Coming Up Short in Fire-and-Brimstone Tirade

The spirit is willing, but the Bible scholarship is weak.

Sacramento Republican Rep. Doug Ose, who is thinking about taking on Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer next year, played the House floor like a stage recently in a debate over denying money for the rebuilding of Iraq to companies from the coalition of the unwilling, like France.

A very pumped-up Ose strode to the well of the House and delivered a sizzler speech, arguing in part that American lives won’t be spent “on a goal that benefits those lacking the courage to do the necessary thing, lacking the commitment to stand with those who will confront evil where it is found and lacking the qualifications to judge those of us who will.”

Fists clenched, voice rising, Ose went on: “Are we a country that sends our young people across the world to defend the interests of freedom and democracy, to then yield those same interests to someone who simply seeks 12 pieces of silver?”

Then he pulled some coins out of his pocket -- probably quarters, his spokesman said later -- flung them onto the floor and stalked away.

Impressive, but Ose, whose profile lists him as a Lutheran, was about 18 quarters short -- that’s $4.50 -- of getting it right. The biblical reference is to Judas Iscariot, whose sellout price for betraying Jesus was 30 pieces of silver, not 12. Or maybe France, Germany and Russia were on sale that week.

Can Republicans Bank on a U.S. Treasurer?

Another name floated as a possible Republican challenger to Sen. Barbara Boxer is President Bush’s U.S. treasurer, Rosario Marin. That’s her lavish signature on your 21st century paper money. She is the most recent of a cluster of Latinas appointed by Republicans to the job: Romana Acosta Banuelos (Nixon), Catalina Vasquez Villapando (the first Bush) and Katherine Davalos Ortega (Reagan).

Marin does stand out from those other three women, and from Francine Irving Neff (Ford), Azie Taylor Morton (Carter) and Mary Ellen Withrow (Clinton): Marin’s the only one with just two names. The better to fit on a bumper sticker?

Battling for the High Ground on War

Their chambers are only a few blocks apart, but the distance between their politics is another measure altogether.

L.A. County supervisors voted quickly for colleague Mike Antonovich’s motion to join bipartisan congressional support of President Bush and the armed forces in “the liberation of Iraq” and endorsed Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s motion of support for the troops, among them more than 150 county employees.

But down the hill, in L.A.’s City Hall, a measure putting the council on record opposing Saddam Hussein’s regime languished for weeks in committee and was only approved Friday by the council after journalists reported that Hussein’s regime had collapsed and that he might be dead.

On March 14, after the council voted to oppose a U.S. war in Iraq without U.N. support and got its knuckles rapped by some residents, Councilman Dennis Zine put forward his motion to condemn Hussein, urging “every government on Earth to use all influence possible to rid Iraq” of the dictator, including by permanent exile.

His fellow council members sent the motion into a legislative graveyard of the Rules and Elections Committee for study. Only after Zine protested its delay did the motion get passed out of committee without recommendation, allowing the council to finally adopt it unanimously Friday.

Points Taken

* A who’s who of Orange County politicos were among 1,500 people at a memorial service honoring Randy Smith, a lobbyist and GOP activist who managed in death to bring together folks who hadn’t been in the same room for years.

Among those wearing luau shirts, which the decedent favored, were Democratic kingpin Wylie Aitken, architect of Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s 1996 victory over Bob Dornan; Democratic Assemblyman Lou Correa of Anaheim; local GOP party chief Tom Fuentes; and Assemblyman Todd Spitzer (R-Orange), who accompanied himself on guitar singing Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” -- a testament to Smith’s fund-raising prowess for candidates running down their own dreams.

* L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has lost a lot of weight, but that’s not why his pants fell down during a recent government visit to Cuba: Various sources say some passing young Havana women “pantsed” the county official as a prank.

* Palo Alto’s City Council is considering guidelines for conduct that would put Britain’s Parliament out of business: a ban on wordless editorializing in its debates. Among the behavior that would be barred are smirks, derisive chortles, raised eyebrows and “body language or other nonverbal methods of expression, disagreement or disgust.” In a pro-civility move not quite up there with Parliament’s “the honourable member,” council members would have to address one another by surname and courtesy titles (“Ms. Smith”).

* Merced’s City Council voted not to name a park after Steven Stayner, the boy who escaped his captor eight years after being kidnapped from a Merced street. Residents had objected because Stayner’s brother Cary is on death row for killing three Yosemite park tourists in 1999.

* Mill Valley has joined some fourscore cities and counties opposing the USA Patriot Act, which gives the feds wider freedom to search property, conduct surveillance and hold people without charging them.

* Labeled “pure”? Prove it. State legislators are thinking about requiring California’s bottled-water companies to issue water quality reports, as public water agencies must now do.

* It died in committee not long after it was introduced in July 2001, but supporters are trying again. Antiwar Democrats on Capitol Hill, among them 10 Californians, are proposing a Cabinet-level Department of Peace as a counter to the Department of Defense.

* Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean scored his first congressional supporter with the endorsement of San Jose Democrat Zoe Lofgren. Alas, Dean’s news release mars his triumph a bit by quoting Lofgren as being “proud and exited” about the endorsement. And Pleasonton Democratic Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher is backing Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman. (After Dean’s presidential campaign trotted out former Crosby, Stills and Nash stars Graham Nash and David Crosby, the John Kerry presidential campaign countered with the middle musician, Stephen Stills.)

* Lompoc’s school board approved a policy permitting students to recite the pledge of allegiance every morning. The policy also prohibits teachers from substituting other patriotic observances in place of the group pledge, and from sending students out of the classroom to recite the pledge.

You Can Quote Me

“Though I have heard from some -- many of whom seem to reside on the West Coast, interestingly enough -- that have criticized this symbolic move, the response, by and large, has been overwhelmingly positive, especially from our veterans and service members.”

Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), one of the brains behind the French-to-freedom fries and French-to-freedom toast changes on the menus of House restaurants.

*

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt. morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Nick Anderson, Mark Z. Barabak, Patrick McGreevy, Jean O. Pasco and Richard Simon.