links for 2009-02-18

Nationalisation, long regarded in Washington as a folly of Europeans, is gaining rapid ground among US opinion-formers. Stranger still, many of those talking about federal ownership of banks are Republicans.

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator for South Carolina, said that many of his colleagues, including John McCain, the defeated presidential candidate, agreed with his view that nationalisation of some banks should be “on the table”.
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no way

When Mr. McCain accepted the Republican nomination for president, he noted that while he and his opponent both spoke about moving beyond partisan divisions, only one of them had a history of working with members of both parties to get things done. "I have that record and the scars to prove it," he said. "Senator Obama does not."

State Insurance Commission and Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner called on lawmakers today to put the brakes on a contentious, 18-month budget deal and instead pass an emergency, six-month package to keep California from insolvency.

With lawmakers one vote shy of a deal to close a $40 billion hole in the state budget, Poizner said all sides should back away from the plan in order to avoid tax increases he charged would disproportionately affect middle- and low-income Californians.

Roughly $10 billion of the $14 billion in taxes would come from hiking taxes on gas, income and vehicles.
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Steve Poizner is positioning himself for his run for the Governorship in 2010

California lawmakers failed to reach agreement on how to eliminate a $42 billion budget shortfall as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger prepares to shut down hundreds of public works projects and fire thousands of state workers.

Senate President Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, plans to lock lawmakers in the capitol unless they pass a $40 billion package of tax increases, spending cuts and bond sales today. The bills, backed by the Republican governor and by Democrats, remain one Republican vote short.

“We are dealing with a catastrophe of unbelievable proportions,” said Senator Alan Lowenthal, a Democrat from Long Beach. “We cannot deny it any longer.”

It's 7 a.m. at Henry Ford Hospital, and surgeons are preparing to remove a cancerous tumor from a man's kidney.

It's potentially a risky surgery, but everything's ready: The doctors and nurses are in the operating room, the surgical instruments are sterilized and ready to go, and the chief resident is furiously Twittering on his laptop.

That's right — last week, for the second known time, surgeons Twittered a surgery by using social-networking site Twitter to give short real-time updates about the procedure

n. Abel Maldonado has been in the Legislature for more than a decade, but he's always been an odd man out.

Maldonado, son of a farmworker who became a wealthy Central Coast farmer, is the Legislature's only Latino Republican. He's also one of the Legislature's few GOP moderates who has occasionally bucked conservatives, but who paid a price for his centrism when he lost a 2006 effort to become the Republican nominee for state controller.

Two years ago, Maldonado was the decisive vote for a budget deal that almost all his fellow Republicans opposed. When the most recent deal on closing a $40 billion budget deficit emerged from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders, he was atop the list of Republicans most likely to vote for it.

Here are key provisions of the proposal to close California's $42 billion budget deficit through June 2010: