HUCK AND STUFF.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

Getting past the GOP's hucksters

Newt Gingrich may be out of the 2008 presidential race, but another Republican Southerner is picking up where he left off -- trying to give the GOP a clean break from the Bush administration.

That would be Mike Huckabee, the second-most famous native of Hope, Ark., and a long-shot candidate in the GOP primary. Huckabee probably lacks the resources and the name recognition to get elected, but unlike the front-runners, he seems to understand that running on the Bush legacy (and Bush foreign policy) is no way to win the general election.

In a recent speech, Huckabee said the Bush administration ignores peaceful options to resolve problems with Iran, trusts the Saudis too much, and has allowed Pakistan to go soft in the War on Terror. This is pretty tame stuff, but the fact that it seems controversial points to how little the front-runners have sought to separate themselves from the president.

Meanwhile, the front-runner (Rudy Giuliani) has so separated himself from Christian conservatives that they're making noise about running a third-party alternative -- a Naderlike vote-grabber who would all but assure a Hillary Clinton presidency. But if the GOP runs on Bush foreign policy and liberal social policy, it's destined for a well-deserved landslide, anyway.

It's hard to imagine that Huckabee has the wherewithal to save the party this time around, but he does have the right idea.

Tennie Pierce, time to move on

The Daily News headline was one most of us could agree with: "Tennie Pierce: 'Justice wasn't done."'

Indeed, justice was not done in the Tennie Pierce case. A prankster walked off with $1.4 million plus a pension as the result of a prank no more harmful than the ones he routinely played on his fellow firefighters. All because Pierce, who liked to call himself "the big dog," was treated to a few bites of dog food.

Of course, when Pierce speaks of the lack of justice in his case, he doesn't mean the way he fleeced the taxpayers of Los Angeles. He's feeling sorry for himself. He thinks that -- in his seven-figure settlement -- he somehow got a bad deal. If that's so, he should have taken his case to trial, where a jury would have laughed it out of town.

Tennie, you've got your money. Do yourself a favor, and disappear from the scene. Don't hang around and kvetch about how badly you have it. That's just doggone poor form.

Savage intolerance

In the battle of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors vs. Michael Savage, it's hard to know whom to root for.

For the uninitiated, Michael Savage is the living, breathing embodiment of liberals' worst nightmares about talk radio. The guy is a vitriolic bomb-thrower, mean-spirited and vicious. That he said some pro-immigration activists on a hunger strike should "fast until they starve to death" may be outrageous, but it's pretty much par for the course in the Savage Nation.

So it's curious that this particular comment should be the one to arouse such consternation. And one wonders whether the San Fran supes, who last week passed a resolution condemning Savage's remark, really have nothing better to do than denounce a talk-radio host.

Worse, though, is the language of the supervisors' pious anti-Savage resolution, which boasts of how San Francisco "values the dignity of all its residents," and brags of its "tolerance." Oh please.

This is the same city that subsidizes the grotesque Folsom Street Fair -- a public S&M display that's a grandiose insult to human dignity, and which, this year, ran an ad mocking Christ and the Last Supper. Plus, just 18 months ago, these same self-righteous politicians condemned a Christian youth rally in their city as "fascist." So much for tolerance.

Savage deserves a condemnation, but then, the San Francisco supervisors do, too. Truth be told, Savage and the supes really deserve each other.

L.A. County seal, SCOTUS-bound?

The valiant souls who have been fighting for the restoration of the original Los Angeles County seal think they might get a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. I wish them well, but I'm not optimistic their effort would succeed.

Had the county not caved in to the ACLU -- that is, had it kept the original seal -- and had the ACLU taken the matter to trial, the county would have won handily. The seal never conferred any kind of religious endorsement; it merely acknowledged that Christian missionaries settled the Los Angeles area. Like the name "Los Angeles," the old seal pointed to our region's religious heritage without establishing anything close to a state religion.

But the county didn't fight, opting to surrender to the ACLU, and that has created a much more complicated case.

Anti-religious thinking likely influenced the supes' decision to remove the seal, but short of reading minds, how could that ever be proven in a court of law? And while the Constitution doesn't preclude the county from including a cross on its seal, it certainly doesn't require one, either.

The irony is that when the supes voted to kill the cross, they said they were saving the taxpayers' money -- never mind that changing the insignia on every county vehicle, form, letterhead, etc., would cost $700,000. That was a pittance, they said, compared with what it would have cost in legal expenses to defend the old seal.

But now they find themselves spending untold millions -- they refuse to disclose how much -- to protect their new, politically correct seal. So they've saved the taxpayers nothing, while creating needless controversy and insulting the intelligence of every one of us forced to foot the bill.

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(color) no caption (Mike Huckabee)