark and Sound Bite

. . . AND speaking of someone who insists on coming back from the political dead, Bob Dornan, Orange County’s favorite redhead, the eight-term Republican firebrand of the House of Representatives until he was defeated in 1996, is still swinging.

From his home in Virginia, a state on the Right Coast, Dornan learned that Michael Farber has filed for personal and business bankruptcy. Farber is the Orange County Democrat who ran a committee called “Dump Dornan” and tried to do so, taking on Dornan in 1994 and losing. Two years later he lost the Demo primary to Loretta Sanchez, who did beat Dornan.

Farber claimed $505,261 in unpaid campaign and business bills, and listed his assets as $565, a three-figure falling off from 1994, when he raised half a million bucks--a stupefying sum for an Orange County Democrat--to run against Dornan.

Dornan, who accused Farber of taking campaign money from a pornographer, now accuses him of taking “a scoundrel’s way out.”

Quick Hits

Garden Grove Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who got leaned on last summer to move her fund-raiser out of the Playboy Mansion, had no comment to make on L.A. City Council candidate Tom Hayden canceling his fund-raiser at the offices of Hustler magazine. . . . When Ventura County Chief Administrative Officer Johnny Johnston asked the Board of Supervisors to change his title to chief executive officer--CAO to CEO--an aide suggested that he “tell them, ‘I’d like to buy a vowel.’ ” . . . Diane Watson may think her election to Congress in the big-time Democratic 32nd Congressional District is a slam-dunk, but her campaign mailer identifying election day as June 4 jumps the gun by 24 hours. . . . The telegenic L.A. city attorney contender Rocky Delgadillo may be the candidate on the milk carton--he has taken part in many debates with opponent Michael Feuer, but refuses any that are televised. . . . In the GOP versus the GOP, veteran Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) has quit as chairman of the state’s Republican delegation after some hot-tempered, closed-door meetings over that survival-of-the-fittest issue, reapportioning congressional districts.

Word Perfect

“California takes up the majority of my time because y’all think we just don’t like California, which is not the case.”

--Ken Lisaius, the Bush administration’s media liaison for California--and 16 other states, too. In the Clinton years, California had a liaison all its own.

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Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Mark Z. Barabak, Faye Fiore, Patrick McGreevy, Jean O. Pasco, James Rainey and Margaret Talev.