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Businessman new head of U. of Missouri
12/15/2011

ST. LOUIS, Dec. 14 (UPI) -- A University of Missouri alumnus with years of experience as a software executive has been chosen as the university's 23rd president. Thomas M. Wolfe officially takes office Feb. 15, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. ...

Fla. cancels contract with French railroad
12/15/2011

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Dec. 14 (UPI) -- Florida has canceled a partnership with the U.S. subsidiary of the French National Railroad to provide education on the Holocaust in France. Holocaust survivors said SNCF America's agreement to provide $80,000 for ...

Ex-priest charged with 38 sex offenses
12/15/2011

CORNER BROOK, Newfoundland, Dec. 14 (UPI) -- A former Roman Catholic priest in Newfoundland has been charged with 38 sex offenses dating back to 1969, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said. In a release, the RCMP said George Smith turned himself in ...

Orval gets polled
12/14/2011

by Tommy Durham

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White Wives to Downtown Music
12/14/2011

Plus Hurt, Chris Milam and more.

THURSDAY 12/15

Downtown Music Hall has White Wives, featuring former members of Anti-Flag, Dandelion Snow and American Armada. But don't mistake this for a side-project or a synthesis of the members' other bands. The band has a markedly different sound, more widescreen indie rock than political punk. Opening acts are Josh the Devil & The Sinners and Adam Faucett, 7 p.m., $8. Arkadelphia native Nick Flora traffics in bouncy indie rock in the mode of Ben Folds and David Bazan. Flora plays at Revolution with North Little Rock jangle-meisters Knox Hamilton and heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter Jarred McCauley of Little Rock, 8 p.m., $8 21 and older, $10 younger than 21. Long-running nostalgia act The Manhattan Transfer plays a holiday show at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, 7 p.m., $28-$54. Standup comic Rahn Ramey has appeared on HBO's Comedy Relief and in the films "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" and "Escape from New York." Ramey is at The Loony Bin through Saturday night, various show times, $7-$10. Irish Consul General Paul Gleeson makes his first visit to Arkansas to meet with local dignitaries, Trapnall Hall, 6 p.m.

FRIDAY 12/16

How about some crunchy, moody modern rock, with the volume turned down ever so slightly? Stickyz hosts Hurt, for an acoustic performance, with opening act Jeffro, 18 and older, 8:30 p.m., $12 adv., $15 d.o.s. The Arkansas River Blues Society's Christmas Open Blues Jam includes a house band featuring Unseen Eye, Gil Franklin and Lucious Spiller, Cornerstone, 8 p.m., $5. Maxine's has an evening of singer-songwriters, with Brian Martin, Bonnie Montgomery, Glass Anchors and Isaac Alexander, 8 p.m., $5 adv., $7 door. Or is a jam-packed night of horror-punk more to your liking? Then check out the Rotten Records showcase Only Flesh, featuring The Kill Crazies, The Muddlestuds, Moment of Fierce Determination, Let Them Be Buried, Rehab Superstar, Livid and Project 7, Downtown Music Hall, 5 p.m.

SATURDAY 12/17

Chris Milam brings some laid-back songwriting to Browning's Mexican Grill, 8 p.m. Juanita's hosts Fayetteville pop-punk stalwart Dreamfast, whose newest EP, "My Wounds, My Weapons" is packed with ultra-catchy, booze-fueled tunes, 9 p.m., $6. Blisterin' Arkansas bluesman Michael Burks plays an 18-and-older show at Stickyz, 8:30 p.m., $10. Over at Revolution, Wrangler Space pays tribute to Widespread Panic, 18-and-older, 9:30 p.m., $8 adv., $10 d.o.s. Cornerstone hosts "A Gumbo Christmas," with Butterfly & Rebirth of Irie Soul, Fiyah Teddy, Brukshot Burnz and more, 9 p.m., $10.

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Nichols talks 'Mud,' more
12/14/2011

A Q&A with the Little Rock director. by Lindsey Millar

"I think I can finally say that I have a career without smirking," Jeff Nichols said last week on the phone from outside his editing studio in Austin, Texas. The Little Rock-born writer and director couldn't, actually. He started laughing as soon as the words left his mouth.

Call it a symptom of his current state of mind — "cautious optimism," he says — about "Mud," the Southeast Arkansas-set coming-of-age drama that wrapped filming just before Thanksgiving (and with Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon and a host of other name actors starring, the biggest film production set in Arkansas since ever). About the prospects of his sophomore film "Take Shelter" in awards season (most notably, up for five Independent Spirit Awards, more than any other film save "The Artist"). And about his future in the business.

How are you feeling about "Mud"?

You just really never know until you get into the editing room and put it all together. But while we were filming, I had the same feeling I had on "Take Shelter," this distinct feeling of, "Man, we're doing something unique." You hope that culminates into a good film.

As far as the moving parts, the cast was really amazing and the crew was really amazing. Now I'm in sitting in front of this period of work, where the pressure is on my shoulders to take all that blood and sweat and turn it into something.

How's the editing process working?

I'm working with an editor, Julie Monroe, who's worked a lot with Oliver Stone, all the way through. It's been totally different. She's been editing the entire time we were shooting. I just got back in Austin and I've already watched an assembly cut of the movie.

With a bigger budget than your previous films, were you able to get a lot of different takes during filming?

Yes and no. It's really funny. We were still very limited on time because we were limited by Screen Actors Guild rules on how much time the two boys who play Ellis and Neckbone [Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland, respectively] could work. So there are still some scenes where I got two takes. But this movie is immensely more covered than my other films.

The biggest difference between this film and my other films is that I really wanted to move the camera. "Take Shelter" had very specific camera movement. "Shotgun Stories" had no camera movement. Each of those were creative choices, partly dictated by production restraints, especially on "Shotgun Stories," but mainly dictated by story. Most of "Mud" was shot using a Steadicam. It's a pretty big progression because the camera moves constantly, which is really appropriate for the film: It takes place on a river, and I've always said I wanted the camera to move like a river, so it kind of flows through the story, not to mention that it's a film about these 14-year-old boys who're constantly moving.

Did you know from the beginning that you wanted to cast an Arkansan in the role of Neckbone?

I knew I wanted to, but I didn't know if we'd find him. I was just looking for a kid who was honest, who was a non-actor. We read some kids that had been in other movies and I just wasn't really finding what I was looking for. I didn't really care where he came from, but it was an extra bonus that he came from Arkansas.

We really lucky to find Jacob. He's incredible. They both are. All the adult actors were impressed by the kids. I know I was impressed.

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How did the Arkansas crew work out?

The Arkansas crew we had did a great job, but we had to supplement it with people from Louisiana and elsewhere, so it'll be nice to see the local crew base grow so we don't have to bring as many people in.

How was filming in Arkansas otherwise?

[State film commissioner] Christopher Crane made it possible for us to shoot in Arkansas. That guy is a badass. He's the best thing to happen to Arkansas film in a long, long time. There were plenty of instances where he could've said, "This just isn't going to work," but he didn't.

Whether the film is good or not, I don't know. Or whether it presents Arkansas in a light that people want to see themselves in, I don't know. But it's a beautiful film. Like jaw-dropping. Because Arkansas is beautiful and the river is amazing. I'm trying to put as many shots in the movie as I can.

I don't know if most people think of that part of the Delta as beautiful-Arkansas.

I always have. We'd be driving home from set out in Stuttgart and you'd get the most beautiful sunsets you've ever seen in your life. The horizons are unlike anything else in the world. And then you get down in the river and that's an entirely different thing. The White River and the Mississippi River never look the same; they always give you something different visually. We shot all this stuff at night and the weather was changing and it was getting colder and the air temperature was much colder than the water, so all this mist was coming off the river. It's so beautiful and crazy looking, it looks fake.

You shot a lot of the film on an island?

It's outside of Eudora. It was this farm-owned piece of land. It was ridiculously beautiful. Sandy beaches and tall willow trees. It feels like you're on an island in the "Thin Red Line" or something, but in Arkansas. Sam Shepherd had some days off and he would just come out to the island. I'd look up and Sam Shepherd would be on the island looking at barges.

But all of our locations were really great. McConaughey was joking to me about it; he said for all of them you take a car down a dirt road, then it turns into a gravel road, and then it turns into mud, so you have to get out take a four-wheeler and then, when you're almost to set, you have to get out and walk down a path for five minutes. Another time, he said, "I knew when I turned on Possum Waller Road, this was going to be a good-looking location."

I hope that translates.

So how was working with McConaughey?

I love him. I think he's amazing. He's a superhero. We had him dangling from trees and jumping off moving dirt bikes in cowboy boats. He'd come and talk to our stunt guy and he'd say, "Yeah, I think I can do that," and he'd just nail it.

He's just a cool guy. He's focused and serious when he needs to be and he's totally laid back the rest of the time.

You definitely had way more star wattage than your previous films. Was that hard to manage?

Not from my perspective. We had two huge movie stars and they were up for the challenge. We took them into these backwoods crazy places and they were up for it. We had them staying at the Days Inn or whatever. I never heard anybody complain. No prima donna moments at all.

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My big worry going in was how I was going to deal with someone who's on their Blackberry all the time or asking about their trailer.

McConaughey never wanted to go to his trailer. He was around all the time. He was part of the process. He wanted to be part of that process. Reese was a little different because her parts were more self-contained, but she was very similar in that regard.

What about the logistical challenges of having to manage an army of people as opposed to the smaller groups on your previous films?

I got shielded from a lot of that because Sarah Green is without question one of the greatest producers in the world. Things were just taken care of. That's what I had to get used to, not being in charge. On "Shotgun Stories," I was in charge of everything. With "Take Shelter," I definitely knew everything that was going on, and I oversaw most of it. But on this film, things just showed up. They just happened. I had a marine department and a marine coordinator, and I didn't meet the head of the department until he showed up.

What does that even mean, marine department? Someone who drives the boat?

He coordinates all the stuff on the water. We had to move our entire crew out to an island in the middle of the Mississippi River. We had pontoon boats and speedboats and another skiff for shooting from. We had multiple boat drivers. We had to get jet skis to put safety divers on for the kids in the boats. It was nuts.

Artistically, the learning curve for me was figuring out the best way to use all those resources. We're still trying to do the exact same thing we've always tried to do, which is to capture something that feels real and honest. In a way, you've got more to work against because you have all these amazing artists, you're production designer, your AD — all these people who are great at their jobs, and they will make anything happen that you want to happen. If you want to block traffic, they'll make it happen. So you're like, "Why is there no traffic behind this kid?"

