Recall Too - Part 5, Harassment

After a large front-page article yesterday in the Denver Pest, the Hudak Brownshirts are out practicing Alinkayite intimidation techniques including having one of their number prance about with a long lens camera taking everyones pictures and calling the police and everyone they can think of to make complaints. The fellow with the camera looked fairly lively. The rest of his crew looked like they had been recruited from the Jerry Garcia Memorial Nursing Home.

Our location is on a grass strip between the public sidewalk and the parking lot of a corner property. The grass strip is public property, but the City of Arvada has notified us several times in one day that all our signs must be 12 ft from the curb. This after we moved the signs. The repeat visits were just time wasters.

The Brownshirts have evidently called the property manager and complained about us as now they don't want us to park our cars on their asphalt. The police were summoned to enforce this edict and we had to move our cars across the street. This is inconvenient as the laptops we use need power and we had been getting it by using an inverter in one of our vehicles and running an extension cord about 10 feet down to the table. We now have to bring our own car batteries with us to keep the computers running. The police were reminded that the edict about parking was non-specific and included the Brownshirts, all of whose vehicles we helpfully identified. Everyone on our team was spry enough to park across the street and walk back. The Brownies, not so much and the pogrom reduced their numbers from six to two.

We use the laptops to confirm that everyone signing our recall petitions is in fact who they say they are, and is a registered voter in the district. This inconveniences the Brownshirts when they send their friends over to add known invalid signatures to the petitions.

Shortly after I got there a fellow approached me and told me that his grounds maintenance company wanted to blow out the sprinklers in the area we were using. We asked for 5 minutes to clear out the line at the table and that he start at the far end of the grass strip, which he agreed to. As the farthest sprinkler heads began to spray air and water, we picked up out table and moved it to the asphalt to wait out the storm. When the sections near us began to erupt, the Brownies found themselves dampened a bit. When the blowout process ended we moved everything back to the grass just in time for the police to arrive. Yep, they had been called about us being on the asphalt. We explained about the sprinkler blowout and all was well. The head Brownie then came rushing up and accused us of conspiring with the landscape company to deliberately soak them. Officer Friendly rather brusquely informed him that she didn't want to hear any more from him, having heard too much B.S. from him already. Come to think of it, a false report ticket is issued at the policeman's option isn't it?

The fancy lead-acid battery packs that we came up with, with a 400W inverter included and a claimed 12-hour run time alas only ran two laptops for about 30 minutes. Might be insufficient initial charge. We'll find out more tomorrow.

Also having 3 or 4 extras on the sidewalk even with opposing signs actually helped our efforts. Pity they left early.