Schwarzenegger

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed on Friday to make it easier for school districts to fire weak teachers by changing a law that mandates instructors be laid off only according to seniority. He also recommended reducing the role of a state commission that has the power to overturn teachers' dismissals. The move to take away final say over teachers' dismissals from the Commission on Professional Competence was spurred by a Times investigation last spring, according to the governor's staff.

The Schwarzenegger administration wants to put the University of California in charge of state prison inmates' medical needs in an overhaul of the troubled corrections healthcare system that could save $12 billion over a decade, officials say. The arrangement, similar to a centralized system of managed care, would dramatically expand the use of telemedicine, a technique by which patients are seen by doctors in remote locations over a screen with...

Funny, isn't it, that when the governor scours the state budget for waste, fraud and abuse, he only seems to find it in programs for the old, the young, the poor and others unable to raise campaign funds or muster political opposition. Like those seniors and disabled people in the state's In-Home Supportive Services program. IHSS allows them to stay out of nursing homes or other facilities far more expensive for them, their families and ultimately the state and its taxpayers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who often speaks of his love for California, has promoted the state with his wife Maria Shriver in television commercials over the last five years. And as they invited viewers to visit, California's first couple got paid. Schwarzenegger and Shriver have received more than $235,000 since 2005 for appearing in commercials for the California Travel and Tourism Commission. The governor's aides said Schwarzenegger and his wife did not know about the income until The Times inquired about it this week, and they mailed the tourism commission a check to repay it on Thursday.

They flew to Washington searching for a path out of the budget storm that has battered California. But Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state's four legislative leaders found nothing more definite than a promise for more discussion. It was a case of bad timing. They arrived Wednesday to find Capitol Hill buzzing with the election of a populist Republican to fill Democrat Edward Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat, and confronting the consequences for the national healthcare plan, the Democrats' hold on Congress and Barack Obama's presidency.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger warned Friday that the state remained deep in fiscal crisis and proposed steep reductions in almost every major government program, but many lawmakers quickly dismissed his ideas as stale and vowed to push for alternatives such as tax hikes. His proposal, aimed at closing a $19.9-billion gap, and the response to it foreshadow another year of paralysis in Sacramento as the governor and lawmakers struggle with the latest crippling shortfall. The new budget blueprint -- the governor's last before term limits force him from office -- comes after the state's epic financial problems have already become a target of ridicule around the world.

Billionaire Roland E. Arnall, whose widespread philanthropy and extraordinary political friendships stood in contrast to repeated investigations into alleged lending abuses at his giant subprime company, Ameriquest Mortgage Co., died Monday. The longtime Holmby Hills resident was 68. Arnall, a Holocaust survivor who co-founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center, had resigned as President Bush's ambassador to the Netherlands on March 7, returning to Los Angeles to be with a seriously ill son, the family said.

Re "Schwarzenegger could play the recall card too," Opinion, Sept. 9 Rather than adhering to Joe Mathews' profligate and gamy plan for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to court the recall effort threatened by the prison guards union, the movie-star-turned-pol could make the most of his lameduck years in office by advocating the reinstatement of the so-called car tax. It would go a long way toward easing the state's budget crisis. Does the former bodybuilder have the political muscle and intestinal fortitude to take such a stance?

The headline and tone of "Angelides Emerges as 'Anti-Schwarzenegger' " (Jan. 11) got it wrong about state Treasurer Phil Angelides: He isn't "the anti-Schwarzenegger." He's pro-people of California. He's one of the few public officials in either political party who has the guts to speak sensibly to the public. He's honest about the fact that at least temporary additional taxes are needed to support the things great state institutions should do: educate, assist and protect the citizens to create productive, civil, livable and compassionate communities.