Minister’s Remark Fires Up a Flock of Lawmakers

There’ve been a lot of Polaroid moments under the state Capitol dome: the Black Panthers toting guns into the Assembly in 1967, the porn-star lobbying assault of 1996, and now, the Apronista Revolt.

Some Democratic state senators showed up wearing Betty Crocker couture to show how offended they were when an evangelical minister who tends his flock on the Capitol premises pronounced female legislators who leave their children at home to work in Sacramento to be “sinful.”

Among the apron-stringers was Richard Alarcon of Sun Valley. His apron (from the Kitchen Anorexic line?) read: “You can never be too rich or too thin,” which sounds like a campaign slogan for the man Alarcon hopes to unseat next year, L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn.

The Assembly weighed in on the matter a day later and a letter short. Members of both genders and both parties pasted on round white stickers with the letter M, for working mothers. A few stuck them on upside down, evidently thinking it was meant to be a W, for women.

Pastor Ralph Drollinger’s April 26 memo to the Legislature and staff hung the “sinful” label not only on legislative mothers but on all working mothers. It “contradicts God’s revealed design for them. It is sin.” (Paging Ms. Shriver, working mother.)

A woman, Drollinger wrote, is scripturally and specifically “prohibited from leadership in the institutions of marriage, family and church.”

“She is not explicitly prohibited from leadership in government or commerce -- that is, so long as she does not have children at home.” Otherwise, it’s a sin.

Wonder what kind of turnout there will be for Drollinger’s next “Women Legislators Bible Study” class?

Schwarzenegger Hums a Conservation Tune

You always figured from his movies that he had chutzpah.

Here’s the proof. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a memo advising “fellow California state workers” on how to conserve gasoline as part of a “Flex Our Power ... at the Pump” campaign.

“I am calling on you, the state’s work force, as well as California businesses, local governments and nonprofit organizations, to commit to a series of actions that will reduce fuel use. We can keep California rolling by making common-sense changes in the ways we use fuel,” the memo read.

It’s all standard owner’s manual and driver’s ed stuff: keep enough air in the tires, don’t speed, “accelerate smoothly and break gradually.” (That’s the spelling, “break.”)

Pretty bold stuff, coming from the first civilian to own a Hummer. But he has cut down from at least half a dozen Hummers to a mere three.

Maybe with enough air in the tires, some slow driving and gradual braking, the top-of-the-line Hummer would get, oh, 12 miles to the gallon.

Something New Under the O.C. GOP Tent

The new GOP anthem in Orange County must be “Kumbaya.”

After 20 years under the right -- the very right -- hand of party Chairman Tom Fuentes, the new party chief, Scott Baugh, is making the tent bigger.

A bigger tent for bigger-money people, at least.

He appointed Frank P. Greinke to head the party’s finance committee. Greinke is a founding member of the New Majority, the rich Orange County moderates who have become the biggest GOP rainmaking group in California.

He Wants to Recall ‘the Austrian Meatball’

Ready to rumble, again? A Riverside County man, a veteran of local recalls, already has 64 people signed on to his next recall target:

Arnold Schwarzenegger or, as Hank Ramey calls him, “the Austrian meatball.”

The way the self-styled “liberal progressive activist” Ramey sees it, Schwarzenegger’s campaign hoodwinked and double-talked its way into office, blaming Gray Davis for matters beyond his reach.

“If they wished to blame Davis for the bad economy and the energy crisis,” Ramey says, “they might as well blame Davis for the stock market crash of 1929, the crucifixion of Jesus and for tempting Eve to bite the forbidden fruit.”

He’s not new to the recall game, having played in the Baldwin Park and Bell Gardens recalls of 1991 and 1999.

This time, his signatories so far include his father, sister, brother-in-law and some friends who run a restaurant in Paramount.

Ramey is thinking about making it a virtual class-action recall, rounding up any state Supreme Court justices who rule against gay marriage, and Democratic Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, who took the gay marriage issue to the court and even voted for Herr Meatball.

Points Taken

* The city flier invited small businesses to learn how to do business with the city of Los Angeles, but with the investigations into pay-to-play allegations in the mayor’s office, perhaps the choice of words and images wasn’t the best. Above images of stacks of money was this question: “Would you like to learn how to do business with the City of Los Angeles?”

* Nearly 20 years after Clint Eastwood served as spokesguy for Take Pride in America -- delivering the message, “Bad guys abuse public land. Good guys save it” -- he’s doing it again. Eastwood joined some award-winning fifth-graders in spiffing up three acres of parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains. The Take Pride group encourages volunteers to improve public land.

* Guerrilla political poster guy Robbie Conal -- whose merciless caricatures of public figures have been plastered across L.A. and other cities for a couple of decades -- has rolled out his next campaign, a trio of George W. Bush caricatures, to be plastered eventually from California to the political conventions in Boston and New York.

* It’s the next best thing to a campaign consultants’ hall of fame. L.A.-based Joe Cerrell gets a lifetime achievement award from the American University’s Campaign Management Institute. Among the laureates, Ronald Reagan’s campaign guru, Stu Spencer. (How good is Cerrell at this PR stuff? Hey, he sent out his own press release on this.)

You Can Quote Me

“This is one of the nosiest legislatures I’ve run into. We’ve got big problems in this state to worry about. Whether or not people light a cigarette in the car is not one of them.”

-- Republican Assemblyman Ray Haynes of Murrieta, lambasting a bill that would have made it an infraction for adults to smoke when there is a child in the vehicle. Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. The bill was stubbed out by the Assembly.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt. morrison@latimes.com.