Anne Landman

Crazy Republicans, Equal rights, Ethics, Ethnic/Minority, Extremism, Fake patriotism, Religion, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Weird Grand Junction Stuff

City Council chooses to keep mostly Christian prayers at public meetings

by Anne Landman • March 6, 2018 • 66 Comments

“We say this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.” — City council members bow their heads during Christian prayers at a public meeting at City Hall, September 2, 2015

At their workshop Monday evening, Grand Junction City Council decided mixing religion with government was a good thing to do, and they would continue to do it.

City Manager Greg Caton told council members the City’s invocation policy dates back to 2008, saying they all inherited the practice. Council had an opportunity Monday at their workshop to discontinue prayers at City Council meetings and avoid further controversy over the City’s persistent endorsement of religion, modify the current policy or substitute a moment of silence instead.

But history shows the City of Grand Junction always has a hard time coming into the 21st Century.

Disgraced white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos plans talk in Grand Junction

by Anne Landman • March 2, 2018 • 7 Comments

Milo Yiannopoulos

People are hyperventilating over a scheduled appearance in Grand Junction by white supremacist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at 7:00 p.m. on April 14th at a currently undisclosed location. Some are planning protests, but the best thing to do might be to just yawn and ignore Yiannopoulos entirely.

Get ready, Mesa County Republicans. President Trump wants to take your guns!

by Anne Landman • March 1, 2018 • 9 Comments

President Trump on Wednesday called for seizing guns belonging to people who are deemed to present a danger to others without allowing them due process first.

“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump told a group of lawmakers at a meeting about school safety and gun violence.

“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

Grand Junction City Council has an opportunity to end divisive religious invocations at public meetings. Let’s hope they do.

by Anne Landman • February 27, 2018 • 1 Comment

The Devil is among the many diverse religious players who are likely to get more chances to say invocations at City Council meetings, unless the invocation is eliminated entirely or the invocation policy is changed changed to a moment of silence instead of prayers.

Grand Junction City Council plans to re-assess the issue of hosting religious invocations at public meetings at their Monday, March 5 workshop.

Grand Junction made history in 2017 as the first city in Colorado host a Satanic invocation at a City Council meeting. News of the event spread across the country, and the story even made it onto Russia Today’s news website, RT.

How could something like this happen?

Under pressure from the City’s secular community to abide by the Constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, in 2008 the City of Grand Junction adopted an invocation policy that opened up the invocation to anyone, instead of reserving the opportunity to say it only to representatives of a few selected religious groups. Over the last ten years, the new policy has resulted in the City making history with invocations given by atheists, Satanists and anarchists.

But the most prominent non-Christian invocation — a Satanic invocation last August, and all the hoopla that surrounded it — TV news cameras, prayer circles at City Hall and Bible-toting people in the audience — seems to have made Council interested in revising their invocation policy.

Trump’s Border Wall Folly

by Anne Landman • February 4, 2018 • 52 Comments

“Believe me,” said Trump. But no, Mexico won’t pay for a wall. Trump is now demanding American taxpayers pay for it.

While still promising Mexico will pay for it, President Trump is now trying to extort $25 billion from U.S. taxpayers to build a “big, beautiful” border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and he’s holding DACA recipients hostage to do it.

It’s clear Trump either doesn’t understand, or is ignoring the nuances of legal and illegal immigration as well as actual statistics about the rates of crime committed by immigrants vs. U.S. citizens, and how most contraband gets into the country illegally.

By far the biggest contributor to violent deaths in the U.S. is not immigrants, but our country’s own violent culture paired with easy access to deadly firearms — a fact President Trump completely ignores in his effort to whip up xenophobic fear among Americans.

The stakes for Trump’s wall are extremely high for American taxpayers in many ways. The first is financial.

Take our survey!

by Anne Landman • February 1, 2018 • 3 Comments

[socialpoll id=”2485002″ path=”/polls/2485002″ width=”600″]

Activism, Crazy Republicans, Deplorables, Education, Equal rights, Ethics, Ethnic/Minority, Extremism, Hate, Intolerance, Pop culture, Propaganda, Religious hypocrisy, Trump Insanity, Xenophobia

How the President’s racism affects the western slope

by Anne Landman • January 28, 2018 • 2 Comments

President Donald Trump spent years spreading the racist lie that President Obama was born in Kenya. He’s publicly described Mexicans as rapists, called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” said immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS,” used the gang MS-13 to disparage all immigrants and called African countries “shitholes.”

