It’s all over but some of the voting. Post your thoughts here. My final words today:
* POPUP MAIN STREET: I mentioned a few days ago the Popup Main Street movement, which is aimed at using intelligent design to continue the redevelopment of South Main as a people-friendly old-fashioned neighborhood. Another step came today with the hay bales pictured above near Main and Daisy Bates, soon to be replaced with trees. Instead of a four-lane street here, it’s two lanes for cars, with a bike lane. The median work will “calm” traffic significantly, making street crossing by pedestrians a safer venture. For what it’s worth, Boulevard Bakery was swarmed with people at lunch today. Feels good down there. Home-made ice cream from an old-fashioned soda fountain counter two doors away.
* MATT JONES TO HAVE SHOW ON THE BUZZ: Sports talker Bo Mattingly has left The Buzz and, beginning Monday, former Razorback quarterback Matt Jones and Trey Schaap will take over the 1-4 p.m. time slot as “Overtime,” on Radio 103.7. Jones has been appearing from time to time on the station and has an easy radio style. Mattingly is moving his show in the Little Rock market to Fresh Talk 93.3 KKSP-FM. It will air from 2 to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday, beginning Dec. 10.
* $1.2 MILLION WINNER: I mentioned over the weekend that Mike Townsend, a former Bayer pharmaceuticals rep, had won a million-dollar verdict from a federal court jury in Pine Bluff over his firing by Bayer for blowing the whistle on a Pine Bluff doctor who was buying a Bayer-made IUD from Canada and charging Medicaid for the higher-priced FDA-approved U.S. version of the same drug. The doctor was convicted in the case. Bayer came up with a pretext for firing Townsend 11 months after it was revealed he’d told authorities about the scheme, but the jury didn’t buy it. Brian Reddick, co-counsel on the case with Chuck Banks, said the jury awarded about $320,000 in lost wages and benefits since the firing, doubled by the statute, plus $568,000 for Townsend’s emotional distress, for a total of $1.21 million. The judge took under advisement a claim for $850,000 in “front pay,” or future wages lost on a job paying about $130,000 a year to a man with another 10 years of work life expectancy. The judge also will determine attorney fees and costs that are allowed under the whistle blower statute. It’s unknown if Bayer will appeal.
* MILLION DOLLAR WINNER: The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery says Tat Sing Wong of Marion won $1 million with a $20 “Lucky Lottery Ticket” purchase at the E-Z Way Food Market, in West Memphis. Taxes will take a third of it or so.
* PANTS ON FIRE: A friend reports getting a mailer from Republican Sen. Missy Irvin that says she’s working to strengthen Medicare for all Arkansans. Did you know the Arkansas Senate governs Medicare? Me neither. Because it doesn’t.
* PAUL RYAN GOES HUCKABEE ONE BETTER: Paul “Marathon Man” Ryan has topped Mike Huckabee’s suggestion that people who vote Democratic are headed straight to hell. A second term for Obama will imperil the whole dang country’s Judeo-Christian tradition, Ryan says.
* GIVE PEACE A CHANCE: In this contentious season comes a UALR lecture of a different sort. Dr. George A. Lopez, chair of Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, will speak on “Can We Achieve Peace in the War on Terror?” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8, in the Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall in UALR’s Fine Arts Building. There’s an informal reception at 6 in the Fine Arts Gallery. It’s all free and open to the public. Working with David Cortright since 1992, Lopez’s work includes “The Sanctions Decade: Assessing U.N. Strategies in the 1990s.” Lopez and Cortright’s research detailing the unlikely presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq appeared before the war in “Disarming Iraq” in the September 2002 issue of Arms Control Today and then later after the war in “Containing Iraq: the Sanctions Worked” in Foreign Affairs (July/August, 2004).
* IF YOU CAN’T LAUGH YOU MIGHT CRY: The following e-mail is going around liberal circles. Perhaps you’ve seen it. It hints at an expectation of Armageddon tomorrow. I still thought it was funny, even if it was addressed in our direction from The Enlightened States of America (and I’m not saying you should take the statistics as scientific certainty):