And they say, "We blocked it for sound."

"But there's no traffic; we're on a busy road."

So they're like, "Well, we'll bring cars in."

And you say, "Well that seems stupid [laughs]."

There was an equally big learning curve as I've had for my last two films. "Shotgun Stories" was everything. "Take Shelter" was effects, both practical and CGI. This movie was learning how to operate on a legitimate film set, where you have people working there for you and how to best use those resources and still maintain as much honesty and spontaneity as you can in the film.

Last time we talked you said you were at kind of a crossroads, where you felt like the next decisions you made could set the course of your career. Has that thinking changed at all?

It's a constant thing that I'm managing. You always want to think about what's a good next move. The cool thing about having "Mud" in the can is I feel like with these three films I've said a lot about who I am as a filmmaker and, from this point on, I'm done establishing myself. After "Mud," I don't feel as much pressure about making a certain kind of movie. I always have to make good movies. I still have to make things that are successful. But I feel this interesting freedom coming. I don't know if that's true or not. With these three movies, it's an interesting cross-section of stuff that is all part of who I am with a filmmaker and a storyteller and it's literally across the board. Watching these three films, you can definitely get a sense of the kind of filmmaker I am, but maybe it's a little harder to categorize me.

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You're potentially about to get even more juice in awards season.

Getting nominated for five Independent Spirit awards is crazy. It's already made a difference. But it goes back to the heart of what I was telling you several months ago — it just allows me to keep some control in my hands and allows me to make some decisions about what I want to do. That's the most exciting thing to me about "Mud" — that I was able to get it made at a much bigger level than I ever had before and still make it one of my films. A big part of that was [producers] Sarah Green and Everest and Film Nation. That's really exciting, and I feel like that control or whatever you want to call it is mine to lose as opposed to mine to earn. Anything that happens during award season only helps foster that.

What sort of schedule are you on?

We're hoping to have it done by the spring. It's a big movie, but the pieces are there, from what I've seen.

In the meantime, you're not going to do any other projects?

We're looking at stuff, but I've got a movie to edit. They're sending me scripts and other things. There are always two tracks with me writing and directing my own stuff and there's this other track of me doing other stuff, whether that's writing a script for someone or directing someone else's script or adapting a graphic novel, and all that stuff interests me. You never know whether those two tracks will converge. I've got two movies that I want to sit down and write and they're not contingent on the rest of the world at all.

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Good week for the Burns Park geese
12/14/2011

Also for hypocrisy and payoffs. It was a bad week for equality, the business lobby and Kevin Lewis.

It was a good week for...

THE BURNS PARK GEESE. The North Little Rock City Council agreed with Mayor Pat Hays to postpone next week's planned controlled goose hunt in Burns Park to reduce the flock of 200 near-domesticated waterfowl by 150 or so. Hays said he'd open the record to any suggestions for alternatives to reducing the problem caused by geese — both prolific defecation and unpleasant attitudes toward walkers, bikers and other park users. Hays said he wanted to quickly put suggestions in place to see if they might work. If not, the hunt might be rescheduled in January before the hunting season is over.

HYPOCRISY. Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway), an outspoken critic of President Obama's handling of the economy, received $5,990 from a federal stimulus-funded state program to convert vehicles to run on natural gas, the Democrat-Gazette reported.

PAY-OFFS. An FOI request from the Arkansas Times revealed that Willy Robinson, recently ousted defensive coordinator for the University of Arkansas football team, will be paid his base salary, about $27,000 a month, through March 5 unless he's hired before then. He'll also get a bowl game bonus equivalent to one month's base pay. Not a golden parachute, perhaps, but a nice soft landing.

It was a bad week for...

EQUALITY. According to new analysis by a University of California at Berkley economist, six members of the Walton family are worth as much as the bottom 30 percent of Americans. The Waltons' $70 billion represents (according to a 2007 Forbes analysis) the assets of about 100 million people.

THE BUSINESS LOBBY. The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld a nearly $50 million verdict in Lonoke County for farmers who said they were damaged when genetically altered rice from the Bayer CropScience contaminated their crops. Importantly, the court upheld a finding that a statutory cap on punitive damages, which constituted $42 million of this $48 million verdict, was unconstitutional. The state legislature passed the cap in 2003, hoping to extort acquiescence out of a Supreme Court fearful of the business lobby, even though two attorney generals, Beebe and Pryor, opined that it was unconstitutional.

KEVIN LEWIS. The Little Rock lawyer, who swindled several banks of nearly $50 million through fake improvement district bond issues, was sentenced to 121 months in federal prison. He'd pleaded guilty earlier to one count of bank fraud. He's agreed to $33.8 million in restitution, though it's unclear what ability he has to make that restitution.

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Big money for lawyers
12/14/2011

It's known that the lawyers got $185 million in legal fees. It's not known how much money their clients got. The lawyers won't say, and a Texarkana circuit judge turned down a request from an opposing attorney that he require disclosure of the amount.

The case involves a class-action lawsuit against more than 20 groups of insurance companies. Plaintiffs allege that numerous customers of those insurance companies were harmed by the companies' use of a software program called Colossus in calculating damages in automobile accidents. Some 25 lawyers from Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma joined in filing the suit. Judging from filings in the case, John C. Goodson of Texarkana is the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

He did not return calls from the Arkansas Times. Goodson is married to a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

At least 24 groups of defendant insurance companies have settled with the plaintiffs. Those settlements, approved by Miller Circuit Judge Kirk D. Johnson, produced $185,106,129.64 cents in legal fees for the plaintiffs' lawyers. A group known as the ANPAC defendants (for American National Property and Casualty Company) has not settled, and ANPAC's lawyer, Elizabeth Fletcher of Little Rock, has tried to discover how much money has gone to the members of the class, the actual injuried parties. She asked for the number of class members, the number of claims paid, and the total amount of claims paid.

"Fundamental fairness and the principles of due process support ANPAC's right to discover this information," Fletcher wrote. "The potential for conflict between the members of the class and the class lawyers, which specifically bears on issues of adequacy of counsel, increases as there is less and less relation between the amount collected by the class members and the hundreds of millions of dollars collected by the class attorneys."

Goodson replied that the information sought by Fletcher was irrelevant, and accused her of "slinging mud" at him. Judge Johnson agreed with Goodson about the irrelevancy of Fletcher's request.

Last month, the suit against ANPAC was dismissed at the request of Goodson and his law partner, Matt Kiel. Their motion did not explain why they wanted a dismissal. Judge Johnson dismissed the case "without prejudice," which means it could be filed again.

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'The Sitter': one crazy night done mostly right
12/14/2011

Jonah Hill salvages it. by Sam Eifling

In "The Sitter," a still heavy-set Jonah Hill plays a college student on suspension, a perpetual ball of screwups without aim or scruples. Then he volunteers to go babysitting for a night — an act of self-sacrifice, actually, to help his painfully single mother get to mingle at a party — and his life turns partially around. Along the way, there are laughs. This is the sort of template that bad movies have relied on for eons, and indeed, "The Sitter" sets its stakes low enough that it's only going to top out at "not half bad" in most estimations. Let us be generous and say, then, that it is not half bad. David Gordon Green, the Little Rock-born director, doesn't reach the heights of his 2008 stoner-canon "Pineapple Express," but he does manage something here better than the typical group-date movie for 16-year-olds, which is, truth be told, the ground "The Sitter" claims.

Strongly in the defense of "The Sitter," none of the three child actors is loathsome. The eldest, played by Max Records (of "Where the Wild Things Are" fame), is a dour neatnik partial to v-necked pullovers and the bonanza of pills he keeps in a fanny pack to control his anxiety attacks. His younger sister, played by Landry Bender, is going through a "celebutante" phase, which excuses her working-girl cosmetics schemes and her insistence on slinging Paris Hilton-grade hip-hop lingo. For someone whose life's dream is to be famous and be invited to parties, she is surprisingly tolerable. Then there's the adopted Central American firebug, played by Kevin Hernandez, who enjoys smashing things, introducing small explosives to plumbing and disappearing at inopportune times. His penchant for petty theft also leads to his snatching of a critical MacGuffin that allows the film to sic an enjoyably unhinged Sam Rockwell and cronie J.B. Smoove after Noah.

Thus our hero is set upon the sort of character-building course — saving his own hide, upholding his ever-higher standards of what a babysitter ought to do — that comedy is made of. Enjoying "The Sitter" requires that you forget anything you might think you know about New York City geography, and to accept that sometimes logic simply can't be invited to the ends of movies. But outside of its mishmashed plot, the "Sitter" completes its emotional arcs convincingly, which in a movie about One Crazy Night is often the true feat, as "Adventures in Babysitting" could tell you.

A word, then, about Hill, without whom "The Sitter" would be a dog's breakfast. He's maybe the most unlikely leading man working in films today — obese, slackfaced, moptopped — but he displays a surprising bit of range in "The Sitter," working from the same vulnerable crassness that made his vulgarity-spewing secret bromance with Michael Cera in "Superbad" the most memorable aspect of that slacker-teen classic. Like fellow Judd Apatow disciple Seth Rogen, Hill can reach into a wellspring of honesty on multiple fronts. He appears to honestly not care. Then he appears to honestly want to cause verbal harm to those around him. Then he appears to honestly ache when he's wounded.

Even while the film orbiting around him is this hostile to realism, you root for his character and you root for the actor. Maybe it's that both he and Rogen are, to be charitable, nontraditional stars, but somehow they're able to combine tenderness and crassness with uncommon success. With any luck his turn earlier this year in "Moneyball" gave a glimpse of a future when Hill's talents do more than merely prop up B babysitting comedies.

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The 13th hole
12/14/2011

Brett Overman has a knack for turning bad luck into folding cash. A story of determination, success and the power of golf. by David Koon

As the old saying goes: Into every life, a little rain must fall.

Whatever old sage first said that wasn't really talking about rain, of course. He was talking about Act of God stuff: fires, floods, tidal waves, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and all the other things that keep insurance agents awake at night. The little problems of our lives usually roll right off our backs. It's the big things that tend to jut up like thorns when you pass a hand over all your days.

When those Act of God Days come — and they will come eventually for all of us, make no mistake — that's when a guy like Brett Overman is a good friend to have. If Overman was 65 or 70 years old, it might not be all that shocking that he's now on his fourth highly successful business venture — National Disaster Solutions, a 24/7/365 multimillion-dollar outfit that drops into major disaster zones all over America to help communities and property owners pick up the pieces. When you hear that he's only 36, though ... well, it's enough to make the average Joe feel positively useless.

Since he started NDS in 2004, Overman and his crews have haunted those places in America and the Caribbean where others are trying their damndest to get out: New Orleans after Katrina; Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake that reduced most of the country to rubble; Joplin, Mo., after the May 2011 tornado that turned a mile-wide swath of the town to so much nail- and glass-strewn mulch. Disaster has been very good to Overman, helping him buy his dream home in South Florida and befriend everybody from musician Jimmy Buffett to the perpetually-tanned actor George Hamilton. That said, it's not all business to him. He talks quite a bit about the human side of his work; the need to help.

It's hard to speak in praise of a rich man these days, when so many have it so rough, but Brett Overman isn't your typical rich guy. In an America where too much wealth seems to be built upon the air, Overman got his the old fashioned way: sweat, a bit of luck, the gift of gab and a mean game of golf.

If there's such a thing as a born businessman, Brett Overman might qualify as a child prodigy. Brett's parents, Pat and Ben Overman, said that when he was a boy, their only son had a head for business that surprised even them. At an age when other kids were spending their allowance on comic books and baseball cards, Brett was asking his mother for books on sales and marketing. He set up lemonade stands, and later started buying trinkets in bulk and selling those. In elementary school, he got a job picking strawberries in his small hometown of Caraway (35 miles northeast of Jonesboro), negotiated a price with the farmer, then hired other kids as subcontractors to do the actual picking. Rather than mow a few lawns during the summer for spending money, Brett turned it into a business.

"He was going around town getting jobs to mow yards," Ben Overman said. "When we checked, Brett was getting the jobs, and then having all his friends bring their mowers over and mow the grass. He'd give them half the money. They'd use their mowers and gas, and he'd get the jobs."

"I was never really afraid to work," Brett said. "In that, I was different — probably a little out there and weird. I didn't do normal things as a kid, I'll be the first to say."

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Around age 6 or 7, Brett discovered what would become one of the great passions of his life (and, he says, the key to everything he has done so far): the game of golf. Pat Overman said he'd take his clubs, catch a ride over to the golf course in Manila, and stay all day in the summer. His father said Brett would often play in rain and snow, because he believed it might give him an edge if he was ever caught in a gale during a tournament. Brett said that to him, golf is beyond a challenge.

"It's something that's a true, ongoing work of trying to get better, better, better," he said. "I don't know if it's the constant trying to better yourself, or the love of the outdoors, or the opportunity to go to new, fun, intriguing places. At the end of the day, I look back on it and say: single handedly, golf has probably accounted for 75 percent of my relationships."

After the family moved to Jonesboro when Brett was in the 9th grade, he joined the golf team at school, and was soon playing in junior tournaments all over the country (he skipped both his junior and senior proms because he was off playing golf). He was mature enough, even at a young age, that his parents usually allowed him to fly places by himself and stay with trusted members of the country clubs where he played. One of those tournaments, Ben Overman remembers, was another turning point in his son's life.

"He went to this place in South Florida and played, and he came home and told us: I'm going to live there someday," Ben recalls. "That's where he lives today: Turnberry Isle, Florida. ... He knew at 15 years old that he was going to live there, and he's lived there the last nine or 10 years."

In high school, Brett took some ribbing from the football players for being on the golf team, but it stopped when he got a full-ride scholarship to play golf at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

"All the football players would tease me: 'Hey, Brett, come play football. Why you playing that sissy game?' " he said. "Shortly after, knowing I was going off on a college scholarship, my phone would ring, and they'd say: 'Hey, can you teach me? Can you give me some lessons?' "

After just two weeks in Lafayette, Brett's friend — former PGA Tour pro Craig Perks — introduced him to executives with the McIlhenny Co., the family behind the famous Tabasco sauce, made and bottled on Avery Island in South Louisiana. The McIlhennys were soon close friends with the likeable Arkansan.

"Literally for five years, I had a key to Avery Island," Overman said. "That was a huge culture thing for me. And once again, it traced back to the game of golf." Overman would travel all over the world with McIlhenny executives during his time in Lafayette, getting real-time business experience that he said just can't be taught in a classroom. In his sophomore year of college, The McIlhenny Co. offered Overman what was then the fourth franchise of their Tabasco Country Store, a touristy outlet that sells merchandise emblazoned with the Tabasco logo. With help from his parents, Overman and a cousin started their Tabasco Store in Branson, Mo. He was just 19 at the time. It was a great concept and a great market, Overman said, but the location they picked wasn't the best. The store did OK, but not terrific. Still, running his own business at that age taught him a lot about the rigors and responsibilities involved in keeping a business afloat.

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After graduating from college, Overman followed his dream of playing professional golf to South America. He spent 11 weeks there on the South American Tour, with sponsorship from Tabasco, before he realized the hard truth about himself. "It was one of those deals where you can't look in the mirror and lie to yourself," he said. "I'll never forget it. I was in Brazil. I'd just played my tail off, probably the best I'd played down there, and I was in a tie for 34th or something. I said to myself then: This is not really what I want to do." Overman came home, and went to work at his father's small, family-run janitorial business.

"It wasn't a week before he said, 'Dad, the real thing is to get into restoration,' " Ben Overman recalls.

Everybody dreads the idea of something terrible happening in their home — a fire that soots up the place but doesn't destroy it, a sewage leak that fills up the basement with dark swill, even — God forbid — a traumatic event that leaves the walls and carpets soaked with blood. Even so, not many homeowners have given much thought to how they might get their house back to square one if any of those things happened. That, in a nutshell, is where Brett Overman was coming from when he got the idea for All-Clean USA. There were other restoration companies, of course, but Brett wanted to do it better. His father, he recalls, was skeptical at first.

"He said, 'You didn't go to school for that, Brett. You're not a carpenter. You're not a contractor,' " Overman said. "I probably couldn't spell restoration, but I'd seen another company there in my hometown do it and do it well. You hear things about different people, and I'd heard there was a demand for a service-oriented company at the time to do that."

Still, he knew his dad was right. He wasn't a painter, or a carpenter, or a plumber, and didn't know the first thing about putting a house or business right after a disaster. He needed on-the-ground experience. So, just after Christmas 1998, Overman started cold-calling restoration companies in Lafayette, La., offering to come down and work for them for free.

After getting rebuffed by several businesses, Overman finally found an owner who knew him from his golf-playing days in Lafayette. He's friends with the owner now, and they joke about the fact that when Overman first called and offered himself up as an unpaid intern, he thought it was a prank call and almost hung up. After listening for a while, though, the man on the other end of the line told Overman to show up ready to work the next morning at 8:30 a.m.

That first day was a quick education. The second call of the day was a trauma scene — a suicide. Overman is a guy who keeps it together well, but when he describes that scene, you can catch a glimpse of the horror in his face — and maybe a peek at the 20-something kid in a haz-mat suit who wondered just what the hell he had gotten himself into.

"We were having to wipe down the walls," he said. "There's blood everywhere. The lady I was working with went to move the sofa, and when she does, there's the guy's ear ... I remember walking out, and she said: 'Kid, are you sure you want to get into a business like this? It's not very glamorous.' "

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He got through it, though, and stuck with it. After three weeks of working every kind of restoration job imaginable, he came home to Jonesboro, asked his dad for a $7,000 loan, bought two truckloads of equipment — carpet cleaners, drying fans, air scrubbers and more — and started All-Clean USA.

"I had some business cards made up," he said, "and I went door to door to all the insurance people and property people that I knew, telling them I've started a business, this is my story — not knowing what in the hell I'd do if the phone rang." Two weeks in, it finally did: friends of a friend who'd had a fire.

"They said it was the first fire they'd ever had," he said. "What they didn't know is that it was the first fire I'd ever done. I got two of my dad's maintenance people, and we went in, and in about five days we cleaned that house top to bottom, painted about four rooms, cleaned their carpets, and when we left they just signed their [insurance] check over to me." That job netted enough to pay his dad back. It was more money than he'd made the whole time he was playing golf in South America.

One job turned into another, and then another. As All-Clean in Jonesboro took off, Overman started thinking about expanding — perhaps a little prematurely, he admits now. He had family in Conway, so he set his sights on opening another office there and started advertising for a manager. After weeding through over 100 applications, he settled on Burle Fortenberry, who had been laid off from Nucor Steel and was then driving a school bus part time. Fortenberry had never worked in restoration before. They met for their interview at Colton's Steakhouse in Conway.

"I showed up more or less dressed up, and he was in a T-shirt and jeans with his cap turned around backward — typical golfer," Fortenberry said. "I went home and told my wife about it, and her impression was: 'You need to run.' "

Fortenberry was offered the job and decided to take it. In 2001, the first year of the Conway office, they did around 30 jobs, barely enough to keep the doors open. In 2010, All-Clean Conway did 389. By then, Overman had expanded All-Clean all over the state and regionally, opening offices in Hot Springs, Little Rock, Springdale and Memphis. It was a different kind of expansion in 2004, however, that would take Overman's business life to the next level.

Since the time he was a kid playing golf tournaments, Overman said, he'd wanted to live in a warm climate — somewhere tropical, where you could play golf in shirtsleeves year round. Once All-Clean was on its feet and growing, Overman decided to pull the trigger on buying property in South Florida. He eventually sold that property for a hefty profit, but the idea of living there had taken hold once again in his mind. The thought of a house near the coast naturally got him thinking about the threat of hurricanes, and the money to be had if a disaster-restoration company was in the right place at the right time.

Overman called his cousin, Tyson Overman, whom he'd partnered with on the Tabasco Country Store, and told him his idea: While Brett kept All-Clean humming in Arkansas, Tyson would move to Miami, start a restoration company, and get busy knocking on doors. By the time the next hurricane came ashore, they'd be ready. They packed his cousin's things into moving vans, trucked him to Florida, and Florida Disaster Services was born.

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You know, of course, what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men. For the next 10 months, the hurricane factory that is the Gulf of Mexico quit spinning hurricanes toward Florida.

"We're losing money, and not really getting anywhere, debating on whether it was going to work," Overman said. "Then 2004 hits. We have Hurricane Charley, Hurricane Frances, Hurricane Ivan and Hurricane Jeanne. That tapped the resources of everybody in the industry — four hurricanes spread out like that throughout the state."

The first big job was a retirement high-rise in Punta Gorda, Fla., which had been heavily damaged by Hurricane Charley. "We worked day and night," Overman said, "recruited people, brought them in, for three hard weeks, and then you'd have another [hurricane] hit over on the East Coast. That went for three hard weeks, then you had another one hit in the panhandle. At one time, we were spread out in four different areas — two 26-year-old kids."

Looking to expand further but with his cousin worn a bit ragged, Overman bought Tyson out in 2005, got his general contractor's licenses for all the states on the Gulf Coast, and then folded Florida Disaster Solutions into National Disaster Solutions. The ink was barely dry on his new business cards when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Fourteen days after the levees broke, Overman ventured into the city under armed guard with representatives of FEMA, who wanted to assess a high-rise building there for possible use as a command center. Overman remembers driving into the drowned city, his SUV weaving through stalled cars and National Guard Humvees, at times driving through water deep enough that it came up into the floorboards around their feet.

"I'll never forget pulling up at that building, and they had seven bodies tied together, tied to the posts of the porte-cochere, there where you drive in," he said. "The water had receded a little, and they were still in search and rescue mode ... There's the business side of things: 'We're going to be able to come in here and get a lot of work.' But the more you were there — and I didn't leave for 90 days straight, I didn't go anywhere — you get more involved, and touch more people, and hear sad, heartache stories, you just want to do everything in your power to help."

Eventually, NDS got the contract to do demolition and remediation on every Jesuit school in New Orleans, along with contracts to restore everything from movie theaters to doctor's offices. By the time they got to many of them, the tropical heat had turned the buildings to a fetid and moldy nightmare, with mushrooms growing out of the walls in some cases. Most of them had to be completely gutted back to the bare framing, and rebuilt from there.

"Being in the battle like that every day, it really puts things in perspective," Overman said. "Human life, and just caring about people ... . It makes you truly appreciate things a whole lot more. It makes you step back and think what's really important."

Since Katrina, which really put National Disaster Services on the map, Overman and NDS have responded to trouble all over, including working in 21 states and in the wake of the last 16 hurricanes. Back in August, after rains from Hurricane Irene swamped Vermont and completely cut off many small towns, NDS was there. The company, by Overman's estimation, rebuilt around 75 percent of Vilonia — including 35 homes in one neighborhood — after the tornado back in April of this year. It was Joplin, Mo., however, which he said is the worst destruction he's ever seen. A large swath of the town was virtually wiped off the map in May 2011 by a mile-wide, EF5 twister that churned through the middle of the city. He's in the restoration business, Overman said, and in most cases, there was just nothing left in Joplin to restore.

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"That was the worst thing I've ever seen," he said. "Worse than Katrina, worse than the hurricanes. That's the worst true, widespread devastation that I've ever seen. ... You had people at every corner, trying to direct traffic. They think this is their street and they're actually four streets over. They didn't even know where they were, because the street signs and all the landmarks were just gone."

It isn't all rain clouds and ominous skies for Overman, however. Soon after moving to South Florida, he met — again, through the magic of golf — the Florida real-estate developer Donny Soffer, who owns the five-star Fountainbleau Hotel on South Beach and other high end properties in the region. With Soffer, who Overman said he now considers a second father, he has traveled all over the world, including partying with hotel heiress Paris Hilton in Sardinia and cruising the Caribbean with the musician Jimmy Buffett on Soffer's 270-foot yacht, Mad Summer.

"Brett is not a user, he's a friend," Soffer said. "His heart is in the right place. We've always had a relationship like a father and son — but I don't always know who the father is. ... He doesn't just come along because I have all the toys. He's a true friend."

Through Soffer, Overman has befriended A-list actors, star athletes and big-money philanthropists, including Anthony Kennedy Shriver. Overman currently works extensively with Shriver's charity, Best Buddies, which helps people with developmental disabilities.

"He's got a great demeanor, respect for people, such a good humor," Shriver said. "Plus he has a refreshing mentality and a spirit that is hard to find these days. ... There's something special about people from your part of the world. Bill Clinton sure has it. And Brett's got the same kind of thing. It all comes naturally to him, and that's helped him in golf, business, whatever he does."

Even though his job often has him meeting people in the worst moments of their lives, Overman still has a lot of want-to left in him. Nobody knows when the next Act of God is going to lay them low, but it's kind of amazing to think Overman might well have another 36 years — or more — to work with.

"It's the passion in what you love," he said. "I see that in other people. To me, that's the key to staying young and healthy. That's what I do. It wakes me up. It motivates me. I didn't set out to say: 'I want to have 400 jobs and make x-amount of dollars.' I try just as hard at 36 as I did at 23. Your responsibilities change a little, but I'm still passionate about it, and I still love it."

Kelley Bass contributed reporting.

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Tell the bees
12/14/2011

Driving in to the office one day last week, we heard a report on NPR about beekeepers, those hearty souls who ride herd over the bugs that make the honey.

Driving in to the office one day last week, we heard a report on NPR about beekeepers, those hearty souls who ride herd over the bugs that make the honey. A beehive is a great advertisement for cooperation and self-sacrifice, we think, with every one of the furry, heaving multitudes contributing, over the course of a lifetime, a few drops of liquid gold for the greater good before passing on with a bee-ly sigh.

It got The Observer thinking about dear old Dad, who had a few hives on the family stead, way out in the boondocks of Saline County. Dad was a doer, and when he did anything he did it all the way, so soon after he came home with his rattling pickup truck full of empty bee-boxes he'd picked up at an estate sale, he had to get the rest of the beekeeper's accoutrements: the white suit, the bellows-equipped tin smoker, the bee-keeper's helmet with fine mesh all about the face and elastic at the neck.

Every time we saw him in that getup, we couldn't help but think of astronauts tottering around on distant planets, the mesh keeping out those pesky Martian mosquitoes, as big and angry as Spitfires.

After he was gone — more than 10 years in the grave as we write this — The Observer learned that our father had been a Pentecostal preacher once in his youth.

He had settled into a much more peaceful understanding with the Universe by the time he took up the bees, but we suspect it was the ritual of beekeeping that appealed to our father's fallen-away heart: Smoke the bees to calm them. Crack the lid of the hive with a flat crowbar. Pry out the frames, breaking loose the hard wax. Lift the frames out, the capped and filled honeycombs translucent gold, amazing and impossible, sunlight seeping through each perfect chamber. Such architecture!

Though Intelligent Design has been ripped off and turned into a rallying cry by zealots these days (and a good scientist could probably explain to us those identical hexagons without the need for the Almighty with enough time and cussin'), The Observer learned to know God in our youth by looking at those tiny cells, each one designed and made — somehow — by an unimaginably smaller brain.

There can be no randomness to this, we thought then, only some Higher Order.

That first harvest, once the frames had been safely stolen away and spirited back to the barn by the mammals, a few determined bees clinging to our rattle trap International Scout for awhile before giving up and turning back, we remember Dad taking off his gloves, opening his Case knife, then plunging it into the raw honeycomb, the amber honey rising to meet the tip of the blade. He sawed out a rough, dripping square, and held it out to us.

That's how we remember him there: clad all in white, smiling at what he had made, holding out the dripping comb to a son who would one day stand in awe of him but not then. We remember how the anticipation of sweetness rose in our mouth — rose, rose, rose, as it still does as we write this.

Here's another thing we didn't learn until after he was gone: A good memory is much sweeter than the sweetest honey.

Surfing the Internet the other day, The Observer came across a website that's been clearly needed for far too long: www.devastatingexplosions.com.

It's exactly what it sounds like: a hand, hovering over a big red button like the one we imagined sitting on the president's desk back when we were a kid. Click the hand, and you're treated to a devastating explosion. That's all it does.

We don't know if it's a work of genius or a testament to the fact that some folks have too much time on their hands, but it sure does help blow off some steam after Christmas shopping.

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A Christmas Carol
12/14/2011

It was beginning to feel a bit like Christmas when, on a crisp crystalline night, I went to the Rep and was completely charmed into the season by its fresh and moving "A Christmas Carol, The Musical." All the essentials made the transformation into the musical: Scrooge, the ghosts, and, early on, the words the pitiless Scrooge threw at the kinder-hearted folk who appealed to him on behalf of needy children at Christmas: "Are there no prisons?" he sneered. "Are there no workhouses?"

Later, during Scrooge's long night terrors, a ghost presented him to two spectral children, their multiple needs apparent. "This boy is Ignorance," the ghost intoned. "This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware of this boy."

As the miser cringed in belated understanding, the ghost repeated the miser's own words to further haunt the old man: "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"

As one who's written plenty about prisons, I have seen those two children in the flesh — and by the thousands. They grow into teen-agers, and later adults, whom we fear. We build prisons to house them, correct them, punish them — and sometimes kill them. Yet, we know that most will eventually be freed to try — usually with scant support — to re-integrate into our larger society.

We fill our prisons with grown-up versions of Ignorance and Want and, like Scrooge, are blind to their humanity. We have learned well to "beware" these children, while we've allowed ourselves to believe that — somehow — they should have grown into good citizens, however much their childhoods lacked good training, responsibility and love.

But, as Dickens wrote, "if [men's] courses are departed from, the ends will change." On the very day I attended the Rep, the Arkansas Department of Correction announced a new program that will bring prisoners together with dogs that have been, like them, outcast.

Renie Rule, an executive at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, who also volunteers in a prison, pushed to get the program established. To its credit, the ADC recognized the value — to inmates and dogs alike — in teaming up with CARE, an animal rescue group. Here, for both, is a chance for training, responsibility and love.

All dogs accepted to Paws in Prison will come from shelters with high kill rates. They will be paired with inmates who will train them to become eligible for adoption. In turn, as any dog-lover knows, the very presence of dogs around inmates and staff will help humanize our prisons.

Inmates selected for the program will themselves be trained. They will have to earn the right to teach and care for a dog. The dogs will sleep in their cells and be allowed in most parts of each prison, where they can interact with other inmates and staff.

The goal is for each dog to earn the American Kennel Club's good citizenship certification. When dogs are adopted, the trainers will get new shelter dogs.

Socialization and a second chance at life is the good news for the dogs — and for many of their trainers, as well. For those men and women who will never leave prison, the dogs offer the feel of fur, lessons in gentleness, a chance for playfulness and simple wordless companionship amid loneliness and loss.

Our Scroogy little hearts may snarl that prisoners don't warrant such comforts. But prisoners are often their own worst punishers. Their white uniforms bespeak guilt, but many also suffer shame, the heavy chains they "forged in life." They long for the chances that old Scrooge got: a chance to do something good; a chance, at last, to give.

These needy dogs offer them that, along with generous, tail-wagging acceptance.

Thanks to Rule, the ADC and CARE. Without costing the state a farthing, they have created a transformative gift. As some lucky dog might say, "God bless us, every one."

