Davis Adds Commercial to List of TV Credits

Now, don’t you all go worrying about Gray Davis. He may not be working steady, but he is working.

A couple of months back, This Space told you about his prime-time debut in a TV sitcom, being taped as he chased actor Tim Conway onto the floor of a real Lakers game during halftime. Davis is on TV again, this time in a 30-second commercial plugging a product created by a pair of fellow Stanford alums -- a little online gold mine called Yahoo. He is paired with an eighth-grader named Ashley in the ad, one of several Yahoo has launched in a new campaign. The split-screen dialogue goes like this:

Davis: “Hi, I’m Gray Davis; I used to be governor of California.” (He laughs.)

Ashley: “I’m Ashley, eighth-grade treasurer.”

Davis: “I search on Yahoo. I’m looking for an agent.”

Ashley: “When I run for student government, I use Yahoo to e-mail my friends, tell ‘em to vote for me and stuff like that.”

Davis: “One actor got to be governor, so maybe a former governor can go into acting.”

Ashley: “Being popular, it kind of helps you out.”

Davis: “I don’t think action-adventure would be my milieu, but who knows? Maybe -- I gotta be positive.” The background music is a little number called “Hail to the Chief.”

A Yahoo spokeswoman said there was absolutely no synchronicity intended when the spot aired last week on the finale of a prime-time TV show whose signature line, uttered by a billionaire with an ego as sizable as his assets, is: “You’re fired.”

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5 Legislators Seek End to Bureaucratic Silliness

Five legislators’ letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urged him to stop a bit of bureaucratic silliness: a ruling from the state’s industrial relations department that people who volunteer to work on watershed restoration projects -- and perhaps others -- are entitled to be paid prevailing wages for their volunteer labors.

The letter, signed by Assembly and Senate Democrats -- Dede Alpert, Debra Bowen, Christine Kehoe, Sheila Kuehl and Mike Machado -- noted, “We can’t imagine anyone who volunteers to clean out a streambed or build a community garden expects to be paid a prevailing wage, or, frankly, any wage at all. Community-based nonprofit organizations undertake any number of projects that benefit the people of California at very little, if any, cost to the state’s taxpayers. To require every volunteer on a project to be paid a prevailing wage” will slow or shut down such projects altogether.

It concludes with a sly reference to Schwarzenegger’s comment in an interview with The Times: He said he wanted a part-time legislature so lawmakers wouldn’t have so much freedom to create “strange bills,” a term he did not explain. “We urge you,” the letter states, “to resolve this issue administratively as quickly as possible, lest some legislator be forced to introduce a ‘strange bill’ to correct the situation.”

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Rev. Lou Sheldon Gets an Apology -- Sort of

What’s even less pleasant to hear than “I told you so”?

In the world of the news media, it’s “I didn’t tell you so.”

New York Newsday -- which, like This Space, is owned by Tribune Co. -- acknowledged last week that an April 7 column by columnist and author Jimmy Breslin carried quotes attributed to Orange County’s man of God, the Rev. Lou Sheldon.

But these quotes about homosexuals were remarks that Sheldon never made.

Breslin, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said he had quoted Sheldon accurately based on a 1992 interview at the Republican National Convention in Houston.

Sheldon, of Anaheim’s Traditional Values Coalition, demanded a retraction, declaring that he had never met Breslin and he certainly had never opined, as Breslin wrote, that homosexuals would come knocking on someone’s door and if a young boy answered, he would be kidnapped and forced to become homosexual himself.

In a 1992 column about their convention meeting, Breslin quoted Sheldon as saying homosexuals were dangerous because they “proselytize,” but wrote nothing so vivid as nabbing kids from their homes.

In 1992, Sheldon told the Orange County Register that Breslin’s column was “sour grapes,” but did not dispute having spoken with him.

In an April 15 “editor’s note,” Newsday said Breslin, who has called Sheldon a “fruitcake,” erred by drawing the 12-year-old quotes from memory.

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Missing Class to Work on Election Day Costly

Civics, schmivics -- they need the dough!

Thousands of California high school students pitched in and served democracy in the March 2 election, working at polling places around the state -- even though some of their schools pleaded with them not to.

True, you can’t put a price tag on the great experience in civics it offered, but you can put a price tag on what their absences cost the schools -- $26 a day, per.

Schools receive an ADA -- average daily attendance -- stipend for each student who shows up in class. Fewer students, less money.

Missing class to work on election day is an excused absence, but not a paid one. Loni Hancock thinks that’s the wrong message, so the Berkeley Democratic assemblywoman is trying to nudge a bill through the Legislature to change the elections code so that “an absence authorized pursuant to this paragraph is not an absence in computing average daily attendance and shall generate state apportionment payments.” In me-and-thee-speak, that means the check would still be in the mail.

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Points Taken

* The Political Hotline reports that Andrea Jones, the daughter of GOP Senate candidate and former Secretary of State Bill Jones, is leaving her job as press secretary to Arizona Sen. John McCain to come home and work for her dad. Jones pere incurred the wrath of California Republicans in 2000 when he endorsed McCain in the primaries and not George W. Bush. Andrea Jones soon joined the McCain campaign to coordinate the youth vote. Then she managed the U.S. Senate campaign of San Jose Republican Rep. Tom Campbell against U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Campbell lost, but the experience makes Bill Jones’ campaign against Boxer familiar turf for the junior Jones.

* Palmdale Republican Sen. William “Pete” Knight is taking medical leave for unspecified medical tests. He heads the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund, and was the chief author of the California proposition that banned gay marriage. Knight’s son, David, married his partner of 10 years when San Francisco was issuing marriage licenses to homosexual couples.

* Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca will be honored May 16 at the Women Against Gun Violence group’s 10th anniversary, emceed by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica and graced with the presence of L.A.’s mayor, Jim Hahn.

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You Can Quote Me

“I had 9 3/4 wonderful years as state librarian, and I achieved every Irish Catholic’s dream -- a good government job with a pension.”

--California historian, state librarian emeritus and droll quote-maker Kevin Starr, departing from the post where his time served, plus his Army years, puts him into double digits of government service.

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Patt Morrison can be reached at patt.morrison@latimes.com. Her previous columns are at www.latimes.com/morrison. Contributing this week was Jean O. Pasco.