It’s a nightmare vision for most right-wingers, straight out of the Shangri-La they sneeringly refer to as the “People’s Republic of Boulder,” but it’s a little closer to reality today after Governor Renewable signed House Bill 1331, which provides state tax incentives for high-tech, fuel-efficient vehicles.

Wednesday, Ritter was at Arapahoe Basin ski area in Summit County (still open for skiing – and snowboarding — until Sunday), where he signed House Bill 1199, which makes about $3 million available to communities threatened by wildfire as a result of the massive mountain pine bark beetle epidemic (arguably exacerbated by global warming).

Ritter also signed a bill authorizing a new ski-themed license plate for the state, markedly different from other skiing state plates because ours includes a skier and a snowboarder (despite occasional slope rage involving the two forms of snow riding). State Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, one of the bug bill sponsors, said he’d prefer a telemark skier.

Gibbs and state Rep. Christine Scanlan, D-Dillon, House sponsor of the beetle bill, also announced at A-Basin that they’ve finally picked up some national buzz on the bug front, with two U.S. House subcommittees set to hold hearings on the voracious, rice-sized insects on Capitol Hill June 16.

Tough financial times and all, that may result in some more desperately needed federal funds to thin forests and create incentives for businesses to deal with more than 2 million acres of dead trees – perhaps even use them for biomass energy.

Gibbs and Scanlan were two of only three Western Slope lawmakers to get perfect “100” scores in the “Conservation Scorecard 2009,” released today by Colorado Conservation Voters. The other was Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village.

The lowest Western Slope score for her voting record on environmental legislation? Laura Bradford, R-Colbran, who took down popular Democrat Bernie Buescher in bright-red Grand Junction last November.

If Ritter gets the same kind of reception he got Tuesday during a bill-signing ceremony at the Capitol, he’ll likely get a snowball in his ear at A-Basin, which closes for the season Sunday.

Grocery workers angered by Ritter’s veto of House Bill 1170, which would have provided unemployment benefits in the event of a management lockout, heckled Ritter during the signing ceremony for several economic-hardship bills on Tuesday.

Chances are he’ll get a much friendlier reception in the high country, though, where he’ll sign Senate Bill 161 to create a new Colorado ski-themed license plate to rival neighboring Utah’s and HB 1199 focusing on forest health in the wake of the mountain pine bark beetle threatening ski areas around the state.

HB 1199, championed by state Rep. Christine Scanlan, D-Dillon, provides economic incentives for companies dealing with the epidemic, funds for mitigating wildfire danger and planning resources for local emergency responders.

Last month he thought it was high humor that the ACLU offered to defend the right of a Colorado driver to on her license plate proclaim her love for tofu (“instead of real food” says Brophy). As we reported, the the woman’s proposed plate, ILVTOFU, was rejected the Department of Revenue as potentially obscene. In the age of texting, the DOR has decided the letters F and U can not appear together in that order.

The ACLU suggested the government DOR rethink its FU rules so as not to needlessly infringe on citizen expression.

Brophy mocked the ACLU for this at his blog and revealing a muddle-headedness on his grasp of the law.

Yes, the same ACLU that goes all over the country trying to find the Ten Commandments in a public place so they can insist that the Ten Commandments be taken down are about to argue that FU should be allowed on license plates in Colorado.

How about this plate: ACLUSUX, or maybe one that puts the new letters [new letters?] F and U on a plate with ACLU?

ACLU spokeswoman Cathryn L. Hazouri contacted the senator in response to say the organization would defend his right to express those thoughts on a license plate should he so desire.

Huh? This confused Brophy, spurring him into Carrie Bradshaw-style reverie.

I just have to wonder though, if I could fit the 10 Commandments onto a license plate, would the ACLU defend my right to park my car at the state capitol with that plate on it? I suspect the answer is no, as they seem mostly to be interested in defending politically correct or obscene “speech”.

They really should rename themselves the PCACLU.

Wrong again. Of course the ACLU would defend Brophy’s right to decorate his car any way he liked — with the Ten Commandments or with passages from Revelations or with excerpts from his blog or god help us with his tweets!

The ACLU regularly argues for the right to display the Ten Commandments in public. It only argues against their display in government spaces where the display may intimidate and so crimp the expression of Americans doing their government business. It’s the difference between public expression, which the ACLU guards, and government expression, which the ACLU monitors. That’s what the ACLU explains all over the web and in court filings, anyway, for anyone interested to look.

Will an aide please explain to Brophy that the ACLU defends Christian expression all the time. Explain too that it wasn’t elected officials or journalists but the ACLU that pried the lid off of the Bush Administration torture policies and it is the ACLU that will eventually compel the Obama Administration to bring those involved in extraordinary rendition and the torture-taxi trade to justice. The ACLU doesn’t flinch and it doesn’t stop at license-plate expression and its mission has nothing to do with political correctness.