Sad to say, but there are people in our own community who actually believe these things, and worse, and Trump is empowering them to more freely express their racism and xenophobia.

City Council endorses protections and path to citizenship for DACA recipients. G.J. citizens react.

by Anne Landman • January 23, 2018 • 21 Comments

On January 17, 2018, the Grand Junction City Council sent an official letter (above) to Senators Cory Gardner, Michael Bennet and House Representative Scott Tipton urging the House and Senate to pass “a clean bill as soon as possible to prevent the end of DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] in March.”

Republican and “Deplorable” G.J. City Council member Duncan McArthur voted against the letter supporting young DACA recipients in our community

The letter was signed by Mayor J. Merrick (“Rick”) Taggart. City Council approved it on a 5-2 vote. Councilmembers Duncan McArthur and Barbara Traylor-Smith voted against it.

The dangers of June Fellhauer’s 2018 talk by Caroline Leaf, promoted by District 51

by Anne Landman • January 13, 2018 • 8 Comments

WakeUp Ministries’ promotion of Caroline Leaf’s talk

Local self-styled Christian missionary June Fellhauer is back in 2018 and this time, her unregistered nonprofit Wake Up Ministries sponsored a talk at Two Rivers Convention Center on January 12 by Dr. Caroline Leaf, another Christian missionary.

Caroline Leaf labels herself a “cognitive neuroscientist.” Her teachings are aimed at helping people “see the link between science and God as a tangible way of controlling their thoughts and emotions.” Dr. Leaf’s talked are based on her own idea that “the mind controls the brain.” She teaches that thoughts are the sole controller of our physical and mental health, that “toxic thinking is the root cause disease” and that thoughts can change our DNA.

The problem is, most of Leaf’s teachings are debunked by science.

Trump on immigration: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

by Anne Landman • January 11, 2018 • 6 Comments

NBC Nightly News

Kick the kids out of the room. The president in on TV again, and again it’s for a shockingly offensive comment, especially from an American president.

The Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump actually told a bipartisan group of Senators in a conversation about immigration today,

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

It doesn’t take, “like, a genius” to understand there is nothing adorable about being a “Deplorable”

by Anne Landman • January 9, 2018 • 8 Comments

Many ardent Trump supporters happily call themselves “deplorable,” making fun of a point Hillary Clinton tried to make during her 2016 campaign that many Trump supporters are racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic.

Members of Trump’s “Deplorable” contingents across the country, including those locally, typically deny they are any of these things, yet the Facebook pages of “Deplorables” groups (Trump supporters across the country who have personally labeled themselves “Deplorables”) do in fact reveal a strong component of sexist, racist, xenophobic and homophobic thought runs within these groups.

Rep. Jared Polis to open Grand Junction office Sat., Jan. 6 at 10:00 a.m.

by Anne Landman • January 2, 2018 • 1 Comment

Rep. Jared Polis

House Rep. Jared Polis is running for Colorado governor and will officially open his Grand Junction office this coming Saturday, January 6 at 10:00 a.m. at 421 Colorado Ave.

Polis is a new-age candidate. He is an entrepreneur who started several successful internet businesses. He is the first openly gay parent in Congress and a champion of education. Polis has served on the Colorado State Board of Education, and served a single six-year term until his district was eliminated. He created a foundation that gives annual Teacher Recognition Awards. In 2004, Polis established the charter school, “New America School,” a high school that primarily serves older immigrant youth ages 16–21.

Rental scam afoot in Grand Junction

by Anne Landman • December 31, 2017 • 2 Comments

Renters, beware!

There is a scammer on Craigslist who is stealing photos from rental postings on Zillow, then posting the same property for rent on Craigslist for a too-good-to-be-true low price, like a nice 2 bed, 2 bath house for $500/month. The scammer gets the name of the owner off of the Mesa County Assessor Lookup, and then claims via email to be that person. That way, if the prospective renter gets suspicious and checks to see who really owns the house, they see the name of person they’re dealing with matches that of the actual owner.

