GOP Primary for U.S. Senate Promises Fireworks

So Arnold Schwarzenegger won’t be making movies for a while. Not to worry.

There’ll be plenty of firepower and fireworks in the Republican U.S. Senate primary to choose who will take on Democrat Barbara Boxer in November.

Former legislator and Secretary of State Bill Jones, a GOP veteran who ran for governor in 2002 against millionaires Bill Simon Jr. and Richard Riordan, has announced that he’s in the Senate race.

Apropos of Schwarzenegger, Jones acknowledges his own charisma deficit: “I’m more comfortable in a tractor than in a Humvee.”

Jones also has, as his campaign co-chairman, former Gov. Pete Wilson, who’s been revived as a player with Schwarzenegger’s election.

Wilson’s endorsement of Jones irked another GOP candidate, former U.S. Treasurer and Huntington Park Mayor Rosario Marin.

She rapped Wilson’s knuckles, remarking on her “personal disappointment” and declaring that she wished she had “learned about the governor’s endorsement of my opponent from him personally, especially in light of the fact that we had spoken last year about this primary. I understand Politics 101: Politics is not personal.”

Wilson “obviously has the right to support whatever he wishes and desires,” she said. “But the reality is, he also supported Schwarzenegger who had never run for statewide office” -- which Marin hasn’t done either.

But how does she really feel?

The other candidates in the primary include Los Altos Hills Mayor Toni Casey, former legislator Howard Kaloogian and Moorpark Assemblyman Tony Strickland.

But it’s the Jones vs. Marin fight card that’s drawing blood. Marin already has used the dreaded f-word about Jones, chastising him for having “flip-flopped” in switching his support from George W. Bush to John McCain in the 2000 primaries. And she threatened to sue over her accusation that the secretary of state had illegally extended the deadline for candidates to file ballot statements.

But even this race won’t rival the face-off between Huntington Beach GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who’s been known to surf and hang out with a Van Halen singer, and “B-1 Bob,” former Rep. Bob Dornan, the loosest of GOP cannons, as explosive and unpredictable as old dynamite. If those two ever debate, C-SPAN could sell pay-per-view tickets.

Davis Advisor MakesTrip Back to Old Haunt

The Ghost of Recall Past turned up in the Capitol hallways -- in that suite of governor’s offices known as the Horseshoe.

It was Democrat Garry South, tactician and advisor to then-Gov. Gray Davis, whose campaign tactics were denounced by fellow Democrat and Schwarzenegger voter Bill Lockyer, the state attorney general.

Just visiting old friends, South assured everyone -- friends in what he called the “expropriated” governor’s office now occupied by Schwarzenegger.

The occupant may have changed, but the decor hasn’t all that much. There’s still that old photo of Sacramento inundated in one of its periodic floods, which prompted South to predict that, if they don’t already, Schwarzenegger’s aides soon will feel as if “they are eight feet under water.”

Vasconcellos to Get a Musical Send-Off

He is 71 years old, the Legislature’s longest-serving member, and not exactly a baby boomer.

In the midst of a tumultuous legislative session, the Senate Rules Committee nonetheless squeezed in a “yes” vote on a request by “Vasco” -- Santa Clara’s Democratic senator, John Vasconcellos.

And today, just as Vasco asked, Peter Yarrow -- the “Peter” in Peter, Paul and Mary -- will sing a song on the Senate floor.

Still unknown is whether it will be “Leaving on a Jet Plane” -- suitable for Vasco’s December departure after 38 years in Sacramento. Or perhaps “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” for the man who has led battles to legalize the medicinal use of marijuana.

Makeover for Davis Will Have to Wait

The hit television show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” regularly fields a team of five gay men, all aesthetic specialists, to make over the look, style and living space of a selected straight fellow.

I telephoned NBC to nominate former Gov. Gray Davis for the treatment -- new hair, wardrobe, maybe even a re-do of the Davises’ West Hollywood condo. But NBC said the show didn’t do politicians.

Davis’ hairstyle, as controlled as the former governor himself, was a source of much comment. He had been known to beg off wearing hard hats -- to reporters’ jest that his hair was already up to code.

GOP gubernatorial primary candidate Richard Riordan joked that he would “outlaw hairspray” to make Davis leave California, and once asked a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, “The next time you see Gray Davis would you just ... mess up his hair?” (Riordan’s own hair sometimes looks as if it has been styled by Santa Ana winds.)

Points Taken

* San Francisco’s departing district attorney, Terence Hallinan, still may have to pay $831 due on 23 parking tickets. Perhaps he’s saved enough from his $158,000 annual salary.

* Santa Barbara County’s Board of Supervisors will be sending to the new governor petitions to cut a new county, Mission County, out of Santa Barbara County. Backers collected more than 20,000 signatures to put the issue to voters, but one supervisor’s motion to send this along to the governor died for want of a second -- before the board was told that it was legally obligated to send the petition to the governor.

* Mimi Robins, a Los Angeles Democratic Party activist, a founder of the anti-secession group One Los Angeles and a Richard Riordan appointee to the city’s animal services commission, has died.

* The spokesman for San Francisco’s new mayor, Gavin Newsom, is Peter Ragone, a veteran of Gray Davis’ anti-recall campaign and Andrew Cuomo’s short-lived campaign for governor of New York, and the press rep during Al Gore’s Florida presidential recount.

* “It’s no girly-man beer,” says the Oregon man whose Portland Brewing Co. has cooked up 3,200 cases of “Governator” ale, for sale only in California. Jerome Chicvara says he’s surprised no one south of his border thought of it first.

You Can Quote Me

“Unfortunately, it was the first revenue loss for the year for the Department of Finance.”

-- State Finance Department spokesman H.D. Palmer, whose boss, Donna Arduin, the governor’s finance director, was outside a midtown coffee shop two days after Christmas when her purse was snatched. Quoted in the Sacramento Bee.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her previous columns can be found at www.latimes.com/morrison. This week’s contributors include Times staff writers Dan Morain and Jenifer Warren.