Cheer Cheers to Butler-born rocker Brett Michaels.Thousands of fans flocked to the Big Butler Fair on Wednesday night to hear Michaels perform for the second straight year.Before the show, Michaels presented a check for $10,000 to the Butler County Tourism and Convention Bureau. The cash gift from his Bret Michaels Life Rocks Foundation will be used to help restore and reopen the Kaufman House in Zelienople.The Kaufman House, a historic restaurant, has been closed since 2011 after it was damaged in a fire. With help from the tourism bureau and state grant money, it will eventually open under new ownership and will also be used by culinary arts students at Butler County Community College.Michaels told the crowd that his donation to the Kaufman House project would create jobs for the community.“It’s an honor to be back in my very hometown, being born right here in Lyndora in Butler, Pennsylvania, and I’ve got my family here,” he told the crowd shortly after taking the stage.On behalf of Butler County, allow us to say the honor was all ours.

Jeer We’re the targets of a SLAPP suit, say the opponents of Marcellus gas wells on the Geyer property in Middlesex Township. They went to Butler County Court to challenge township zoning regulations allowing the gas wells.Proponents of drilling — a developer and leaseholders who own a collective 443 acres leased to gas drilling companies — also filed suit, claiming they are being deprived of the financial gain they would have realized had the zoning ordinance not been challenged and operations at the Bob and Kim Geyer well on Denny Road been allowed to proceed.On July 1, Judge Michael Yeager issued a stay on work at the Geyer well pad, which is about .6 miles away from Mars School District property.The judge also imposed a $250,000 bond to be paid by the opponents — Delaware Riverkeeper Network and the Clean Air Council plus four Middlesex residents. They have until July 26 to pay the bond, which is to guard against any financial damages that the driller, Rex Energy, would incur as a result of the work stoppage.The opponents call it a SLAPP — an acronym for strategic lawsuit against public participation. They say it’s meant to intimidate those who speak out against a government entity or its actions in accordance with their rights under the First Amendment.The opponents haven’t responded yet to the bond order. However, they have slapped back with a gambit of their own. They have successfully recruited the American Civil Liberties Union to join their side in the looming court battle.The ACLU is demanding that the developer and gas lease holders drop their lawsuit.That’s not likely to happen. To the contrary, ACLU’s entrance into the fray appears to confirm the obvious — that the opponents don’t have $250,000 to satisfy the judge’s bond order, and they’re attempting some intimidation of their own instead.Apparently those to dare to earn money for a living have no civil liberties.This isn’t a SLAPP. It’s NIMBY-pamby.

Cheer Cheers and happy birthday to Butler Elks Lodge 170, whose members celebrated their lodge’s 125th anniversary on Friday.The local BPOE charter was granted July 10, 1890.Jon Campbell, a 50-year-member and former exalted leader, says the Butler lodge has nearly 700 members, but at one time membership numbered nearly 1,600 when the lodge building was at North Main and Pearl streets.That building was opened in 1951 and contained a lounge, a dining room and what was called the men’s grill. It was the site of a long-running bingo game and a popular social hub.Today the property is a parking lot for Westminster Presbyterian Church. A new, smaller lodge was built in 2000 at 80 Kaufman Drive.The lodge — and, members say, the camaraderie of its members — lives on.“What you put in you get much more back out of it,” says Campbell.