The scammer says he’s out of town and carries out the whole scam via text and email. He had an @aol.com email address. When you respond to the ad, the scammer sends a fake application that lets him to get even more personal information from you. He gives a song and dance about how the house is very special to his family and they’re looking for someone to take care of it, then tells you to send money for first and last month’s rent, deposit and other fees via Western Union to an out-of-town Western Union office — in this case, the mark sent $2,000 to a Western Union in Las Vegas, and the scammer used a fake Las Vegas email address.) He emails a fake contract for the mark to sign, grabs the money and leaves the mark without their money and with no place to live. The prospective tenant and property owner never meet. This all takes place over email and text.

Hobby Lobby, a corporate criminal

by Anne Landman • December 25, 2017 • 9 Comments

Hobby Lobby, a craft store owned by evangelicals and known for pushing it’s owner’s Christian religious beliefs onto it’s employees, is running a full page “O-come-let-us-adore-him” Christmas ad in today’s Daily Sentinel with a camel and all the trimmings, that urges people to download a free Bible at a website.

So this seems like a perfect time to make people aware that Hobby Lobby was fined millions of dollars by the U.S. government in 2017 for illegally importing thousands of ancient Iraqi clay artifacts into the U.S. that were likely acquired by ISIS (the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”) as the terrorist group criss-crossed the country destroying and looting Iraq’s cultural heritage sites.

Trump accidentally admits Republicans deceptively sold the tax bill to the country

by Anne Landman • December 22, 2017 • 1 Comment

From the Washington Post, December 20, 2017:

To President Donald Trump: “We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country — the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions; the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.” — Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ)

Trump just admitted the GOP’s tax cuts were deceptively sold

By Aaron Blake December 20

President Trump was so excited about passing his first major piece of legislation Wednesday that he blurted out that the Republican Party had misrepresented the entire bill, handing Democrats some potentially troublesome talking points for the 2018 midterm elections.

Speaking at the White House just before the House prepared to sign off on the tax-cuts bill one last time, Trump reveled extensively in his win before turning things over to Vice President Pence to heap praise upon him continuously for a few minutes. It was a thoroughly unique spectacle, even as victory dances and Trump Cabinet meetings go.

But along the way, Trump basically admitted that the GOP’s talking points on the bill weren’t exactly honest in two major ways.

While talking about the corporate tax rate being cut from 35 percent to 21 percent, Trump said, “That’s probably the biggest factor in our plan.”

People entering Grand Junction greeted by atheist billboard

by Anne Landman • December 18, 2017 • 2 Comments

Digital billboard currently on I-70B in front of Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A

In another sign of how Mesa County’s culture becoming more diverse and welcoming, a bright digital billboard is greeting people entering downtown Grand Junction and reassuring them it’s okay if you don’t believe in God.

The billboard, located on a busy section of I70-B by Rimrock Marketplace in front of Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A, was put up by Western Colorado Atheists and Freethinkers (WCAF) as a big a “thank you” gift to all the people in western Colorado who have had the courage to come out as atheists in the last year. It’s also a celebration of the progress made by western Colorado’s growing secular movement in advancing rational thought and reason in all our endeavors.

Trump Joins the Weird World of Adult Babies

by Anne Landman • December 18, 2017 • 6 Comments

…On that note, the following bumper sticker was spotted in the parking lot at Sprouts Farmers Market on 12/16/2017:

Corruption, Crazy Republicans, Deplorables, Equal rights, Ethics, Extremism, Hate, Human rights, Intolerance, LGBT issues, Religion, Separation of Church and State, Stupid Republicans

Trump’s shocking U.S. District Court nominees

by Anne Landman • December 17, 2017 • 1 Comment

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Three of President Donald Trump’s nominees for U.S. District Court judgeships have gone down in flames in the last few days for reasons that make Americans scratch their heads about how they could ever have been nominated to in the first place.

Trump’s nominee for U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, Matthew Spencer Petersen, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, December 14, 2017 and was forced to admit he had never tried a single case in any court of law, and had never filed a single motion or conducted even one deposition on his own over the course of his entire legal career. He was also stunningly unable to answer even the most basic questions about legal procedures common to federal courts.

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