Andanh.com

Also at the Little Rock City Board tonight:

The revised plans for Strode Development's Park Avenue shopping/office/residential project on the site of the old University Mall was approved and praised by groups that had opposed the original site plan.

(Some had been critical a few weeks ago when neighborhood opposition and representatives of the Midtown Redevelopment Committee had thrown up objections to the first development plan and slowed the project. To some, whatever developers want they should get.)

The improved plan is a "triple crown winner" said Craig Berry, a former Planning Commissioner who heads the Midtown District. There's less parking, more of a town center feel, new office elements, better residential uses, more open green space. Too bad they couldn't talk Target into a two-story store. But Target is coming.

Jim Bell, head of the neighboring Briarwood neighborhood group, reminded the board that it wasn't long ago that the decaying University Mall was standing and rotting and the city board was considering putting an all-night nightclub in the mall. That club energized the neighborhood. The rest is history - redevelopment of blight is underway with a plan that just about everybody involves think will be a credit to the center of the city.

The Little Rock City Board, lacking full membership (and perhaps needed votes), voted to delay consideration of the reappointment of Central Arkansas Water Commissioner Jane Dickey for a week.

Strong opposition to the lawyer's reappointment, after 11 years on the commission, has arisen from activists working to protect the Lake Mamelle watershed. They object to her role in the water utility's failure to buy land that Jay DeHaven now hopes to flip back to the utility; on her approval of a settlement for development of Waterview Estates, a lakeview subdivision, and for her close ties through her law firm to various corporate interests. Her firm, in which she is a partner, once represented Deltic Timber, the largest landowner in the watershed.

Objections to a weakened watershed ordinance being considered by Pulaski County are being raised in public comments.

A powerful statement was offered by former Water Commissioner Craig Wood against Dickey's reppointment. He said it would serve as a statement of dissatisfaction with the current commission's "failure" in recent actions to protect the watershed for 400,000 customers.

One final wrinkle: Director Gene Fortson asked for an opinion on what legal changes would be required for the cities of Little Rock and North Little Rock to to choose water commissioners from applicants rather than only being in a role to accept or reject nominations from the commission itself.

Well and good, but just window dressing. The city board HAS the power now to reject a nomination and thus force the Water Commission into a meaningful application process, which it did not hold in Dickey's case.

Since folks have been anxious to throw in comments about the Bush visit in other threads, here's a line on that topic. (Above is a pool photograph, supplied by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, from his visit to the Family Service Agency in North Little Rock. The White House staged an I-care session for Bush there on the financially embattled, probably as a means to get a public offset to the cost of his flying down for a fund-raiser later at the home of beer distributor George O'Connor on Palisades.)

Other sightings? Comments? Photos? (Send them to max@arktimes.com).

If the motorcade to Palisades exceeds 25 mph, I expect the Cammack cops to hop to.

David Sanders, we await your inside-the-fund-raiser report.

MOTORIST UPDATE: Road rage rules. More than an hour before Bush was to leave, major arteries were blocked or severely limited (i.e. LaHarpe), to preserve a smooth flow for the Bush motorcade back to the airport. Worst was Interstate 30, its three southbound lanes blocked at the Broadway exit in North Little Rock. The traffic backup was huge and steaming, our trappee reports. I was flipped the bird by a woman who thought blocking Second Street at Chester would somehow make the stopped traffic in front of her on Chester move so that she could proceed. I had given her a horn salute for blocking the intersection.

The group that wants to make adoption and foster parenting in Arkansas more difficult (and punish gay people in the process) has announced that it has enough signatures to qualify for an extension in signature gathering for its proposed initiated act.

This is to say that, with almost 62,000 signatures needed, the group has obtained that many, but knows that many will be disallowed, either as improperly gathered or not those of registered voters. Every signature must be individually witnessed. A petition can't be left in a church vestibule for unmonitored signatures, for example.

Petitioners were out in force in churches Sunday. Some pastors, such as at Little Rock's predominantly black and powerful St. Mark's Baptist, urged people in the audience to sign up.

I anticipate a vigorous review of the signatures.

Release on the jump.

Even Mike Huckabee fans have been put off by his PAC's decision to support Alaska Rep. Don Young, suspected crook and known champion pork barreler, in his re-election campaign. The Huckster has caught so much heat, that he's responded to some comments on his website, as summarized here. Simply put, Young supported him, so ....

UPDATE: The Club for Growth, the anti-tax outfit that fought Huckabee's presidential candidacy on account of his apostasy on  fiscal issues, is crowing about Huck's endorsement of boodler Young.

Over the past year, the Club for Growth has been criticized by Huckabee and some conservatives for painting the Arkansas Governor as a fiscal liberal. If ever there was proof that that the Club was right from the start, it is this outrageous endorsement of Rep. Young who embodies the worst of the Republican Party's wasteful habits.

The Iconoclast gives a valedictory to John White, outgoing chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

John White is done. The University of Arkansas Press survived; the University of Arkansas Museum did not. The College of Business became a training school for Wal-Mart, and the College of Education became an enabler for the Waltons' right-wing political assault on public education.

The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences has more students and fewer faculty than when White came. The College of Engineering, to which he has retired at full salary, has lots of well-paid endowed professorships and more students leaving the state and nation for employment than any other college. He borrowed record amounts of money to build more buildings than needed, and he made an offer to buy Fayetteville High School. He gave Houston Nutt millions for abusing his UA cell phone and running off franchise players. Lots of money was raised, not without strings, and he got a $10,000 desk and a $3 million mansion.

