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Bikes Against Bush Whacked
By
Jacob Dobkin
Published Aug 29, 2004
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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By
Jacob Dobkin
Published Aug 29, 2004
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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More troubling bike-related news from the RNC: Bikes-Against-Bush creator Josh Kinberg got arrested yesterday afternoon while demonstrating his invention during an interview with Ron Reagan at MSNBC. As we have previously reported, Kinberg's bike is set up to spray chalk protest messages on the sidewalk- the plan was for people to submit the messages via the Bikes-Against-Bush website. During the arrest, Kinberg very politely demonstrated that the chalk messages could be washed off with water. While the first officer on the scene appeared to agree that wash-off graffiti did not constitute vandalism, a supervising officer did not, and Kinberg and his bike got thrown into a police van and spirited off to jail. Gothamist is fairly appalled at this turn of events: chalk based graffiti has been tolerated for many years in New York, as generations of school children can attest. Kinberg appears to have gone out of his way to avoid breaking the law, and despite the protests of the journalists and protestors, no explanation for the arrest was given by officers on the scene.
Thanks to Jason Kottke for spotting the story on NYC IndyMedia and for mounting the video of Josh's arrest on the Kottke.org server (use this Torrent file to avoid crashing Jason's server). Braintag reports that Josh got released this morning, but that his bike is out-of-commission until at least September 3rd, which means the Bikes-Against-Bush project has been ruined, at least during the convention. And it looks like the national media has taken notice: Josh is slated to be on Hardball tonight at 7pm- Gothamist will definitely be watching! [Related: a good wireless.WIN interview with Josh from May]
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Jacob Dobkin
Jake Dobkin co-founded Gothamist with Jen Chung. In 2019, Jake released Ask a Native New Yorker, a book based on his Gothamist advice column.
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