Free Republic

Riverside -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took his 2,500-page plan to change California on the road Friday, but quickly found that his two-month statewide tour will be anything but a victory lap. Hecklers, demonstrators and commissioners with plenty of questions showed up for the first of seven scheduled public hearings on the plan, which is the centerpiece of the governor's effort to reorganize state government. "In my State of the State address, I promised to shake up government, get rid of all the waste and inefficiency and make government smarter, faster and a better servant to the people,'' Schwarzenegger told 600...

Governor Schwarzenegger's California Performance Review Releases Results The much-anticipated report from the California Performance Review has just been handed to Governor Schwarzenegger and you can now see it online at www.cpr.ca.gov. Through Executive Order S-5-04, Governor Schwarzenegger established the California Performance Review (CPR) to restructure, reorganize and reform state government to make it more accountable and responsive to the needs of its citizens and business community. In five productive months, the 275-member CPR team analyzed thousands of issues and interviewed hundreds of people and organizations to determine the root causes of today's problems in state government and make dramatic recommendations...

Performance review instead says payroll growth should be slowed, not stopped. If a proposal to overhaul state government to be released today amounts to "blowing up the boxes," state workers won't catch much shrapnel. The California Performance Review doesn't envision a radical shrinking of the state work force in favor of privatization or curtailing government services. Instead, it calls for a relatively modest reduction of 12,000 in the projected growth of the payroll in the next five years. The state's work force would keep growing - just not as fast as anticipated. By comparison, the state payroll - in real...

SACRAMENTO — Some of California's most influential business interests — including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and EDS — were given easy access to a state commission as it met privately to recommend sweeping government changes, according to disclosure reports and interviews. Public interest groups, in contrast, complained Friday that they were largely excluded from the five-month study, ordered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. A Microsoft sales official met with a top aide that Schwarzenegger appointed to the California Performance Review, and former Michigan Gov. John Engler, now working for Electronic Data Systems, spent about an hour with the review team because "we wanted...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR My name is Licorice, and I am a hamster. I have never shared my story before because, frankly, sometimes all a hamster has is his privacy. Thursday night, however, Alexandra Kerry described the circumstances of my rescue by her father after I had fallen off a pier in Massachusetts. I have come forward now to set the record straight. I was the hamster of Alexandra's sister, Vanessa, and she, on balance, was a good person, although a bit of a tickler. On this occasion, as the family gathered on the pier to depart for a vacation, somebody -...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Bystanders who want to help a heart attack victim are increasingly being told by 911 dispatchers to skip the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and concentrate on giving chest compressions until medical help arrives. Driven by medical surveys and continued public resistance to giving mouth-to-mouth, emergency medical groups across the country have either changed or are considering changing the traditional instructions given over the phone to untrained individuals helping a heart attack victim. "If someone is going to do nothing because they are apprehensive about doing mouth-to-mouth, it is simple to tell them to find the middle of the...

<p>Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has so many government reform proposals in the air that one wonders how he can keep track of them all. Among other things, the new governor is trying to overhaul education finance, completely remake the Medi-Cal system for the poor and fix a prison system rotten with corruption and abuse.</p>

<p>Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plans to streamline state government moved forward Tuesday with a call to state workers to begin offering their ideas and a June deadline when recommendations would be presented to the public.</p> <p>Schwarzenegger promised during his State of the State speech last month to "blow up" the bureaucracy in an effort to remove waste and fraud. Administration officials announced Monday the opening of a campaign office for the Californian Performance Review as well as a Web site and hot line.</p>

<p>Dr. Peter Safar, a medical pioneer at the University of Pittsburgh who spent a half-century perfecting landmark treatments in emergency care and became known as the father of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, died Sunday night from complications of cancer. He was 79. Safar, who was convinced that too many people die needlessly before reaching emergency rooms, is best known for crafting modern first-aid techniques now used inside and outside hospitals, including mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing, a hallmark of CPR. His internationally recognized work was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in medicine, most recently in 1994.</p>

C-P-R pioneer Peter Safar dies August 4, 2003 6:05 PM The Associated Press Pittsburgh-AP -- One of his proteges is calling it "a loss for mankind." Dr. Peter Safar (SA'-fur) has died of cancer at 79. Safar is regarded as the father of C-P-R and a pioneer in emergency medicine. Safar is credited with developing the nation's first doctor-staffed, multi-disciplinary intensive care unit. And he also developed the "A-B-C's of C-P-R" -- a technique taught to everyone from surgeons to Boy Scouts. It was in the 1950s that Safar developed a method of combining mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with chest compression....