Most of us who love and value the University as an essential part of our community are glad to be shed of him. We all look forward to better days ahead under the leadership of Chancellor David Gearhart, a Fayetteville native with a good heart and more than a lick of sense.

The Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly, has done a 50-state ranking of the best bands and solo performers.

Arkansas's best band: Black Oak Arkansas. Go, Jim Dandy.

Best solo performer: Johnny Cash.

Best new band: Gossip.

If Skynyrd wore spandex, played their instruments in barrels of sludgy motor oil, and were led by a choogly, boogie-woogie bonehead straight outta Spinal Tap, they’d have been Black Oak Arkansas, named for frontman “Big Jim Dandy” Mangrum’s hometown. | Man in Black Johnny Cash’s balls were steelier than the jailhouse doors at San Quentin and Folsom prisons. The original gangsta rapper boasted in song about shooting a dude just to watch him die, years before Suge Knight hung people out of hotel windows. | Lesbian punk-bluestress Beth Ditto of Gossip (featured in the video below) could swallow six Gwen Stefanis and spit four of them out for breakfast. (She’d save the other two for sustenance through a long winter, where they’d play cards inside her with a couple of Janis Joplins.)

The link on best band will take you to a page with video, MP3s, etc.

The feature is a setup to get people to vote by phone in some "people's choice" awards -- Bob Dylvan v. Prince for best solo performer from Minnesota; the Four Seasons v. the Misfits for best New Jersey band, etc.

Rumors are flying about sale of a major Little Rock construction company, or at least a portion of it, and a possible pullback from Northwest Arkansas, which is in the midst of a real estate shakeout, by another LR firm. We checked. The reports so far:

A spokesman in the CDI Contractors office said today that a sale is in process. No other information was immediately available, though rumors say an out-of-state company has made a successful bid. Dillard Department Stores announced in April it was seeking a buyer for its 50 percent stake in the national company based in Little Rock. The future of CDI’s corporate structure has been the subject of news stories since the death of its founder and CEO Bill Clark last year. In January, its CFO, John Glasgow, disappeared.

Also: Despite rumors to the contrary, May Construction Co.’s office in Bentonville is “absolutely, positively not closed,” Northwest Arkansas director Bill Gandy said Tuesday, though he is now working in Little Rock for the time being.

The latest Obama outreach to the right is to endorse and promise to expand the Bush practice of funneling federal money to churches. Even the leftie blogs are getting a little nervous.

Has it occurred to the very smart people who engineered the successful Obama primary campaign that, the more you triangulate (FISA, Fair Trade, campaign finance, guns, faith-based initiatives, whatever) the easier it is to develop a simple and devastating story line on a candidate who broke from the pack by promising to change the way Washington does business? At best: He's just another politician. At worst: You can't believe anything he says.

UPDATE: kos, one of Obama's loudest supporters, has been perturbed enough by recent developments to withhold a contribution to Obama.

Not that I ever bought it, but Obama is now clearly not looking much different than every other Democratic politician who has ever turned his or her back on the base in order to prove centrist bona fides. That's not an indictment, just an observation.

Now I know there's a contingent around here that thinks Obama can do no wrong, and he must never be criticized, and if you do, well fuck you!

The Little Rock Zoo is touting its newish and newly named reticulated python (Cammie) in a YouTube video.

WARNING: This isn't for the squeamish. The animal kingdom is a dog-eat-dog world -- make that giant-snake-eat-bunny-rabbit world. UPDATE: I'm not surprised there's already been some fallout. I expect more.

You can see in this one reason why the polluters of Arkansas -- and their colleagues and toadies on the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, such as  commissioner and steelmaker Thomas Schueck -- refuse to acknowledge that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is, well, a greenhouse gas. Defining it as a contaminant could lead to restrictions on poison-spewing coal-fired generating plants, such as the one proposed by one of the state's significant natural areas in Hempstead County.

A judge in Georgia has halted construction of a coal-fired plant in that state -- the first in Georgia in 20 years -- because a permit from that state's environmental protection agency put no limit on carbon dioxide emissions and other dangerous chemicals. The decision will be appealed. But the whole country is watching.

Don't know about you, but I'm getting far too many neighborhood group e-mails about smash-and-dash burglaries (even in homes with security systems) and worse.

This morning, for example, I got a note about a recent break-in in Briarwood in which a burglar nearly clubbed a dog to death with a shovel. And then I got an LRPD report of a home intrusion in the 5800 block of Lee about 2 a.m. today. The occupant awoke to find a man standing by his bed with a semi-automatic handgun. He wanted money. Told there was none, he searched the house fruitlessly then left, but not before pulling out a window unit air conditioner.

UPDATE: On the Briarwood burglary. It was at the home of Graham Rich, relatively new CEO of Central Arkansas Water, and occurred while he and his wife were away last Monday night. He says that the injury report on his 14-year-old rescue dog, Jessie, was exaggerated. He believes she was clubbed with a shovel found in the yard because she emerged limping from beneath a storage shed, a place she normally never goes, when the Riches returned home. "She's going to be OK," Rich said of the chow mix, which will bark at unfamiliar arrivals, but doesn't bite. The burglar smashed the front door and stole a laptop, but otherwise left the house undisturbed.

Rich said he'd become too complacent about his good neighborhood, where neighbors tend to look out for each other and life has been peaceful since he arrived. He'd left the front storm door unlocked and left no lights on when he left. "People just need to be a little smarter than what we were," he said. He's buying a timer to turn lights on and off and will be securing locks in the future.