Last night, Caleefoahneea governator Arnold Schwarzenegger gave the State of the State address in which he was, actually, pretty conciliatory.

While the nation's only cybernetic governor has no problem killing innocent bystanders, he had a much more difficult problem last night: how to deal with the overwhelming defeat of his special election in November. Schwarzenegger actually made the defeat sound good, suggesting that he may himself have been too partisan and that the people's reaction to his issues indicated that, while Californians may tolerate a killer robot from the future, they won't tolerate a partisan killer robot from the future:

I've thought a lot about the last year and the mistakes I made and the lessons I've learned. What I feel good about is that I led from my heart.

Now it's true that I was in too much of a hurry. I didn't hear the majority of Californians when they were telling me they didn't like the special election. I barreled ahead anyway when I should have listened.

I have absorbed my defeat and I have learned my lesson. And the people, who always have the last word, sent a clear message - cut the warfare, cool the rhetoric, find common ground and fix the problems together. So to my fellow Californians, I say, "Message received."

Wow! Who knew that Conan the Barbarian could be so diplomatic? He admitted that he made mistakes, and then said that he learned from those mistakes. He didn't try to blame Democrats for the failure of the special election; he didn't blame special interests; he didn't blame anyone but himself.

After initially breaking the ice by admitting his mistakes, Schwarzenegger proceeded to describe his agenda for California in the future (the near future, not the far-off future in which we're at war with the machines). He suggested that with California continuing to grow, it needs to make long-term investments in education and infastructure (which will be hard with Schwarzenegger himself cutting money for education) in order to keep up with that growth.

He announced a Strategic Growth Plan for accomodating California's growth. This plan includes:

• $500 billion for infastructure improvements over the next 20 years, with $70 billion in bonds sold over the next 10 years to create $200 billion for such improvements
• Adding 1,200 miles of new highways and 600 miles of mass transit, which will create 150,000 new jobs
• Improving air quality (somehow) even though we are increasing the number of cars on the road
• Construction of more than 2,000 small schools, 40,000 classrooms, and the modernization of 140,000 classrooms, all to accomodate the estimated 250,000 new students who will enter California schools in the next 10 years
• Increasing funding to colleges (somehow) to acommodate the 500,000 new students expected to enter California universities in the next ten years
• Increasing California's water supply to serve 8.5 million more people
• Construction of two new prisons, a crime lab, providing for new emergency response facilities, and providing space for 83,000 new prisoners
• Constructing 101 new courts, renovating 56 courts, and expanding 44 courts

And how does Ahnold plan to pay for all this? The "fiscal discipline" of the past two years must continue, he said. Budgets must still be cut. But Arnold wants the General Assembly to do the following:

• Increase the minimum wage by $1 an hour
• Repay $1.67 billion from Proposition 98 (something about education)
• Provide $428 million for after-school programs
• Allow Californians to buy prescription drugs from overseas
• Pass Jessica's Law to allow California to track sex offenders in the state

Is Arnold changing his tune after the failure of his special ballot? Is he catering to what the voters want rather than trying to impose his desires upon them? His CPU must be "a neural net processor, a learning computer," because Arnold has learned from the failure of November. Unless this is all a bunch of happy, sappy crap calculated to make us feel better. But even the Democrats in the General Assembly were pleased to hear that Arnold was less willing to make unilateral decisions and more willing to work with his opponents. He's turning from a trustee, who does what he feels is right on behalf of the voters, to a delegate, who does what the voters want.

"Come on, Cohagen, you've got what you want, now give dese people infastructure improvements!"

And now for something completely different

CalTrans reported when it began building a second, earthquake-proof eastern span of the Bay Bridge that the span would cost about a billion dollars. Now, it's changing its tune, saying that the single tower will cost a billion dollars. The entire project is expected to be completed in 2012, at a cost of over $6 billion. Here, Read!