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Fun facts about Newt Gingrich
12/14/2011

by Tom Tomorrow

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As the coaching carousel turns in Fayetteville
12/14/2011

One of the markers of a football program's relative progress is that the concept of "season" will naturally expand. by Beau Wilcox

One of the markers of a football program's relative progress is that the concept of "season" will naturally expand.

'Tis true that some of this is a function of an overwrought base simply obsessing over every stitch from signing day through spring and summer practices, fueled by as much fodder as their ISP's bandwidth cap will permit. But success breeds this kind of zealotry. Winning 28 games over three years has given the Razorbacks that sort of year-round allure.

The supposed lull between the end of the regular season and that bowl game far, far off in the distance is one period that, by all rights, should be quiet. It's a weeks-long vacuum for bowl-bound teams and for schools that flopped their way to an early finish, it's a signal that basketball is about to take center stage for a while.

There is no such December malaise in Fayetteville anymore. The coaching carousel spins almost off its axis for a few weeks, which means that coveted assistants like Garrick McGee get well-earned shots at taking over flagging teams. When the McGees of the world morph into commodities, the implication is clear: your program is thriving when the also-rans start plucking fruits off your tree.

It is then rare for one coordinator to rise while the counterpart falls. But when Willy Robinson finally got his walking papers last week, dismissed for failing to build upon a sturdy foundation laid late last year, Arkansas found itself in that very odd position of replacing both at once.

To supplant McGee, head coach Bobby Petrino brought back his brother Paul, paroled after a two-year stint in Champaign as Ron Zook's OC at Illinois. Frankly, the little brother is a beneficiary of fortunate circumstance, as McGee's ascent left the door ajar for a return to Arkansas when Zook and his staff were mercifully flushed after a six-game skid to end the season. This sort of hire will always incite fears of Razorback supporters who get justifiably queasy over the slightest taste of nepotism within the program, but even the jaded have to acknowledge that Paul Petrino is far more steeped in offensive know-how than the common hanger-on. He helped make Casey Dick a somewhat respectable passer in short order, then was part of Ryan Mallett's early flourishing in 2009.

The more curious and divisive choice was spent on rehabbing a defense that ranked somewhere near the middle of the national rankings despite returning a wealth of seasoned contributors. Ultimately the man Petrino tabbed as Robinson's successor was Paul Haynes, who struck many observers as an odd selection given that former Miami coach Randy Shannon was rumored to have been the early front runner, and that Haynes had spent only one year as Ohio State's co-defensive coordinator.

Haynes and Petrino have connections dating back to their NFL stints, and it became apparent from the latter's press conference ("Paul Haynes is extremely familiar with the way we operate") that the decision may have been forged long before it was announced. To hear former Razorback/current "Drive Time Sports" talking head Marcus Elliott talk, though, you'd think that this is some sort of conspiracy hatched to keep the Hogs' defense playing harmony to Petrino's offensive melody, which is absurd. Elliott, like many, seemed titillated by the mention of Shannon, then had those rose-colored glasses shattered when Haynes was announced. It's understandable that common fans would endorse someone with Shannon's background, but is it realistic to think that a former head coach of Shannon's caliber and age would take a coordinator job at this point?

Consider this: the coordinators of inarguably the two best defenses in the country are Kirby Smart (Alabama) and John Chavis (LSU). Smart toiled as a position coach for various teams before Saban made him coordinator at the ripe age of 32; Chavis built up the Tennessee defense during its halcyon days in the late 1990s before he became a casualty of Philip Fulmer's ouster in 2008. Neither has been a head coach to date.

So Shannon would have been a coup, but he was probably more of a pipe dream than anything else. Arkansas needs to bolster its defense principally through a more global approach to recruiting, an area where Haynes excels, and by re-establishing a physical presence in the secondary, once a hallmark of this program that has dissipated over time.

There is much to be gained by having the two Pauls in the fold in early December. Both get an audition in Dallas on January 6, an opportunity to hit the ground in full stride and get a leg up on recruiting.

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Curry in a Hurry shows promise
12/14/2011

The NLR Indian restaurant is authentic and friendly.

We wanted to love Curry in a Hurry even before we tasted the food. But we were a bit skeptical when we pulled up to the convenience store on North Little Rock's Pike Avenue. We squinted dumbly at the inconspicuous entrance, nearly camouflaged by next door's neon beer ads. Once inside, we were puzzled by the absence of tables in the main room. We were ushered to a pale purple sideroom-cum-closet. It's large enough to hold a square table and not much else. "Slumdog Millionaire" was on the TV, remote in easy reach next to the upright roll of paper towels. Overly bright photos of entrees line the walls, and floral curtains cushioned diners from neighborhood happenings just beyond the walls.

The manager, Sahil Hameerani, an early-30s immigrant entrepreneur, recommended "the popular Chicken 65," and left us with menus — but not before informing us that the place is family owned and his dad does the cooking.

The menu includes such rarities as bheja masala (goat brain) that aren't Indian restaurant standards, but we ordered "spanich" pakora and chicken 65 to start. The spinach was lightly battered and deep fried, served with tamarind sauce. We could taste it through the chickpea crust. The bittersweet, salty meld had a satisfying texture.

Chicken 65 is usually boneless deep-fried chicken. In south Indian lore, it takes 65 days to age the marinade. When the dish arrived at our table, it was practically glowing from the overhead fluorescents. The showy red comes from hours of marinating in spices (and, we suspect, a bit of food coloring). For balance, it was garnished with crispy fried curry leaves and cool cilantro. This version of chicken 65 was barely fried, but it still made us long for the beer that Curry in a Hurry doesn't serve. It does offer a bright green basil juice, which makes a nice palate cleanser. It has a sugary, vanilla flavor and tiny, gummy seeds.

We were less impressed with the breaded pakora. The overwhelming flavor was "generic deep fried." If we chewed thoughtfully, a hint of cumin muscled through, but unless we're polishing off a night of heavy drinking, it's a dish we'll avoid.

The chicken 65 was tender and tangy, but despite its professed popularity, was less interesting than some of the other offerings. The seekh kabob — with a strong fennel undertone — was served in a delicious flaky naan. The vegetable curry will become a safe standard, with plump potatoes, carrots, peas and moderate heat. The spices are distinct, particularly ginger, and the fresh cilantro was a welcome touch. The mutton (in India mutton refers to goat) biryani was succulent, although the rice could have been a tad spicier.

Haleem, a mush of meat, barley and wheat, often resembles overcooked dahl. But in Curry in a Hurry's version, both meat and wheat still retained their separate properties, even as impossibly thin strips of beef melted into the sticky base.

Palak paneer was the standout. It's a dish often noted more for its texture than its flavor, but Curry in a Hurry mastered both. The spinach tasted fresh and not too gelatinous. The paneer — fresh cheese — was perfectly browned, firm and generous. There was just the right amount of creaminess and a subtle heat that didn't leave us scrambling for rice and water.

Dessert isn't on the menu, but when we asked, Hameerani brought us khir and gulab jammon. The khir was a bland, gritty rice pudding with almond flavoring and cashew topping. It's dessert for those who don't really like dessert. But the gulab jammon was the best we've ever tasted. Usually this donut-like dessert is much too heavy, a victim of its own thick, sickly-sweet syrup. But this syrup was light and the donut fresher and airier than we could have hoped.

In fact, fresh food and hospitality seemed to be the overriding theme of the odd little two-table restaurant. Hameerani was chatty, excited about his new venture and seeking honest feedback — and with the TV and private dining, he'd obviously put effort into making the space comfortable for patrons. Curry in a Hurry has no pretension and a lot of heart. It feels like a Southern approach to Indian cuisine. The portions are hearty, the prices are moderate but it's the authenticity — of both the food and the dream — that will bring us back.

Quick bite:

This is the place to try goat brain or liver, and the Indian standards — curries, masalas and biryanis — are fresh and hearty. If there is space, dine in. The dining set up and friendly manager are part of the charm.

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An open letter to Mark Martin
12/14/2011

When you entered office at the Capitol, you immediately changed the news channel on the public television in the Capitol Rotunda to Fox News.

An open letter to Mark Martin

When you entered office at the Capitol, you immediately changed the news channel on the public television in the Capitol Rotunda to Fox News. It had been set to a more mainstream and moderate news source by your predecessor. With the results released by several recent surveys (Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind Poll and University of Maryland) that indicate a person having no exposure to news at all has better knowledge of events than someone who watches Fox News (either Republican or Democrat), I'm hoping you'll do the right thing and change the channel back. Will you do your part to help Arkansas citizens be better informed? Or will you continue to subject both public employees and visitors to the "news" channel that distorts facts and promotes disinformation?

Karen Wells

Little Rock

From the web

In response to an Arkansas Blog post on Nashville News Publisher Mike Graves' column on the De Queen-Nashville high school football game in which he wrote (and subsequently apologized for saying) that he was "embarrassed for the decent citizens of De Queen, especially when the prayer and our national anthem were ignored by the thugs in the crowd who kept their caps on" and asked "when we give the illegal so much, how do we expect them to have any respect or regard for America?":

I don't know about anyone else here, but I am tired of people speaking their minds, then apologizing for it. The apology means nothing. Stick to your guns. If you say what you believe, then stick to it. This is America. So what if people are offended?

I'm more offended by these apologies that always come out than anything else. I don't think what the man said is worthy of all this hoopla. That is a problem in today's society with the Internet and such. Things get blown out of proportion in a hurry, and then the TV news has to get a hold of it and try to stir up the pot.

jtsims

I went to Fort Baptist Northside in the early '90s with the sons and daughters of Vietnamese and Laotian refugees. Their parents, most of whom spoke no English, took whatever jobs they could find, from furniture factory jobs down to the chicken plants. A few families started restaurants or Asian food markets. The high school age kids worked too so the family could make ends meet. Sound familiar?

Today, many of those students are now doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, teachers, etc., and their children speak little to no Vietnamese. Twenty years from now, I see no reason we won't see the process repeat itself with the Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants, just as it has many times before, including my wife's family who came to Subiaco, Arkansas, from Germany 100 years ago.

FSMXNA

In response to an item on the Arkansas Blog, "Occupy Wall Street is making a difference."

It amazes me that people in power are swayed by protesters screaming out against them from a safe distance. Ole LBJ heard the sea of anti-war protesters outside the fence day and night until it bothered him so much he chose not to run for a second term. He could have ignored the noise and had a second term with no one so much as knocking a hair out of place yet the protesting finally got to him and he slunk off to Texas to die five years later.

