ANNUAL PUSH OF NEW LAWS IS WASTEFUL WORK.

Byline: JILL STEWART 

LIKE demons pushing more than 1,000 mostly unneeded or Orwellian new laws, California legislators barely had time for the other dark activity each August: back-to-back fundraising events as they rushed hundreds of bad laws onto Arnold's desk.

Even as legislators approved hundreds of these awful special-interest laws, such as my ``favorite'' that forces parents to strap older children into safety seats, they were taking scads of special-interest money over cocktails.

The scrappy Capitol Weekly reported that during a seven-day period, officeholders got more than 700 campaign donations bigger than $1,000, working out to ``about a donation every 15 minutes.''

Have you ever seen that scum that floats back and forth during a change in the tides? That's what goes on in Sacramento each August: Money and laws swirl in an endless dance.

Outgoing Assemblyman Keith Richman, a San Fernando Valley Republican, sent out a satirical ``test'' bill to protect Pluto's status as a planet. Richman couldn't get the Legislature to reform its ``safe seats'' gerrymandering scam, but he quickly got 53 co-authors eager to protect Pluto as a planet. What a fiasco.

One of the most mindless laws approved was Assembly Bill 2108, by Sonoma County Democrat Noreen Evans. It requires parents to stick kids in backseat booster seats until they turn age 8 or reach a specified height.This onerous law will save between zero and seven lives annually in California.

Is that a typo?Is it possible that our full-time ``professional'' Legislature approved a law forcing parents to spend tens of millions of dollars and preventing them from visiting with their bigger kids in the front seat, all to save fewer than 10 lives a year?

That would be insane. Welcome to the nuthouse.

I cannot exaggerate the turmoil this silly bill will create. Booster seats cost about $20 to $90, and the U.S. Census says California has roughly 1 million 6- and 7-year-olds, the group hit by AB 2108.

By my estimate, in the first year alone, parents will get slammed with $2 million to $10 million. Parents who try to economize using boosters from the attic will find that many are too small.

Worse, about 500,000 of California's under-8 children are from big families. Where do parents put four under-8 kids if none can sit up front in the Camry? Big families -- largely Latino, by the way -- will be forced to buy huge vehicles.

Yet in my Google searching, I could not find a single media outlet in California that bothered to report that AB 2108 will save fewer than seven lives annually.

In April, a National Transportation Safety Board expert testified in Sacramento that, ``From 1995 through 2004, 145 children age 6 and 7 were killed (in car crashes) in California; 84 percent were unrestrained or improperly restrained in adult seat belts.''

Translation: If we didn't cleverly lump these rare deaths in with deaths of kids who aren't even wearing a belt, you'd see they are doubly rare.

Evans' aide, Jazmin Rodriguez, conceded to me that Evans' office has no idea how many 6- and 7-year-olds died because they used adult belts. Previously, Evans cited vague data that kids are ``59 percent less likely to be injured'' using boosters.

Said Rodriguez: ``I can't guarantee we can distinguish between (deaths from) no restraints and (deaths from) adult belts.''

Translation: They're contemplating an onerous shift in the way California families transport their kids and don't know why.

National Transportation Safety Board staffer Danielle E. Roeber told me that of these rare 145 deaths between 1995 and 2004, 63 children wore adult belts. About the same number weren't restrained at all.

Got it. Now, of these 63 kids, how many would have died in a booster seat as well? Roeber explains: ``I can't tell you that.... We have no idea how many would be killed with a booster'' seat versus an adult belt.

Good grief. Think of the lives we could save if the millions of dollars wasted under AB 2108 were spent on something semi-intelligent.

You can bet that the mostly Democratic legislators who voted for this dog of a bill have hands outstretched now for donations from medical, legal, consumer and other groups who love a Nanny State.

Yet it's not just Evans and her ilk. Hundreds of idiotic laws sit on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk, with little real attention by the media.

How do we stop this endless dance? No campaign reform known to man will ever make a dent.

Maybe the day the Legislature orders all adult passengers to ride in the back seat (after they ban smoking in your own car), the public will take back its government. Then again, maybe not.