Denver was the first to fall. Then Chicago. And this December, Kailua, Hawaii, will become the third city to be taken over by communists bent on world domination. That's when B-cycle — the bike-sharing program that Colorado goober-natorial candidate Dan Maes believes is a front for an unconstitutional effort to tie American cities into an over-arching United Nations plot — will get in gear there.
B-cycle (the bikes are RED, as if you hadn't noticed) has predictably denied the communist ties, but Alchemist Threadworks, a small clothing company in the People's Republic of Boulder, has made the connection clear by marketing a cycling shirt with the following message: "Bike Share is the Gateway to Sinister World Domination. 'This is bigger than it looks on the surface.' — Dan 'McCarthy' Maes." And on the back is this: "Count me in!"
In early August, Maes told the Denver Post that concepts like bike-sharing, which has been flamboyantly promoted by his opponent John Hickenlooper, "aren't just warm, fuzzy ideas from the mayor. These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by this United Nations program that mayors have signed on to." They may eventually threaten our personal freedoms, he added. And maybe make us grow hair on our palms.
Maes likely has a friend in Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, who was way ahead of his time in December 2008 when he slammed the Fort Collins Bike Library — which lends out bicycles free to anyone with an ID — as among the nation's most wasteful projects. The bike library was created earlier that year with a $132,000 federal clean-air grant. It now has 200 bikes and 5,000 members.
Make that 5,000 card-carrying, pedal-pushing commie members.
And why does Coburn hate Fort Collins so much, anyway? On this year's list — released just this month — of what he considers to be wasteful federal spending, Coburn blasts a $1.4 million stimulus loan that the Fort Collins Brewery got from the Small Business Administration, as well as a loan to the makers of Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey.
Water rights: Westword MasterMind and ArgusFest founder Jason Bosch — who appeared in Off Limits last week after returning to Denver from three months on the March to Fulfill the Dream with the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign — is back in the paper this week, but for a different reason. He spent most of the weekend in jail after being arrested with his friend, Sarah, and charged with misdemeanor assault.
The details of the crime? Apparently, Bosch and Sarah were tooling around in Sarah's '91 Nissan Sentra on Saturday night when she decided to shoot some friends who were standing outside Beauty Bar on 13th Avenue — with a Super Soaker squirt gun. Unfortunately, some of the collateral damage may have included an off-duty police officer, who called for backup. Sarah was pulled over a few minutes later on Broadway.
"She confessed right away," says Bosch, who wasn't able to post bail until Sunday evening. "The whole thing is completely preposterous."
Sarah, who asked that her full name not be used, says that Bosch didn't do anything but was arrested anyway. "I knew I was hitting people I didn't know, but still, it was just water," she points out. "I can see why it can be threatening and a scary thing, but it wasn't. It was just a stupid prank."
Both Bosch and Sarah face hearings on their cases in mid-September.