I'm glad it works! Protesters have saved us from some of the worst of the 1%, and we've already seen the power of those dirty hippies trashing our precious parks. Winter doesn't seem to be slowing them down much but I predict next spring will be a watershed moment. We've got the winter to let the Occupy message foment in our minds and I think by next spring a whole lot of us Centrum Silver folks will get our Occupy on.

In truth our election system and our government has become so corrupted it hardly works at all. Hundreds of years of special-interest sponsored amendments and bills and tax breaks have spoiled the soup. Can anyone name an aspect of modern American life that hasn't been corrupted? Can't even trust your kids to your local priest, for crying out loud. And if the boy plays football — look out!

It's high time we have a major adjustment. The way things are we can't keep kicking the many many cans on down the road. It's time to take our medicine and deal out a lot more medicine for those who can't handle the truth that America is a cesspool of corruption controlled by Fascism in the form of Citizens United. A country of war profiteers. An oligarchy taking us back to pre-Civil War days when Massa held all the cards. It will not stand! Occupy your mind and the rest will follow!

Deathbyinches

Submit letters to the Editor, Arkansas Times, P.O. Box 34010, Little Rock, AR 72203. We also accept letters via e-mail. The address is arktimes@arktimes.com. We also accept faxes at 375-3623. Please include name and hometown.

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Tropical Smoothie headed to old YMCA Building
12/14/2011

And Lombardi closes.

Tropical Smoothie Cafe will be the first retail tenant in the downtown former YMCA building, at Sixth and Main, according to Sharon Priest, director of Downtown Little Rock Partnership. The sandwich and smoothie franchise has an expected March 2012 opening date. The California-based Tower Investments purchased the building in 2005, with plans to redevelop it as retail space. But in 2010, the building was unoccupied and up for sale. Little Rock resident Shellie Barnes purchased the building in August 2010, rescuing it from another buyer who wanted to raze it for a parking lot. Perhaps Tropical Smoothie is the first of many retailers who will embrace the historic building. According to Priest, the business' commitment "is another affirmation that things are happening downtown."

Local liqueur company Lombardi closed shop this month, falling victim to banks' cautious small business lending practices, according to owner Nick Lawrence. Lawrence and a partner started Lombardi in Little Rock in 2007, shortly after Lawrence's primary employer, Delta Airlines, filed bankruptcy.

"I'm a pilot. My salary was sliced, my pension gone. I needed look into something else," said Lawrence, a Little Rock native.

His business partner had a recipe for limoncello, so they decided to mass-market the liqueur. The company offered three lemon liqueurs, but its signature product was Lombardi Cream of Limoncello.

For the past two years, Lawrence has kept up his flight schedule while overseeing the liqueur company. It was a small operation with three fulltime employees at its peak. Finding capital became increasingly frustrating. Lawrence said banks wouldn't offer a loan because of insufficient cash flow, and several private investors offered help, but then backed away.

The Historic Arkansas Museum has posted the recipes from the winners of its 7th Ever Nog-off — John Robert Jackson's Eggnog (People's Choice), Capital Eggnog (tie for Taster's Choice Award) and OMnog (tie for Taster's Choice Award). Go to arktimes.com/nog for the link and more information.

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New fraud: Regulation is bad
12/14/2011

In the catalog of imagined horrors inflicted upon the nation by a merciless government, none is more enduring, at least in the minds of big business and the Republican right, than regulation. by Ernest Dumas

In the catalog of imagined horrors inflicted upon the nation by a merciless government, none is more enduring, at least in the minds of big business and the Republican right, than regulation.

They have invoked it for 40 years, since President Nixon, Republican, signed all those laws regulating discharges into the country's air, lakes and streams and forcing businesses to have clean and safe workplaces.

Last week the Republicans used their big majority in the House of Representatives to pass a nonsensical bill to halt new federal regulation. Every important regulation on business would hereafter have to be approved by both houses of Congress. It would quadruple the workload of Congress, which cannot now even pass routine budget bills, and virtually guarantee that no act of Congress dealing with the health, safety and financial security of the American people would ever again be implemented.

But it was just theater. No one seriously thought that could work or should become law. But the Republican congressmen all rushed out boilerplate statements crowing about their votes to create jobs by voting to stop President Obama from imposing burdensome rules on those desperate good people, "the job creators."

Rep. Tim Griffin sent the media a statement claiming that he had just voted to stop the heavy hand of Barack Obama from "crushing Arkansas job creators." He didn't identify the Arkansas employers or potential employers whom the president and his bureaucrats were crushing and how they were doing it.

If he were pressed, he would probably say it's those forthcoming rules to control greenhouse gases, coal ash and other pollutants from fossil fuels, a list supplied by the coal and petrochemical industries and electric utilities.

Griffin would be hard-pressed to show that less government regulation produces jobs. He was a mole in the best laboratory for that research, the George W. Bush administration. (Griffin worked in the White House political office.) Bush came into office denouncing the excessive regulation of the Bill Clinton administration and promising to be more obliging of industry. He put lawyers, lobbyists and executives from industries in the jobs regulating their industries, and regulation came to a virtual standstill, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the other financial regulators. Bush's EPA refused to carry out the Clean Air Act even after the conservative U.S. Supreme Court said it was obliged to.

How did all that work out, congressman?

The economy produced a net growth of almost 23 million jobs under the extreme duress of the Clinton regulators. In the caress of the Bush regulators, the job creators produced a hair over 1 million jobs—the worst eight-year jobs record since the Great Depression. We need more of that, Griffin says.

The regulatory bugbear does go back largely to Nixon and to the Democratic Congress that worked so closely with him.

There was the hated Occupational Safety and Health Act, signed by Nixon in 1970, requiring all private and government employers to provide a workplace free of toxic chemicals, mechanical dangers and unsanitary conditions. For 20 years, industries denounced OSHA regulations and pointed to ridiculous sounding rules. They were supposed to be costing millions of jobs.

You hear the complaints only rarely now. One reason is that some 14,000 workers were killed or died from workplace accidents or sicknesses every year then. It's down to a little over 4,000 a year now although employment has almost doubled. Injury rates and work-related sicknesses have dropped dramatically, from 11 per 100 workers in 1972, when the rules went into effect, to 3.5 per 100 workers now.

All the consumer product safety rules that Republicans are raging about now? That pretty much started with Nixon and his firebrand consumer affairs director, Virginia Knauer, who died, incidentally, the other day at 96.

All the current fuss about regulation is over the implementation of the Clean Air Act, signed by Nixon, along with the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. When a major air pollutant is identified, the EPA is supposed to adopt regulations to bring it under control. Now it's carbon dioxide, mercury, nitric acids and other contributors to global warming.

Congress and their regulatory lackeys acted upon the growing alarm of Americans about polluted lakes, rivers and harbors, the smothering smog and deteriorating quality of the air over major cities like Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago (and, yes, Little Rock), the acid rain that was killing forests in the industrial heartland and the rising incidence of respiratory diseases among children and the elderly.

All those horrors are much better, thanks to regulation, and some day we will combat greenhouse gases, too, though maybe too late. It is well to remember that the Griffins and the chambers of commerce all those years said the rules were excessive and job killing.

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Brave Combo to Stickyz
12/14/2011

Also Hamboy Jukes Band at Stickyz, the Victorian Christmas Magic Lantern Show at the Old State House, Whale Fire and Phantom Limb at White Water, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's 'Happy Holidays' at Robinson, a huge-ass local show at White Water, Trampled By Turtles at Juanita's and The See at White Water. by Robert Bell

WEDNESDAY 12/14

HAMBOY JUKES BAND

8:30 p.m. Stickyz. $5 or a canned ham.

Last month, Amboy Community Food Pantry in North Little Rock served more than 900 people. That's 900 people who would have gone hungry had it not been for the volunteer-run nonprofit. But pantries don't just fill themselves. So in addition to the good work of the volunteers who run the food bank, the nonprofit also needs donations; hence this show. The Hamboy Jukes Band (dig the nod to the Amboy Dukes, the psychedelic rock band that launched Ted Nugent into the world) is a super-group of sorts, including Jimmy Powell (Go Fast), Walter K (Shannon Boshears Band), Mike Nelson (Gun Bunnies, Big Silver, Amy Garland Band), Johnny Atomic, JR Top (Booyah! Dad), Mark Wyers (Josh the Devil and The Sinners, The Weisenheimers) and Gil Franklin (Port Arthur Band), as well as Jim Jolly on guitar and jazz pianist Bill White (Farris Holliman's Rhythm Masters). Be sure to bring a canned ham. Other nonperishable food donations will be accepted as well.

WEDNESDAY 12/14

VICTORIAN CHRISTMAS MAGIC LANTERN SHOW

7 p.m. Old State House Museum. Free.

In the olden times, before smartphones and liquid crystal displays and cathode ray tubes, before even film itself, people still huddled in dark rooms to stare at glowing projections. You know, for entertainment. One of the earliest methods of creating shimmering distractions was the magic lantern, a sort of proto-projector that bounces light off a mirror and directs it across an aperture and through a lens and a glass slide with a colorful image on it. Later innovations enabled the images to move, thus humanity took another step toward the birth of film. The Old State House Museum will give audiences a taste of Victorian-era entertainment, with a genuine antique magic lantern, which "rapidly projects spectacular color slides on a full-size movie screen." The images are dramatized by costumed entertainers and by the audience itself, which is encouraged to clap, stomp and join in chants and songs.

THURSDAY 12/15

BRAVE COMBO

8 p.m. Stickyz. $10.

Call me crazy, but with the exception of being at some sort of German beer garden — kielbasa in one hand and the afternoon's third massive stein-full of beer in the other — I've never really dug polka. But one exception might just have to be Brave Combo. The Denton, Texas, outfit got started in the late '70s, doing polka-fied covers of rock classics and by the late '90s/early aughts, Brave Combo was winning Grammys for Best Polka Album (1999 and 2005) and being featured on The Simpsons — a sign that you've made it if ever there was one. The band's polka version of "Must Be Santa" from 1991's "It's Christmas, Man!" even resonated with Bob Dylan, who included a nearly identical arrangement of the song on his own Christmas album, 2009's "Christmas in the Heart." Dylan told Street News Service that he "first heard that song years ago on one of those 'Sing Along with Mitch' records. But this version comes from a band called Brave Combo. Somebody sent their record to us for our radio show. They're a regional band out of Texas that takes regular songs and changes the way you think about them. You oughta hear their version of 'Hey Jude.' " High praise from Blind Boy Grunt himself? Hey man, good enough for me.

