Governor Has One Industry Booming: Gift Shops

Arnold Schwarzenegger promised to turn around the California economy, and so he may -- one souvenir at a time.

Arnoldiana -- that body of T-shirts, postcards and novelties bearing some Schwarzeneggerian figure or phrase -- is selling like mad, raking in the sales tax. In the case of the gift shop in the basement of the state Capitol, sales benefit a Sacramento group for the developmentally disabled too.

Business has never been so good in the shop since Schwarzenegger became governor, and he’s evidently the only chief executive ever to come by and shake hands. He also suggested some better placement for his books.

Bobbleheads of the governor in a business suit toting a kind of machine gun sold out there almost instantly. But Schwarzenegger’s lawyers have demanded that the distributors stop the “outrageous, malicious” act of making and selling them.

Maybe that’s the way it’s done in Hollywood, but not in Sacramento or Washington. The Ohio firm that makes the Arnold bobblehead says profits go to the Sarcoma Foundation of America. The company also makes other GOP bobblers: George and Laura Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Delay, and Democrats Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle. Evidently none of them has mailed a cease-and-desist note and some, according to the company, have even said they like the dolls.

And a new doll in a popular mouse line by Florida novelty toy designer Jay Kamhi is in production. The Mousinator is a buff, 6-inch rodent figure that holds a barbell and a cigar and sings “California, Here I Come” in an Austrian accent.

The actor imitating Schwarzenegger’s voice stayed up all night one night watching Schwarzenegger films, Kamhi said, swaggered in the next morning in leather jacket and Terminator sunglasses, and nailed the song in one take.

Kamhi heard from the state Senate Rules Committee, which wanted to buy a couple of Mousinators. He sent 40, one for each member of the Senate.

The Terminator and the Billionaire

Schwarzenegger promised to put his movie career on hold, but there’s movies and there’s movies. This spring, he and that fiscal superstar Warren Buffett made a short film that was shown to shareholders of Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway.

It opens with a clip of Schwarzenegger’s famous rebuke of Buffett after the billionaire suggested that Proposition 13 could use some fixing. Schwarzenegger warns that if Buffett mentions it again, he’ll sentence him to 500 push-ups.

The film moves to Schwarzenegger’s Capitol office, where the governor is reading a fake Business Week headline, “Warren Buffett Tells Governor to Rethink Prop. 13.” Schwarzenegger is furious. “He will suffer for this,” the governor declares, slamming a fist down on the desk.

Cut to a gym. Schwarzenegger is in military fatigues, Buffett in workout gear. Buffett suggests going to Dairy Queen [one of many such product placements: Berkshire Hathaway owns Dairy Queen].

“There will be no Dairy Queen for you!” Schwarzenegger thunders. “Now you are in my world -- 500 sit-ups!” He puts his boot on Buffett’s back as the billionaire tries to do 500 push-ups. [Music evokes a similar scene in the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman.”] “You want to quit?” the governor barks. “Go ahead! Say it -- I want to quit.”

Buffett: “No, sir. You can’t make me say it. No, sir. I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

Final scene: Schwarzenegger, back in his office, asleep. An aide wakes him up. “I just had the strangest dream,” Schwarzenegger says.

Then he picks up a Muscle & Fitness magazine -- of which he is executive editor. There, on the cover, is a buff, bare-chested Buffett. “Noooooo!” Schwarzenegger screams. The film goes black. Cut. Print.

Not much at the box office, but the video/DVD will be huge.

Irvine Bunnies May Dodge a Bullet

Irvine met the enemy -- and it was a bunny.

Homeowners associations in that planned community complained to their state senator, Minority Leader Dick Ackerman, that cottontail and brush rabbits were turning their expensive landscaping into an open-air salad bar. They wanted permission to kill them.

Ackerman hopped to their aid with a bill letting the Fish and Game folks issue permits for rabbit demises.

Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer opined that a permit wasn’t even necessary if rabbits were a problem.

Humane groups warned that it was cruel and that poisoned rabbits could endanger other wildlife that ate them.

Ackerman will be meeting with Fish and Game about the bill, but the Assembly’s Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee has already voted to bury it -- the bill, not the bunnies.

Some Tonic for Bill Jones’ Campaign

The doctor will be in -- California. Bill Jones’ campaign to beat Sen. Barbara Boxer is getting a house call from U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who’ll speak Tuesday at a $1,000-a-plate breakfast fundraiser for Jones at the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego. [It’s OK, Grant was a Republican.]

In the GOP Senate primary, Jones got one plate’s worth of help -- $1,000 -- from a committee operated by fellow Republican Mary Bono, a Palm Springs member of Congress. Except the federal receipt reporting the donation listed it as being from the Mary Bobo Committee. [There was a Mary Bobo who ran a Tennessee boardinghouse, and she’s been dead for 21 years.)

Confessions of a Quick-Change Artist

Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti was a recent guest blog-diarist for the online magazine Slate. He wrote about housing and after-school sports and all those civic concerns, but -- to use an antiquated English word for underwear -- the big news was ... his smalls.

“Slightly out of breath, at about 10:45 I jump into the passenger seat of my hydrogen-powered city vehicle,” he wrote. “As one of my deputies drives, I change out of paint-stained jeans and a T-shirt into a slightly more presentable outfit so that I can cut the ribbon at the opening of India Sweets & Spices in Atwater Village, on the northeast edge of my district. I hope no one will glance over from their car and suddenly see their councilman in his underpants.”

Points Taken

* Kevin McCarthy, the Assembly’s GOP leader from Bakersfield, sponsors something he modestly calls the Kevin McCarthy Leadership Series, and last week hosted an evening with Newt Gingrich, at the office of the California Dental Assn. Open wide, Mr. Speaker.

* The Oakland Tribune says that under cover of darkness, Schwarzenegger operatives “secretly swept into the lobby of another elected official’s office” and hung the governor’s portrait. State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell -- a Democrat who holds the nonpartisan office -- hadn’t followed a December gubernatorial directive to put Schwarzenegger’s 8-by-10 in the lobby. The Tribune says Schwarzenegger’s picture is boldly going in places in Sacramento where governors’ portraits have never gone before.

You Can Quote Me

“I’ve never heard of any kids on a playground killed by a live sex act.” -- Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, a San Francisco Democrat, about a protest by Oceanside Republican state Sen. Bill Morrow against plans to hold the “Exotic Erotic Ball” at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, where lawmakers want to ban gun shows.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Joe Mathews and Jean Pasco.