Clinton Still Presides at the Westwood Wing

Bill Clinton, not yet a regular host of a TV show or anything else, is making frequent guest appearances in the Entertainment Capital, where he recently had a gabfest with the gaggle of ex-Clinton aides who came west to work.

At the W hotel in Westwood, it was old home week--actually, old White House week. Clinton let it be known that he thinks those in his ex-coterie are still nostalgic for Pennsylvania Avenue even though (like him) they’re making more money and enjoying more free time.

Clinton is putting together a Web site so they can all keep in touch, and he spent a good bit of time chatting up a book he’d obviously read and reread: “Blinded by the Right, the Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.” That’s the mea culpa bestseller by David Brock, who spent much of the 1990s hammering on the Clintons for fun and profit on behalf of various conservative outfits, and now says he was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Clinton, who seems to have practically committed passages to memory, told his former aides that whenever they feel down, they should read Brock’s book to illuminate anew what they were all fighting against for eight years, and as a reminder of what “unhappy” people their counterparts on the right truly are.

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Merry-Go-Round Stops for the O.C. Fair Board

Orange County’s Republican stronghold is peeved enough at the Democratic hegemony in Sacramento, but now it’s serious--the county fair could be taken over by Democrats.

For years, the plummiest political appointment in the once-agricultural county has been a seat on the Orange County Fair and Exposition Board, which oversees the fair’s run every July.

Three seats expire this year: those of former Assemblyman Curt Pringle, local GOP maven Emily Sanford and lobbyist Randy Smith. All were put there by Gov. Gray Davis’ Republican predecessors.

Pringle’s chance at another term is lower than circus sawdust, but he wants to hang on for one last fling at this year’s fair. The three openings mean Davis can put a Democratic majority on the fair board for the first time in two decades; this is no trifling matter. A majority of baby boomer Democrats, says one fair fan, could mean “we get better rock ‘n’ roll bands.”

The fair board doesn’t get paid, but the job is worth its weight in corndogs.

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For the Record, Brulte Gets a Big Idea

Big Jim Brulte may be bigger than he thinks.

The state Senate’s tall and wide GOP leader was saying his piece about Gov. Gray Davis’ proposed budget in a Capitol hallway not far from Davis’ office. Suddenly, there in the scrum of reporters was Steve Maviglio, Davis’ press secretary, hoisting his tape recorder toward Brulte like everyone else.

As the lawmaker recognized Maviglio, he interrupted himself to cheerily declare, “You know when you’ve made it when the governor’s press secretary wants to record everything you say.”

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Just the Player to Tackle the Problem

With the Chargers thinking about divorcing San Diego unless they get a new stadium, the pro football team has added a veteran all-pro political left guard, Mark Fabiani, a first-round draft pick out of Harvard, who’s played on the teams of Tom Bradley, Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

More recently, Fabiani quit his $30,000-a-month energy-crisis consulting job with Gov. Gray Davis after it was learned that Fabiani also did consulting work for Southern California Edison.

Fabiani’s real sport is hardball. As deputy mayor in L.A., he kept hammering at Police Chief Daryl Gates, and he infuriated Council President John Ferraro when he tried to pull an Al Haig “I’m in charge here” and act as mayor when Bradley left town. So watch out, Charger quarterback Doug Flutie--Purdue rookie Drew Brees may not be the only one wanting to call the signals in San Diego.

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Just Color Him Out the Door Already

That’s gratitude for you.

Just when Los Angeles’ Community Redevelopment Agency was over the hump, out of the red, in the pink--name your metaphor for getting better--the agency is looking to hire a new administrator.

Jerry Scharlin was a corporate turnaround artist with zero experience in redevelopment when he was hired in 1999 to reorganize the agency. But his contract expires at the end of July, so in spite of the city having green-lighted one of its largest-ever urban renewal projects, City Hall sources say chances are there will be a new name on the administrator’s door.

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Points Taken

* The Freudian question “What do women want?” gets a California twist on Friday at a Women’s TownHall event in Los Angeles featuring both Gray Davis and Bill Simon speaking on “What Women Want For California.”

* Last week’s Kennedy Center event sponsored by Vital Voices Global Partnership honored women around the world who have labored for women’s rights. Among the women honoring such women was actress Julia Ormond, who flew in from California and who is working on a film about profiteer-trafficking of Russian women.

* A big grant from mega-media-mogul Haim Saban, he of the Power Rangers, has founded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, which was inaugurated last week with a speech by the king of Jordan. Saban already has planted a big footprint in D.C. with Democratic donations, most stunningly his recent $7-million contribution to building a new headquarters for the party whose HQ was once, famously, in the Watergate complex.

* The long-suffering Southern California Assn. of Governments--SCAG being, among other things, a homonym of a synonym for both heroin and hookers--has begun referring to itself as the “association of governments,” hoping that everybody else will take the hint and follow suit.

* Gerry Schipske, the Democratic nurse practitioner and lawyer, is running for Congress in the South Bay-Long Beach district again, and trying to take her ideas to the streets with issue-specific, downloadable bumper stickers bearing messages about teaching, the environment, Social Security and health care.

* A retired Lafayette ironworker who registered his toy poodle, Barnabas, as a Republican voter has been charged with misdemeanor vote fraud, even though Barnabas has never voted and Donald Miller said he did it to show how flabby voter registration checks are.

* In a job move that should come with combat pay, Carolina Guevara--former second-in-command spokeswoman for former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan--will be the new second-in-command spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese.

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You Can Quote Me

“Well, you know, I must admit I’d like to see it. It doesn’t sound good to me. I’d like to know a little bit more about it, but I think that to commercialize September the 11th is something that is not a good idea.”

--Bill Simon, on the Larry Elder radio show, answering a question about the propriety of including a Sept. 11 photo of President Bush as part of a three-picture deal--a $150 premium for a fund-raising dinner next month for Republican congressional candidates. Through a spokesman, Simon later amended his answer, saying that once he found out the picture was of Bush discussing the attack, and not the attack itself, he saw no problem.

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Formerly the Best and Brightest

Last September’s issue of a publication called Government Technology featured on its cover California’s “High-Tech Triumvirate”: Elias Cortez, Arun Baheti and Steve Nissen. Cortez, head of the state’s technology department, has since been suspended, gubernatorial aide Baheti has resigned and Nissen departed, all under the cloud of the Oracle software debacle.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Richard Fausset, Carl Ingram, Patrick McGreevy and Jean O. Pasco.