Nuñez fills in a few blanks

Our esteemed assembly speaker hardly offered a full accounting of his crazy spending, but at least he coughed up a few explanations. The $8,745 spent at Hotel Arts in Barcelona covered accommodations, as well as the cost of a mini-van rental and the hiring of a driver and translator. The $2,562 bill at Louis Vuitton in Paris covered gifts for dignitaries in connection with his visits to France to study high-speed rail and universal preschool. A $5,149 expense in France involved buying lunch and wine for a 26-member delegation on the high-speed rail trip. "I learned French wine is a lot more expensive than California wine," Nuñez told reporters (the guy’s a regular riot). The LAT's Nancy Vogel, who broke the original story, called it "mininmal explanation." And Nuñez? "We have to deal with a fundamental policy question about this and that is: How do we pay for trips when we're promoting the California economy, California tourism or California trade? And I don't think anybody in this room can tell me with a straight face that it is wrong to use campaign dollars on legitimate trade missions." Amazing - the guy either doesn't get it or doesn't want to get it. Sure, people are ticked because he's using all this campaign money, but what's really given this story legs is the refusal to come clean with line-item detail on what was spent and why. What a dummy.