Forbidden plate (Graphic/acme.com)

Turns out state plate arbiters forbid hundreds of letter combinations deemed too controversial or offensive, including ARS, SIN and PIG. The department occasionally convenes a committee to add to the verboten list “so that plates stay free of letters that abbreviate gang slang, drug terms or obscene phrases made popular in text messaging,” McGee reports.

That was news to Kelley Coffman-Lee, the 36-year-old Centennial woman who simply wanted to promote her love of soybean curd while tooling around town in her Suzuki. “My whole family is vegan so tofu is like a staple for us,” she told the Post. “I was just going to have a cool license plate and the DMV misinterpreted my message.”

Whether or not the DMV did the misinterpreting — after all, who doesn’t LV TOFU? — the civil servants say their mission is to keep the streets clean. “Standard common practices are: any combination of letters or numbers that carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency, are misleading, offensive to the general public, or represent gang, drug, sex, racial terms,” another Department of Revenue spokesman, Maren Rubino, told the Rocky Mountain News last summer when the list grew to include common text message shorthand, such as LOL, OMG and WTF.

The Department of Revenue oversees the DMV, which, it turns out, really does contract with the Department of Corrections to hire state prisoners to make the plates, the Rocky’s Kevin Flynn reported. More than a quarter-million vanity plate combinations are kept off the road by the policy, which has been in place since the early 1990s.

Think you can think like the DMV when it comes to WTF vanity plate combos? Take a stab at this nifty license plate game still lingering on the Rocky’s Web site.

The proposed skier vanity plate and supporters, from left to right: Ari Stiller-Shulman, Sen. Dan Gibbs, Ski Country CEO Melanie Mills, and Brent Lessing (Hertz Corporation's Soutwest Region General Fleet Manager).

A pair of ski-town lawmakers are out to change that with a ski-themed license plate that comes with the added bonus of earning about $50,000 a year in transportation funding to fix decrepit roads and bridges.

Granted, that’s only enough money to repave a mile or two of I-70, but state Rep. Christine Scanlan, D-Dillon, and Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, were likely thinking more about ski-industry marketing benefits when they agreed to sponsor Senate Bill 161.

The state’s ski-industry lobbying group, Colorado Ski Country USA, launched a petition drive last year, gathering just under 4,500 signatures of people interested in purchasing the new specialty plates for $50 a pop, on top of the usual registration fees.

The Colorado Department of Revenue decides the ultimate design of the plate, but first the Legislature must approve the bill, which already has the unanimous stamp of approval of the Senate Transportation Committee.

A prototype design displayed during the petition drive featured a skier and a snowboarder on a white mountain background with a blue sky — reminiscent of Utah’s now defunct white plate with a solo skier and the tagline “Ski Utah! Greatest snow on Earth.” This state’s proposed plate reads “Colorado” above the skier and snowboarder and “Ski Country USA” below.

The old Utah plate, in use since the 1980s, was recently replaced by a more graphic skier plate that kept the same tagline, and Utah has been pushing hard to cut into Colorado’s skier-day dominance. Colorado sees about 12 million skier days per season, compared to about 4 million for Utah.

“As a state where skiing is our signature sport, we wanted to have a Colorado skiing plate just like they have in Utah, Idaho and California,” said Ari Stiller-Shulman, public policy and communications manager for Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA).

“Utah’s plate is very prominent because we get a lot of Utahans traveling through Colorado and you see them a lot. Ours is way cooler.”

But not everyone agrees with that assessment. One post on a ski-oriented Web site compared the Colorado plate to “clip art,” and another post from someone claiming to be a Utah resident hoped for a design change.

“Living in Utah, it’s always fun to read about the rivalry between our two states and the ski industry. (But) I do hope the DOR comes up with a different design. The one I saw in your post was dreadful.”

Skiing Magazine suggested a different design altogether: a crowded mountain backdrop with the letters “FMR TXN” (translation: Former Texan) and the tagline “Everyone skis here.”

But Stiller-Shulman said the Department of Revenue mandates certain design specifications for visual clarity, and CSCUSA itself insisted on certain elements.

“We wanted to make sure the skier and the rider are wearing helmets, of course, but it has a skier and a snowboarder on it, and if the current form of the plate were to be the one that is used in the end, it will be the only plate in the nation with a snowboarder on it, which is kind of cool,” said Stiller-Shulman, a snowboarder.

But even that aspect could be controversial. About 5.5 million Americans skied in the United States in 2007, according to the National Ski Areas Association, compared to 5.1 million snowboarders, but there’s often tension between the two groups. Two Utah ski areas — Deer Valley and Alta — still ban snowboarding, but no Colorado ski areas keep boarders out.

“We expect (the Colorado plate) to be really popular and a great way for Coloradans to show pride when they ride,” Stiller-Shulman said.