California bailout?

After California voters repudiated all the tax raising, budget nonsense on the ballot last Tuesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the message was clear: Residents wanted the state government to live within its means and impose the necessary budget cuts to get California out of the red.

But the governor's Democratic colleagues in Sacramento aren't quite ready to start making the hard choices. Instead, state Democrats have been floating the absolutely awful idea that Gov. Schwarzenegger go hat in hand to Congress and the White House in search of another bailout from Washington, D.C.

"Allowing California to go belly up presents a great risk to our hoped-for continued economic recovery," Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from Burbank, told the Los Angeles Times.

Predictably, there are some beltway liberals who are sympathetic to this argument.

"Their view is they need legislation, and we're going to try to give it to them," said Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee.

Excuse us for saying so, but this is just flat out nuts.

California, like every other state, already will receive hundreds of millions in federal funds as part of the Obama "stimulus" package. Why does it deserve anything more? Why should taxpayers in Nevada, Wyoming or Michigan be forced to foot the bill for the fact that Sacramento Democrats have sat by for years and giggled as they've spent their state into oblivion in order to gin up campaign contributions from big government special interests and public employee unions?

Thankfully -- and somewhat surprisingly, given its philosophical and economic proclivities -- the Obama administration seems to understand that further bailing out California might not be the best idea.

"Look, we're going to examine what we can do," David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, told the Times. "What we need to do, however, is to treat states fairly, and that means uniformly. Whatever we do for one state, there will be other states who also will want to do that. And there's a limit to what the government can do."

Amen.

Let California deal with its own spending problems.