Candidate Sought to ‘Break Down’ the System

When all else fails, monkey-wrench.

Edward Abbey’s neologism for vandalism against environmental destruction is the operative verb for derailing official processes in general. And Stuart Vance, a Sonora software engineer, is just the man to do it. Because he knows about system overload.

Vance pulled his own papers in Tuolumne County to run for governor, and got to thinking, if several hundred people have already done the same, “How many would it take for the system to break down?” and scrub the entire recall election?

The “denial of service” attack works on the same principle as knocking out a Web site by flooding the server with requests. Too many names on a ballot and election officials would knuckle under, “or we can get people to think, ‘Oh my God, there are 500 people on the ballot! It’s horrible! I’m just going to vote no.

“If we can find 5,000 people to go and pull papers, and if we can find someone to fund them ... then it sends a message.” After more than a week of persuading, at parties, barbecues and elsewhere, Vance had managed to talk a handful of fellow citizens into pulling papers.

County to Name Building After Hope

Hope does spring eternal -- Bob Hope, whose recent death at age 100 inspired Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe to propose renaming the county’s Patriotic Hall after the comedian.

Patriotic Hall is an island of county territory surrounded by downtown Los Angeles. Bob Hope was already 22 years old when the 10-story building opened as a veterans facility. The building’s big moment in the spotlight was in the early months of World War II, when the commander of the Home Guard militia atop the roof opened fire on the horizon with World War I antiaircraft guns, thinking Japanese planes were attacking L.A. (they weren’t).

Civic gadfly Peter Baxter objected to Knabe’s proposal, declaring that Hope, by entertaining soldiers in Vietnam, had “derided the citizens who were publicly protesting” the war. Better they should name it, Baxter said, after actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda.

Knabe retorted: “I’m not going to honor that comment.”

His fellow supervisor Mike Antonovich couldn’t resist: “Bob Hope’s life is one of dedication to this country and to the cause of freedom. I’m sure perhaps North Vietnam will one day pay tribute to Jane Fonda.” The motion passed unanimously.

No Summer Doldrums for Fund-Raising

Oh, California legislators were busy, busy, busy in the month of June, all right -- but it wasn’t just on behalf of the lamentable state budget. Their own budgets, the ones to pay for their reelection campaigns, were very much on their minds. The state’s 120 legislators jointly held 66 fund-raisers in June, after which the tally for six months of political fund-raising by the entire Legislature amounted to $18 million-plus.

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, D-San Francisco, led all lawmakers, taking in more than $1.2 million in campaign money, including 39 donations of $10,000 or more, mostly from labor unions. Breaking the half-million mark were Assembly members John Campbell, an Irvine Republican, with $504,741, and L.A. Democrat Dario Frommer, with $591,386. In the Senate, only Oakland Democrat Don Perata joined that company, with $533,379.

Four legislators, all Democrats, reported raising no money: Assembly members Hannah-Beth Jackson of Santa Barbara; and Sens. Debra Bowen of Marina del Rey, Martha Escutia of Norwalk and Byron Sher of Stanford.

In 2000, Proposition 34 capped direct donations to lawmakers at $3,200, but you will not be surprised to learn that the back door to the bank was kept open for donations to campaign committees formed before the proposition took effect.

Points Taken

* Election-wise, there’s life beyond the recall. Los Angeles County D.A. Steve Cooley is running for reelection in March, and has already raised nearly half a million dollars for his campaign from 950 contributors. He’s got nearly two dozen fund-raisers awaiting him before the end of this year.

* For the Satanic conspiracy-minded, the new California budget measures in at 666 pages.

* Nick Pacheco, defeated when he stood for reelection to Los Angeles City Council, is writing a column for the Northeast Observer/Downtown Observer twice monthly newspaper. The first posted online comment on his work anonymously compliments it as “persuasive and well-argued.... I’m glad that Nick did not go meekly into the good night after he lost the election. The column is a good way of reminding his former constituency that he does have good ideas, even if they are seldom ‘big’ ideas.... Nick would probably make a much better political consultant than an elected official.”

* Orange County Republican Assembly candidate Cristi Cristich spent nearly a year getting ready to move her workers out of business-unfriendly California to Arizona. But now, with her candidacy afoot, she’s issued a press release to the newspaper in Sierra Vista, Ariz., that the move is off. Company officials said a “core group” of employees wasn’t willing to move from California. Cristich’s campaign manager, Chris Wysocki, said the Assembly race had nothing to do with Cristich’s biz staying put, that she’s still looking to expand in Arizona and keep her Anaheim plant, which makes micro-connectors for guided missile systems and pacemakers.

* Angelyne, the one-name dame with the Grand Canyon cleavage, who acquired a taste for politics during the San Fernando Valley secession campaign, was consolidating her bid for governor at the French Market restaurant in West Hollywood recently -- going table to table in her pink feather-puff shoes collecting signatures for her petition to get her on the ballot. Because she’s registered as a “decline to state,” with no party affiliation, she could only collect signatures from fellow party members -- and so she obligingly offered voter registration forms for diners to re-register as “decline to state” as well -- so their signatures on her petitions could meet legal standards. Without much luck, perhaps, as a table of diners reported that she walked over to their table about an hour later with the same appeal.

You Can Quote Me

“When I ran for mayor of Cleveland, I defeated the incumbent Republican. When I ran for the state Senate, I beat the incumbent, who was a Republican.... In 1994, a Republican year, I ran for Congress and was one of the only Democrats to beat an incumbent Republican. I think you can see where I’m going with this.”

-- Ohio congressman and Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, speaking at a fund-raising (and consciousness-raising) event at the Los Angeles home of actor/activist James Cromwell.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors to the column include Sue Fox and Allison Hoffman.