Arnold ran as a Republican. California has a Democratic Senate. He proposed a "universal" healthcare insurance package which was apparently too lavish even for a group of Democratic Senators. Yes, that's correct: California's "Republican" Governor is effectively to the left of his Democratic opponents, some of whom are more concerned than he is about the cost.

"It doesn't matter if there are all these good things in the bill if there's not sufficient funding to pay for them," said Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the Santa Monica Democrat who chairs the committee.

California is $14 billion in the hole. "At the same time, Schwarzenegger issued proclamations declaring a fiscal emergency..." When you can't even keep the state running, you should be focused on trying to trim back unnecessary or wasteful programs, and upping your taxable income (by making the state business-friendly) before proposing lavish new ones.

Arnold is a big fan of McCain, apparently. McCain doesn't seem to understand economics either, from what I've seen. Yes, yes, he says he's in favor of (for example) the tax cut now, but I'm one of those people who watches what people do when nobody was looking and remembers it later. As he himself admitted, McCain voted against the tax cut before he was for it.

Do we need another temporary conservative?

Florida Republicans say "yes"!

Mark Steyn, ever pithy, feels likewise:

As for [McCain's] line about "some greedy people on Wall Street who need to be punished", aside from being almost entirely irrelevant to the subject under discussion (the subprime "crisis"), it reveals, I think, one of the most unpleasant aspects of McCain. For a so-called "maverick", he's very comfortable with the application of Big Government power, and the assumption of Big Government virtue. Undoubtedly there are "greedy people on Wall Street". Why should he and his chums be the ones who decide whether they need to be "punished"? If greed is to be punishable, why doesn't he start with a pilot program applied to, say, the United States Senate and report back to us in five years how that's going?

Government's job isn't to weigh the motives of people and punish bad thoughts. (That's God's job, actually.) But this kind of rhetoric is all too popular today, even, sadly, among the alleged conservative party.