THURSDAY 12/15

WHALE FIRE, PHANTOM LIMB

9 p.m. White Water Tavern. $5.

Little Rock's Whale Fire is all ear candy of the sweetest variety: clean, clear guitar lines, catchy melodies and falsetto "ooh-oohs" all over the place, anchored by bedrock bass guitar. On the band's EP from last year, the lead track "Sirens" includes all these characteristics; it sounds like a mission statement. Phantom Limb is a duo that got started in a fairly inauspicious way. A couple of friends — Justin Kinkel-Schuster of St. Louis (also of buzzed-about act Theodore) and Andrew Bryant of Oxford, Miss. — got to playing songs and recording them and then before they knew what happened, they had an album. The group's self-titled debut (on Misra Records) filters Dinosaur Jr.-style guitar rock through The Band's country-boy soul and raggedy backwoods sensibility. Vocal harmonies recall those of the critically vaunted Fleet Foxes, so if you dig that sound, Phantom Limb is recommended.

[page]

FRIDAY 12/16

ASO: "HAPPY HOLIDAYS"

8 p.m. Robinson Center Music Hall. $20-$65.

For its annual holiday show, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra presents an evening of familiar favorites. Selections include "Let it Snow," "Sleigh Ride," "Ave Maria," selections from "The Nutcracker," the "Winter" concerto from Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons," Rimsky-Korsakov's "Snow Maiden Suite: Dance of the Clowns," and much more. Also just as a heads-up: Santa is rumored to be in attendance, so you'd better watch out, and all that. There will be another performance Saturday night at 8 p.m. and a matinee at 3 p.m. on Sunday.

FRIDAY 12/16

HUGE-ASS LOCAL SHOW

8:30 p.m. White Water Tavern.

If you ever wanted to gorge on a pre-holidays smorgasbord of Little Rock's leading rock practitioners, here you go: Brother Andy & His Big Damn Mouth, Stella Fancy, Jab Jab Sucker Punch (new band with personnel from Big Boss Line and The Moving Front), Adam Faucett, William Blackart, Iron Tongue, Jonathan Wilkins and Booyah! Dad. That's eight — count 'em eight — bands, with even more in the offing, going by the WWT's website. It's like a competitive eating contest but with bands instead of hotdogs or hot wings or whatever. Eating contests are ultra-gross, while this is certainly not, but still: Just how much music can you cram into your ears in a single night? Why not find out once and for all?

FRIDAY 12/16

TRAMPLED BY TURTLES.

10 p.m. Juanita's. $12

Bluegrass fans have always placed a premium on instrumental virtuosity. Whether they favor old-fangled traditionalists or newgrass hippies, playing at lightning speed has always seemed — to the outside observer, at least — to be one of the necessary components. By that standard, Minnesota quintet Trampled By Turtles more than measures up. "It's a War" from the band's 2010 disc "Palomino" blisters by and begs the question: Other than its instrumentation, what really differentiates this from a hardcore song? But it's not all warp-speed antics, and the band displays an understanding of nuance on other cuts. Trampled by Turtles (or TxT for short) is no stranger to mixing it up in terms of cover material. Right now there's a string-band version of the classic Pixies tune "Where is my Mind?" on the band's website. And in addition to the foundational bluegrass influences, the band name-checks acts such as The Band, Bill Callahan and Townes Van Zandt. (Aside: is there anyone making music right now who doesn't cite Van Zandt as an influence? Don't get me wrong, "Live at the Old Quarter" is a desert-island pick for sure, but dang it seems like everyone in the world got hip to ol' Townes in the last five years or so.) Anyways, if you dig prog 'grass-ive (sorry, couldn't help it) acts such as Yonder Mountain String Band, Old Crow Medicine Show and the like and you haven't already checked out TxT, don't pass up this show.

[page]

TUESDAY 12/20

THE SEE

10 p.m. White Water Tavern. $5.

Word comes along that the bearded warriors of The See have been hard at it finishing up their newest platter, "Pretending and Ending." I think one of the songs on it is called "Hey," a demo version of which is available on the band's MySpace page, and it's a good'n. It's got a tender touch. It's not as bruising as the band sounds live. Or once sounded live — it's been a while since I saw The See. Also, I hear tell that there might be a special treat for the first hunnert or so folks through the door. Wonder what that might be? Perhaps a recording of some of those new songs? I'm not one who's given over to idle speculation, but that'd be pretty sweet. Also performing: Coach, the promising local rock act.

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Goose hunt a man thing
12/14/2011

The Arkansas Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the 106 lucky people who won the lottery to be allowed to kill two geese in Burns Park Dec. 20-22 as part of a sanctioned hunt to reduce the population of Canada geese in the park.

No Christmas geese for them. Mayor Pat Hays postponed the hunt to consider alternatives for goose population reduction. But the list may be reactivated for a January hunt.

Meanwhile, we noted one thing interesting about the list. Of the 106 names, only one seemed an obvious woman's name, Crystal Brown. The rest of the would-be geese slayers all carried manly monikers.

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Liberals have a lobby
12/14/2011

It's the Arkansas Public Policy Panel. by Doug Smith

While native liberals are distraught over the conservatism of Arkansas politics, Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, says that politics in his home state of Oklahoma are even rougher and farther to the right than Arkansas's.

"Arkansas still elects moderates who can get things done," Kopsky said. "It's like Hutchinson running against Beebe. Hutchinson ran as a social conservative and Beebe beat him easily." (Former U.S. Rep. Hutchinson, a Republican, opposed Beebe, a Democrat, in the 2006 governor's race.) The panel and its affiliate, the Arkansas Citizens First Congress, can work with Governor Beebe, just as they could work with former Gov. Mike Huckabee, a mostly moderate Republican, Kopsky said.

But Arkansas politics are starting to look more like Oklahoma's. Kopsky said the legislative session earlier this year was the most polarized along party lines that he'd seen in his 15 years with the panel. For the first time, the Citizens First Congress couldn't find a single Republican legislator who'd sign on as a co-sponsor of its bills. And there were more Republicans than ever. The party is likely to gain a legislative majority in the near future.

More far-right Republicans in state government would make the Panel's work more difficult, presumably. But then the continued existence in Arkansas of a poor-man's support group like the Panel, lobbying against big, rich conservative interests like the Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau and the Poultry Federation, is somewhat surprising. At least until one learns that the Panel has more resources than one might have expected.

Operating from a house on Second Street, near the Capitol, the Panel is supported by grants from foundations that share its interest in education, the environment and other issues, and by individual donors. It has an annual budget of $950,000, a staff of 14, "hundreds and hundreds of volunteers," and a professional lobbyist.

But then the Panel has more to do now than in its early years. It was founded in 1963 as "The Panel of American Women," by Sara Murphy, a liberal activist, in the aftermath of the Central High School desegregation crisis. The Panel, all mothers of public school children, championed racial and religious diversity. Other prominent female progressives joined Murphy in the movement — Brownie Ledbetter, Jean Gordon et al. By the '70s, the group was dealing with issues other than school desegregation, and male liberals were signing up. The name was changed to Arkansas Public Policy Panel in 1972.

By 1992, grass-roots activists and people like J. Bill Becker, then president of the Arkansas State AFL-CIO, were talking up a grass-roots lobby group at the Capitol to tell the story that the corporate lobbyists didn't. The Citizens First Congress was formed in 1998. The Congress now has 49 member groups, some of them local grassroots groups that were organized by the Panel — the Gould Citizens Advisory Council, Parkdale Citizens in Action — some of them independent, long-standing groups that support the Panel's work (Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, the Sierra Club, etc.). The groups select the delegates to the Congress.

The Congress spends about $40,000 a legislative session — the $875 legislative lunch here, the $765 legislative breakfast there. It does little in the way of testifying at legislative committee meetings. The Congress's style is to inform its members about bills that would affect them, and let those members talk to their local legislators. "We bring a lot of grass-roots people into the process," Kopsky said. "They're very effective." Individual members of the Congress' 49 member groups total about 7,000, Kopsky said, and the Panel has 14,000 names in its data base.

A number of the Congress's bills died in this year's more conservative legislature — a "wage theft" bill to penalize employers who don't pay the wages they promised, a bill to protect water and land from pollution by natural-gas drilling, bills to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy. But the Congress says it helped pass legislation to lower taxes on low-income single parents with children, to eliminate red tape that was preventing some eligible children from being covered by the ARKids First health insurance plan, and to require school districts to "stop stockpiling and start spending money designated for helping low-income and minority children achieve more academically."

A team of interns, college students working with the Panel for one semester each, reads all the bills introduced and flags the ones that should interest the Congress. Most of the interns are social studies or political science majors. One or two that work the longest hours are paid "a pittance," Kopsky said. The other 5 to 7 are unpaid. Kopsky has been with the Panel since 1996, and executive director since 1999, when Ledbetter retired.

The legislature meets in regular session for only a few months every two years, but the Panel is engaged fulltime in organizing local groups of activists, especially in the predominantly black communities of southern and eastern Arkansas. Bernadette Devone of Pine Bluff is the organizing director.

The idea is to get people participating in the political process who haven't been doing so before, because "the process is controlled by the same people who've controlled it forever, the good old boys or whatever you call it," Kopsky said. Once the local groups are organized, they go to work building community centers, cleaning up election fraud, improving schools, Kopsky said. The new groups are often in conflict with other residents. In the predominantly black town of Gould, the City Council recently tried to ban a group organized by the Panel.

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South in a handbasket
12/14/2011

"Where did the expression 'going south' come from? There's a big debate here." by Doug Smith

Which way?

A devoted Times reader e-mails a question from Colombia:

"Where did the expression 'going south' come from? There's a big debate here." Yes, I can imagine that people in South America don't want to think "going south" has a negative connotation.

But, I've been under the impression that "going south" means roughly "going to hell," that is, "deteriorating, falling apart": Perry's presidential campaign is going south. We usually think of hell as being downward from here, and downward is south on a map.

The on-line Free Dictionary confirms that one meaning of "go south" is "to lose value or quality." In a similar vein, the expression sometimes means "to stop working," the dictionary says, as in "I need more time for this project. My computer has gone south."

FD says that go south can also mean "to make an escape; to disappear": Cheyne went south as soon as he was released from prison; "to fall, to go down": The market headed south today, and "to quit, to drop out": Fred got discouraged and went south.

So it seems the expression is mostly negative. Hellish, if you will, but the dictionary doesn't say for certain that hell is where it came from. Colombian debate will continue.

(For what it's worth, I remember Gene Autry singing "South of the border, down Mexico way ... " and that was pretty positive. Ay, ay, ay, ay.)

