Hybrid Autos to Get Their Own Show Outside

At the big L.A. Auto Show inside the Convention Center on Friday morning, it’ll be fossil-fuel heaven (with probably a few experimental-fuel vehicles).

Outside, it’ll be about clean and green machines, as the Union of Concerned Scientists enlists pols and celebs to put faces behind the steering wheels when it releases its report on the benefits of hybrid cars and trucks (how does 60 miles per gallon sound?).

Elected hybrid car owners Eric Garcetti (the L.A. City Council member has two of them), Assemblywoman Gloria Negrete McLeod (a Chino Democrat), and Santa Monica’s Councilman Kevin McKeown will be matching rpms with famous-faced hybrid car-owner actors Ed Begley Jr. (who made a cross-country, round-trip drive in his hybrid for $150 in fuel), Mimi Kennedy, Nancy Allen and Steven Collins.

Just-plain-folk hybrid owners from El Cajon and Pomona to Simi Valley will also be driving in to show off their wheels to one another and to the public. Look for the helium balloons and banners -- but please, no wheelies in the parking lot.

Sick of Prison and

Health-Care Politics

Now, see? This is the kind of thing that makes people mock California in the first place.

A 15-year-old gang member suspected of murder, shackled at the ankles and escorted by probation officers, escaped last week -- on a trip to an orthodontist.

A week earlier, a man serving time in prison for robbery died after his body rejected the new heart he got in a nearly million-dollar transplant and post-op procedure about a year ago. A public clamor questioned whether a convict should be at the top of the list, and whether the state should foot the bill.

Now that California’s black-hole budget deficit threatens to suck away nearly $35 billion, there’s talk of saving money by releasing some elderly and nonviolent prisoners -- freeing them from prisons where medical care is provided into a state where money for medical care for the poor and unemployed, like some people out of prison, could be chopped back even further.

Predictable Recoil

to Stolen-Gun Study

Across the nation, nearly 1.7 million guns have been stolen over the last 10 years. Many of them -- a reported 153,140 -- were stolen in California, the state that also manufactures the most guns.

But in spite of those big raw numbers -- the numbers are always big when you’re dealing with the nation’s most populous state -- California ranks only 29th in guns stolen per resident, according to the Americans for Gun Safety foundation. The highest is Alaska, with 42.7 thefts per thousand homes (the moose militia, maybe?).

The study is titled, “Stolen Firearms: Arming the Enemy,” and the foundation’s policy and research director, Jim Kessler, cited a 1997 Justice Department study that nearly 10% of prison inmates used stolen guns in the crimes that put them in stir.

“A stolen gun is like gold to a criminal,” said Kessler, “because it can be quickly resold without fear of it being traced to them. If you love your gun, you should lock it up.”

It’s a law of political physics that, for every gun study, there is an equal and opposite spin. The study says those state-rate differences go to varying state laws requiring owners to keep their guns locked up. But at least one gun-owner organization says pshaw -- the report is just gun-control tactics masquerading as information.

Points Taken

* Doug Ose, a Sacramento Republican congressman, has formed an exploratory committee -- the formal name for “please send me money” -- to consider running against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2004. Ose could afford to be his own first donor, having made multiple millions as a Sacramento developer before being elected in 1998. He’s likely to be the first of several Republicans to try to take on Boxer.

* Two Californians have been named to influential federal advisory panels. Dr. Linda C. Giudice, chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Stanford University Medical Center’s gynecology and obstetrics department, will head the FDA’s panel on reproductive drugs. And the Health and Human Services Department’s advisory panel on genetics, health and society will be chaired by Dr. Edward McCabe, executive chairman of pediatrics at UCLA and chief physician at UCLA’s Mattel Children’s Hospital.

* Maybe it’s the proximity to Berkeley, which has a long history of passing resolutions about international policies. The city of Oakland has joined a lawsuit claiming that two federal aid agencies’ environmental studies aren’t up to snuff when it comes to overseas energy projects. The federal suit argues that the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. haven’t given adequate thought to the global warming consequences of carbon dioxide from the $32 billion in investments in coal-fired power plants, pipelines and oil fields from Mexico to Asia and Africa.

* A proposed New Year’s resolution: that Republicans, who take turns with their rival party claiming the mantle of the education party, stop subordinating grammar to politics: the correct adjectival form for that other party is not “Democrat,” it is “Democratic.” So please, make it “the pinko-liberal Democratic Party” or “the ultra-radical Democratic agenda” -- not “Democrat.” The English teachers of America will thank you.

* Invitations for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles’ Jan. 22 dinner marking the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion note that 30 years ago, “fat was bad, and carbs were good,” and “rehab was something you did to a house.”

* District attorneys from Stanislaus, Merced and Madera counties have filed environmental complaints against Union Pacific Railroad, alleging that railroad officials knew hazardous lime was leaking from moving trains, but violated Fish and Wildlife and water codes by not alerting the counties the trains passed through. The railroad says the charges are groundless.

* Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, who grew up on a Ceres peach farm, has wrapped up treatments in Washington, D.C, for an early form of breast cancer and returned to California for the holidays.

* Beverly Ziegler, a regular in L.A. civic politics since she worked on Sam Yorty’s campaigns, has business cards identifying herself with tongue-in-cheek panache as Beverly Ziegler DPE -- doctor of political engineering.

You Can Quote Me

“Get me back in the courtroom, out of politics, and I’ll be happy.”

Sonoma County D.A. Michael Mullins, who lost his reelection shot in March, will be back in court in January as a senior prosecutor for Solano County. During his 30 years with Sonoma County, he oversaw high-profile cases, including the prosecution of Richard Allen Davis for kidnapping and murdering Polly Klaas in 1995.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].