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 It seems like there may finally be a last corner to turn over the impasse on California's budget. Republican lawmakers seem finally to have acknowledged that a budget can't be produced without increasing revenue, even given stentorian cuts into virtually all areas of California life.

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In exchange for agreeing to the taxes necessary to balance the budget, Republicans from the Governor down have come up with various concessions they would like the Democrats to sign off on in order to get Republican cooperation.

To give them credit for consistency, it seems that all the concessions from Democrats are meant to help businesses thrive - a counter to the theory that new taxes will make business activity that much more difficult. Some of the items being discussed are anti-labor (changing a work week to 40 hours a week instead of 8 hours a day/5days a week); anti-environment (delaying greenhouse gas reductions); and anti-regulation ('streamlining' the processes for bidding on state contracts).

In the past, Governors have been able to pass budgets only by stripping some Republican votes away from the pack. This has been impossible this time around, it is said, because those 'rogue' Republicans have been dealt with in career-scuttling ways. The Republican caucus is now a well-oiled, if self-bullied, machine and so Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines is in the position to demand some of these items from Democrats. (See a similar summary of events at http://www.flashreport.org/...

It's politics by ransom - ugly but a necessary element of a democracy.

The worst part of this picture is the continuing attraction to broken philosophies of the past. After the Republican defeats of 2008, to think that any body of GOP reps would insist on anti-environment, anti-labor, anti-regulation items in today's budget... Well, one has to acknowledge California Republican's last hurrah - their monument to the politics of the past.

Hopefully they will answer for this in 2010.