Dominate usage:

"It's a fun show. It educates people about a culture not dominate in Arkansas."

Dr. Douglas Young of Conway questions the use of dominate, and is correct in doing so. Dominate is a verb, as is predominate, which means about the same thing. The adjectives that mean "major, ruling" are dominant and predominant. Unfortunately, we often see the verbs where the adjectives should be, and sometimes where an adverb should be. It's a predominantly black college, not a predominately black college.

Peeking too soon:

Jimmy Jeffress saw the headline, "Fort Smith Tea Party Forum Offers Peak at 2012 election." It piques one's interest, though not in the way a headline should.

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Saved by the Court
12/14/2011

It was the one percent against the 99 percent when the legislature took up "tort reform" in 2003, and the one percent prevailed easily. Since then, the Arkansas Supreme Court has been knocking holes in this unjust and unwise statute. We see again that the separation of powers is a wonderful thing.

Corporations, the Medical Society, the Chamber of Commerce, the Poultry Federation — they were united in support of a bill making it more difficult, if not impossible, for the poor to win a sizeable legal judgment against the rich. Legislators were so intimidated by this fearsome coalition, they didn't even ask the proponents to make a case for the bill. At committee hearings, opponents presented strong witnesses and sound arguments against "tort reform." The other side didn't say much more than "call the roll." The proponents, for example, couldn't find a single insurance-company executive to testify that "tort reform" would bring down the cost of insurance, though that was supposed to be a principal reason for the bill. People in the insurance business knew better than to tell so flagrant a lie in so public a forum. They knew the real purpose of the bill was to shield wrongdoers from a jury's justice.

Legal experts said at the time that the legislation was unconstitutional and would eventually be found so by the Supreme Court. Two attorneys general had said the same thing about similar legislation, previously considered. But the legislators weren't interested, and they were shameless. The "tort reform" bill passed on a near-unanimous vote.

Various provisions of the "tort reform" law had been stricken by the Supreme Court before last week's decision, in which the Court threw out the law's million-dollar limit on punitive damages. Associate Justice Courtney Hudson Goodson wrote for the majority that the Arkansas Constitution allowed the legislature to limit the amount of recovery only in matters arising between employer and employee. The Court thus refused to overturn a $42 million award for punitive damages that was made in Lonoke Circuit Court to a group of farmers who sued a provider of contaminated rice. The trial judge in the case, Phillip Thomas Whiteaker, also had declared the million-dollar limit to be unconstitutional.

The president of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce has said, predictably, that the Supreme Court decision will discourage "job-creating entrepreneurs and business leaders." The supporters of "tort reform" are more law evaders than job creators. They tell the common man and woman "just give up your rights, and we might find low-paying work for you." It's not a good deal, and thanks to the Supreme Court, the people of Arkansas don't have to take it.

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Thanks, but no thanks
12/14/2011

Opponents to a land use plan for the Lake Maumelle watershed, scheduled for a Pulaski Quorum Court vote last week have grown frantic in opposition. The latest development is a "compromise" plan with some controls, but far less than the ordinance would provide.

The Arkansas Farm Bureau floated general elements of the compromise in advance of committee meetings Tuesday on the ordinances. They would list prohibited uses in the watershed; set aside 25 percent of the land as open space and put buffer zones along creeks. Period. The Farm Bureau has also joined with Republican official opposition in starting a new talking point – that unpaved roads are the real source of potential pollution in the watershed and perhaps a taxpayer-financed plan could be developed to pave them all. That wouldn't hurt majority landowner Deltic Timber, the Chenal Valley developer, one bit.

There was also this: In building opposition, the Farm Bureau said it was joined by the League of Women Voters and Citizens Protecting Maumelle watershed in opposition. Wrong and/or misleading. The League wants more than currently proposed, but president Nell Matthews said it supported the proposed plans and will work to improve them after adoption. A member of the Citizens Protecting group said the Farm Bureau was wrong "on many levels."

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Christmas changes
12/14/2011

Santa Claus has turned Republican, I understand, and plans to make some big changes in the Christmas ritual. by Bob Lancaster

Santa Claus has turned Republican, I understand, and plans to make some big changes in the Christmas ritual.

Foremost among them: people had come to regard Christmas gifts as an entitlement, and Republicans have given us to know what horrible things entitlements are, so Santa Claus wants to phase out the Christmas gift-giving tradition altogether.

Instead of presents under the tree for the little ones, S.C. wants the little ones to get jobs. Newt Gingrich was saying just last week that it would be a great benefit — a great character builder — if we'd put the little scudders to work as young as four or five, and Mr. Claus concurs, I gather reluctantly.

Apprentice them out to a no-nonsense sweatshop run by a stern taskmaster — the coffin maker in Oliver Twist comes to mind — and it wouldn't be long before they learned the value of a dollar, and the pride of earning the wherewithal to buy their own crust of bread or bowl of weevilly gruel when malnutrition threatened their on-the-job efficiency or proficiency.

Or just furnish them a daily can or two of Red Bull, the cost deducted from their wages, of course, if they have enough wages to cover a can or two of Red Bull, and they could probably get their work quota just from jitters resulting from that. And what's left over after the Red Bull and the flat tax withholding, sure, by all means splurge on a peppermint cane to hang on the tree and have the family take turns jumping up and licking it two or three times a day during the 12 Days of Christmas.

Such extravagant living as that is morally contraindicated, understand, but it's your dime — literally, it's your dime; as a dime a day sounds about right as a wage in an economy fueled in large measure by pre-pubescent sweat and pre-pubescent tears.

This no work/no-holiday-candy-to-lick-on ethic is as American as beating child-labor slackers with fireplace pokers, going back 400 years to John Smith at Jamestown. It received Biblical sanction from St. Paul in II Thessalonians — and there's no reason why American children should be excluded from it. Literary bleeding-hearts got them excused in the first place, and we're a tougher-minded lot today. We know they're just spoiled brats mostly, who could use a little shaping up.

And not since the 19th century has an American political candidate or party had the tough-love discipline to hold urchins' little feet to the fire, to oblige them to pull their own weight, to pull up by their own bootstraps if indeed the developing Republican scheme admits of their going to work shod. It might very well not.

Oh, but working full time they wouldn't be able to go to school, the spoilers say. Sure they would, say N.G. and S.C. in reply. It'd be the School of Hard Knocks primarily, yes, but eventually the other kind, too. The other kind that banned God and made slouching apes out of Adam and Eve and won't let you beat up homos or pack. It might test their stamina a little to go to hard knocks school every day and no-pack ape school nights and weekends and holidays, but little kids have pep to burn so why not put it to good use?

The bleeding hearts say well, their hands are too small and tender, they don't have the strength to turn a lug wrench or load 16 tons of No. 9 coal or rassle professionally on the WWF circuit. You got the same razzmatazz once about women in the work force, but Rosie got a foot in the door and women proved they could do the job and for only a small fraction of what it costs to get a man to do it.

With just a teensy bit more of timely government deregulation, you could get a child under 10 to do the job for even less than you have to pay a woman, and with the anticipated Republican-agenda legislation enacted and in effect if the child grumbled or sulked about it, or started talking union or threatening to call OSHA, you could tase the little troublemaker or waterboard him or whatever the situation required. Bruise him to death sort of accidentally, as one of the Artful Dodger's workhouse overseers claimed was his specialty.

Garnish whatever coppers were left in his, ahem, paycheck and pass them along to the Koch boys who have to have money from somewhere — or lots of somewheres — to keep their humongo hog act going.

Not that this mess of trash that's bantering toddler workfare really cares about the issue. Their ultimate aim is to revoke all government regulation, so they can get free and unlimited permanent access to the trough, and they figure if they can scrap the child-labor regs then the rest shouldn't be too much of a problem.

The most troubling question for me in all this is how they lured Santa Claus — Santa Claus! — into their shameful kuplotting against the urchinry. I've got some theories on that — from the disillusioning predictability of his Christmas night routine to the physical threat to Toyland from man-caused climate change — and I might get around to expounding on them later.

Meantime, bear this in mind, that Santa is an anagram for Satan. Might be a clue in that.

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Businessman new head of U. of Missouri 12/15/2011

Fla. cancels contract with French railroad 12/15/2011

Ex-priest charged with 38 sex offenses 12/15/2011

Orval gets polled 12/14/2011

White Wives to Downtown Music 12/14/2011

Nichols talks 'Mud,' more 12/14/2011

Good week for the Burns Park geese 12/14/2011

Big money for lawyers 12/14/2011

'The Sitter': one crazy night done mostly right 12/14/2011

The 13th hole 12/14/2011

Tell the bees 12/14/2011

A Christmas Carol 12/14/2011

Fun facts about Newt Gingrich 12/14/2011

As the coaching carousel turns in Fayetteville 12/14/2011

Curry in a Hurry shows promise 12/14/2011

An open letter to Mark Martin 12/14/2011

Tropical Smoothie headed to old YMCA Building 12/14/2011

New fraud: Regulation is bad 12/14/2011

Brave Combo to Stickyz 12/14/2011

Goose hunt a man thing 12/14/2011

Liberals have a lobby 12/14/2011

South in a handbasket 12/14/2011

Saved by the Court 12/14/2011

Thanks, but no thanks 12/14/2011

Christmas changes 12/14/2011

20 Interesting Facts

Businessman new head of U. of Missouri
12/15/2011

Fla. cancels contract with French railroad
12/15/2011

Ex-priest charged with 38 sex offenses
12/15/2011

Orval gets polled
12/14/2011

White Wives to Downtown Music
12/14/2011

Nichols talks 'Mud,' more
12/14/2011

Good week for the Burns Park geese
12/14/2011

Big money for lawyers
12/14/2011

'The Sitter': one crazy night done mostly right
12/14/2011

The 13th hole
12/14/2011

Tell the bees
12/14/2011

A Christmas Carol
12/14/2011

Fun facts about Newt Gingrich
12/14/2011

As the coaching carousel turns in Fayetteville
12/14/2011

Curry in a Hurry shows promise
12/14/2011

An open letter to Mark Martin
12/14/2011

Tropical Smoothie headed to old YMCA Building
12/14/2011

New fraud: Regulation is bad
12/14/2011

Brave Combo to Stickyz
12/14/2011

Goose hunt a man thing
12/14/2011

Liberals have a lobby
12/14/2011

South in a handbasket
12/14/2011

Saved by the Court
12/14/2011

Thanks, but no thanks
12/14/2011

Christmas changes
12/14/2011