‘Music to Stay Together By’ Climbs the City Hall Charts

Now hear this!

Los Angeles’ Local 347 of the SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, may have a hit on its hands. The union opposes secession, and that’s no song and dance--it’s an entire CD that’s now making the rounds on the CD players of politicos.

“L.A. Together: Music to Stay Together By” is a compilation of 14 cuts, with standards like “Let’s Stay Together,” by Al Green; “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” covered by Gloria Estefan; and the grand old “Stay,” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It’s also got “Don’t Say Goodbye,” by the Mexican crossover phenom Paulina Rubio.

It’s an album full of promise--as in, L.A. promises to get cops to the scene faster in the Valley if you don’t secede, as conveyed in the tune “I Love You More Today Than Yesterday.”

From a critic’s standpoint, the pure-white CD cover is reminiscent of the Beatles’ “White Album,” but the compilation could also have used the grace note of a Lennon-McCartney song--something like “Come Together.”

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Simon’s Got the Japanese Vote

On one of those rare, clear July mornings that belie Mark Twain’s remark that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, the Simon-for-governor campaign was setting up shop.

A news conference was being readied on Treasure Island, with the city skyline in the background and, as an aide to the GOP gubernatorial candidate put the lectern in place, angling it so that the vista would be visible behind Simon, two buses full of Japanese tourists pulled up.

Dozens of them piled out to pose before the bridge-and-city backdrop. Some of them spotted the lectern and rushed toward it, taking turns mugging for the camera with the sign that read “Bill Simon for Governor,” and giving their own performances, delivering mock-pompous speeches in Japanese as their friends filmed their antics.

The flustered aide shooed them away with an “OK, that’s enough,” but not before they had proved a truism of American politics: It all comes down to props and photo ops.

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Did You Hear the One About the Lawmaker?

Assemblyman John Campbell is the Irvine Republican who has proposed cutting health-care services to avoid raising taxes, which is something you have to know to understand this e-jest making the rounds in the state Capitol:

A young man was born with a damaged heart, and at age 20 he needed a transplant to survive. The heart specialist told him he was one lucky fellow: three hearts were available for transplant. One was from an 18-year-old Olympic athlete killed in a skiing accident, one was from a 17-year-old girl, and one had belonged to 46-year-old John Campbell. Which would it be?

Without hesitation, the patient chose Campbell’s heart. The doctor was dumbfounded: Why would he choose that, when younger hearts were available?

“Because,” the patient replied, “his heart has never been used!”

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When Going Gets Tough, He Changes Subject

Ventura County’s one-man foot-in-mouth epidemic, county Supervisor John Flynn, is trying the old change-the-subject trick to extricate his extremity this time.

Flynn had been riffing about one Irma Lopez--a big local fund-raiser and wife of the Oxnard mayor--because she had filed a police report saying that, at the Democratic Party’s annual barbecue, Flynn had shouted, “I’m gonna get you!”

Flynn defended himself, saying Lopez was just cooking up a bogus police report to embarrass him, and moreover, he added, she “won’t be happy until she sees a sea of brown faces in every political office in west Ventura County.”

This is not a statement to go unremarked upon, and it hasn’t; the local chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens condemned Flynn, and a letter declared that LULAC “will not allow elected representatives to denigrate the leadership of our community without consequence.”

The letter was written by LULAC’s chapter president, whose name is Denis O’Leary, and there Flynn saw an opening to shift the ground under the controversy by dragging in an even older and bigger controversy.

Because this isn’t about Irish versus Mexican, Flynn told a reporter--after all, his district is two-thirds Latino and he’s been elected seven times. It’s about Protestant versus Catholic! “O’Leary? That’s an Orangeman’s name. I think he enjoyed signing that letter.”

Orangemen are militant Protestants in Northern Ireland, but Flynn called it wrong: “I’m not too up on Irish legend and history,” O’Leary says, “but my grandfather was a Catholic and his parents were too. I’m a green.”

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He’ll Apologize for the Hawaiian Shirt, No More

No shoes, no shirt, no speeches.

The Libertarian candidate for governor, Gary Copeland, wasn’t dressed up enough, so he got dressed down for wandering around the supposedly anything-goes Libertarians’ annual convention in “shorts, sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, randomly shouting stupid comments during other people’s speeches.”

So said Libertarian leader David Nolan in a message to convention delegates. “Tell everyone you can that he is an ‘accidental’ candidate who got the nomination through a fluke.... In 30 years, I’ve never taken this position before”--of renouncing a candidate--”but Gary is in a class by himself, literally.”

Candidate Copeland, who runs a medical information Web site in Orange County, declared himself to be “very sad” at Nolan’s denunciation.

He did it, Copeland opined, because on the ballot, Copeland proclaims himself as a “Libertarian Druid Existentialist.”

“I apologize for an error in judgment, as one’s faith is personal not public,” he said, and offered to step down from the campaign if the party’s members wish him to.

“I will never apologize for being a Druid.”

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Throwing Bouquets at the Tax Fighters

Say it with flowers: A political action committee called Taxpayers at Conservative Opportunities is making it easy for what it redundantly calls “California families from around California” to thank some “real heroes”--not Sept. 11 rescue crews, but California legislators opposing new taxes in the forthcoming budget, like raising the state’s yearly vehicle registration fee, which Gov. Pete Wilson cut by 25% in the days of lusher budgets.

The “Send Flowers to Assembly Republicans” Web site promises to have posies delivered for $10.78, including sales tax. Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. says a variety of “pro-taxpayer” groups have a hand in this; one day alone, he said, 100 people doled out their online dough.

Alas, the blooms are destined to wilt soon in the hot air of a Sacramento summer--100-plus outside the Capitol, and who-knows-how-high inside.

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Points Taken

* Rep. Gary Condit’s wife can go ahead with her $10-million suit against the National Enquirer after a federal judge turned down the tabloid’s request to have the suit dismissed. The suit says the tabloid’s August 2001 story headlined “Cops: Condit’s Wife Attacked Chandra,” reporting on a supposed “attack” in a telephone conversation between the congressman’s wife and intern Chandra Levy, insinuated that Carolyn Condit had played some role in Levy’s disappearance when the two had never met or spoken.

* A news release faxed to these premises was headlined, “Cardenas’ ‘Do Not Fax’ Bill Set for Hearing.”

* A fund-raiser hosted by, among others, Ed Asner, Stanley Sheinbaum and Ed Begley Jr. recently raised campaign funds for the newly redistricted Barbara Lee, the Oakland Democrat who was the only member of Congress to vote against the White House’s use of military force measure after Sept. 11, which the invitation referred to as Bush’s “permanent war policy.”

* Longtime peace activist Jerry Rubin’s campaign for Santa Monica City Council has the endorsement of the “Wednesday night President,” the “West Wing” actor Martin Sheen.

* Orange County Republicans say “aloha” and “you go, wahine” in Newport Beach today to Linda Lingle, Republican candidate for governor of Hawaii, at a luncheon sponsored by the county GOP; the fund-raiser comes tonight.

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You Can Quote Me

“It has been said that the governor is our first coin-operated governor.”

Republican Bill Simon on Gov. Gray Davis’ fund-raising prowess before a group of San Diego civic leaders last week.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Matea Gold, Jean O. Pasco, Margaret Talev and Julie Tamaki.