From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

California will become the only state without a poison-control system if the Legislature adopts budget cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the network’s officials said yesterday.

The system, which includes a center at UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest, offers advice on everything from medication overdoses and snakebites to eating batteries and swallowing weedkiller. It fields about 900 calls per day, with many involving young children.

Schwarzenegger’s spending plan would wipe out the $5.9 million in annual funding for the network.

[…]

Partly by reducing the number of ER visits, the poison control system also helps save about $70 million annually, [Iana Simeonov, director of program development] said.

The latest issue of Omaha Magazine has a short profile on Jeff Koterba in which he reveals that his memoir, Inklings, is due out this fall. You can read the story online here, starting on page 57.

My Miss California cartoon was posted on Oh No They Didn’t. This is why you tag your images, kids.

The Journal Star’s Ground Zero is accepting nominees for an unofficial state rock song, along the lines of Oklahoma’s recent poll, in which “Do You Realize” by the Flaming Lips was named the official Oklahoma rock song. I emailed the Ground Zero folks today to nominate “Sometimes” by The Millions. I promise to lobby hard for you to vote for it.

Poor Ken Svoboda. Four years ago, he dominated the city council race. Two years ago, he narrowly lost the mayoral race to Chris Beutler. And tonight, he ended up in fourth place, booted from the council by three newcomers.

I’ve done quite a few cartoons about Ken over the years (with this one probably being my favorite), but I thought I’d share this one as a little farewell to the guy.

Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish linked today to this post at The Monkey Cage mapping out the level of health insurance among Americans.

I thought it was striking how dramatically different some states were — like Nebraska and Iowa, for example — almost precisely along their borders.

Meanwhile, Ben Nelson continues to make his relatively uninsured Nebraskans proud by coming out against plans to offer a public health insurance option because it could hurt the insurance industry. For what it’s worth, Healthcareforamericanow.com has pointed out that insurance companies make up Nelson’s largest donor group.

From Matthew Yglesias at Thinkprogress:

Health care reform is an enormous, complicated undertaking. Nobody’s going to be thrilled with every provision of a bill. So it’s important to know where one’s deal-breakers lie. Nelson says his deal-breaker is that health reform needs to protect the interests of insurance companies. It’s good to know.

The bad news is that I only came up with 8 that I wanted to share. The good news is that two of these feature Mark Christensen and two feature that frat that uses the vibrator.

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Previous top rejects of the month: March | February | January

It’s been kind of disturbing watching the news coverage of swine flu escalate throughout the day. So in my attempt to save billions of human lives, I shall now link to CNN for the best advice on how to beat the pigs:

Health officials’ advice is to follow common-sense precautions: Wash your hands, stay home if you’re sick and listen to your local health authorities.

“Very frequent hand-washing is something that we talk about time and time again and that is an effective way to reduce transmission of disease,” Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sunday at a White House briefing.

“If you’re sick, it’s very important that people stay at home. If your children are sick, have a fever and flu-like illness, they shouldn’t go to school. And if you’re ill, you shouldn’t get on an airplane or another public transport to travel. Those things are part of personal responsibility in trying to reduce the impact.”

The good news, for Americans at least, is that none of the cases in the U.S. have been fatal. It suggests that access to treatment helps quite a bit, though in the case of the couple in Kansas, the symptoms just weren’t that bad. So be safe and wash your hands!

from Ezra Klein:

Obama wants to save tens of billions of dollars by eliminating the [student loan] middlemen. Study after study shows that they increase cost and add no value. But some of those middlemen are in Nebraska. And for all Nelson’s deficit heroics, he’s not so concerned about the debt that he’d harm a local industry. He’s standing squarely against the reform. He’ll be a hero to the private student loan industry. Or, at least, he would’ve been:

An agreement struck between the president and House and Senate negotiators won’t give Nelson that chance. A process known as “reconciliation” allows budgetary measures to be moved through the Senate with a simple majority, rather than 60. Multiple congressional sources say that congressional Democrats have decided to use reconciliation to go after student-lending subsidies, specifically to get around Nelson.

Senator Nelson saw back during the stimulus debate that his contradictory obstruction brought him quite a bit of power and attention. He seemed to be positioning himself to do something very similar with student loan reform. Unfortunately, the gimmick appears to have worn out its welcome, and the poor guy ended up marginalizing himself.

From the previously linked HuffPo story:

The Nebraska Democrat has become the bane of liberal bloggers and other progressive activists for his insistence on pushing legislation in a more conservative direction.

How nuts is it that giving a multi-billion-dollar federal subsidy to businesses, which costs taxpayer money and adds to the deficit for no reason other than to subsidize businesses, is the “conservative” direction? The answer: really nuts.