ONE BIG PARTY — Grand Junction’s 3rd Annual Gay Pride Parade, Sunday, May 17, 2015
Grand Junction’s Third Annual Colorado West Pride Parade was more impressive than ever this year, with more sponsors and floats than in previous years, and a bigger crowd of spectators on Main Street. The weather was perfect for the event, with a temperature in the 70s, intermittent cloud cover, just a faint breeze and no rain.
Movie poster from the 1971 movie “Cold Turkey,” starring Dick Van Dyke
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In August, 1969 all of the citizens the town of Greenfield, Iowa (pop. 2,100) attempted to quit smoking as a publicity stunt in connection with the on-site filming of the movie Cold Turkey, starring Dick Van Dyke. In an internal project they code-named “Bird 1,” Philip Morris (PM), the manufacturer of Marlboro cigarettes, surveyed the citizens of Greenfield 8 months after their quit attempt. PM used local Girl Scouts to hand-deliver the questionnaires to citizens to increase the acceptance of the packets. The Girl Scouts were instructed to knock on doors and hand a questionnaire packet to “every person who was 14 years old on Cold Turkey Day.” PM paid five dollars to everyone who completed and returned a survey. This tobacco industry document is the report containing Philip Morris’ analysis of the success of citizens’ efforts to go “Cold Turkey.” PM’s descriptions are entertaining, highly chauvinistic and of course paint a very dismal picture of quitting smoking:
See a PDF of the confidential internal PM document here. |
Former Grand Junction City Councilman Rick Brainard. Photo credit: KREX-TV, Grand Junction
Convicted domestic abuser and former short term Grand Junction City Councilman Rick Brainard is publicly gloating over the former Blagg juror’s contempt conviction, and is being assisted by Paul Shockley, the Daily Sentinel’s court-beat reporter.
In response to an April 29 article by Shockley about Ms. Charlesworth’s conviction, Brainard tweeted, “XOXO. That darn Karma is a son of a gun.” Shockley retweeted the comment, helping Brainard further magnify it.
Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger, who is ruthlessly throwing the book at a now-disabled former juror who helped convict Michael Blagg eleven years ago
9News journalist Chris Vanderveen today published an investigative news story about the beleaguered Grand Junction woman who has endured eleven years of invasive personal attacks as a result of serving on the jury that convicted Michael Blagg of murder in 2004. The piece focuses on Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger, who is now piling on to the former juror’s woes by pursuing legal charges and fines against her. Vanderveen’s efforts bring the story of the Grand Junction juror’s plight to Colorado’s front range.
The piece is titled “Juror gets sued after murder conviction.”
Marilyn Charlesworth first endured ten years of attacks by Blagg’s defense attorneys, who, in repeated efforts to win Blagg a new trial, first accused her of failing to disclose a vision impairment, then of failing to disclose a prescription for a certain medication, and now finally accusing her of lying about whether or not she believed she had experienced an incident of domestic abuse over twenty years ago. Now Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger is joining Blagg’s defense in attacking against Charlesworth by charging her with contempt and threatening her with jail time, fees and fines in excess of $50,000, purportedly to pay for costs of Blagg’s first trial, like hotels and meals for expert witnesses.
Hautzinger’s legal pursuit of Charlesworth is forcing her and her husband to spend their retirement savings on legal fees, and could bankrupt the couple. The stress Charlesworth has been under has recently caused her eyesight to deteriorate further to the point where she can no longer drive or work. The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel’s many negative articles editorials about her has turned her into a pariah locally, to the extent that she rarely leaves her house.
Hautzinger’s over-the-top pursuit of Charlesworth is raising questions locally of whether this is a possible case of misogyny, since he recently let a male juror in another case who was accused of exactly the same offense walk free with no consequences. Others think Hautzinger is disproportionately attacking Charlesworth to divert attention from former Mesa County Sheriff investigator Steve King, who was the lead investigator for Blagg’s 2004 trial. King recently pled guilty to embezzling, and a result can no longer offer credible testimony in a new Blagg trial. King is also a former State Senator and favorite of the Mesa County Republican Party, which has suffered a number of embarrassing incidents of corruption and candidates who have broken the law in recent years. Charlesworth has in the past also been an outspoken critic of longstanding Mesa County Republican institutions, like the GOP-dominated Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce. Hautzinger is a Republican, so his actions could also potentially be political payback.
KUSA 9News reporter Chris Vanderveen won the Edward R. Murrow journalism award in 2011, and the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) Reporter of the Year Award in 2012. He and a camera operator drove out to Grand Junction from the front range and back in a single day to cover Charlesworth’s story.
Charlesworth wants to publicize her experience so citizens are aware of the dangers they face if they agree to sit on a jury, since there are no limitations on how long or intensively defense attorneys can try to get new trials for their clients by pursuing jurors who return verdicts they don’t like.
Marilyn Charlesworth of Grand Junction, Colorado, has started a GoFundMe campaign asking for help to pay the mounting legal fees arising from her jury service of 11 years ago.
Charlesworth is the victim of the worst case of juror abuse in American history. It has dragged on for eleven years now past the time of her jury service, and has utterly ruined the life of a woman who responded to a jury summons she got in the mail, as all American citizens are required to do by law as part of their citizenship.
Off-roaders revel in tearing up the North Desert area after rain and snow, creating rutted mud pits for fun.
If you want tourists, friends and family to see the best our area has to offer, whatever you do, don’t take them up 27 1/4 Road into the desert north of H Road. While the panoramas from the north desert area are spectacular, this formerly stark and beautiful range of mancos shale hills running along the base of Grand Junction’s iconic Bookcliffs is now defaced from virtually end to end with trash dumps, mud ruts, shotgun shells and makeshift religious memorials to people who have died out there in accidents.
What used to be a marvelous place for a long, peaceful walk with your dog, is now so disappointing it tries the soul.
An airplane flies over BLM land where shooting is permitted underneath the takeoff/landing patterns for G.J. Regional Airport
Since the shooting range opened several miles out on 27 1/4 Road, and since the North Desert started being included on OHV (off-highway vehicle) maps, the area has turned ugly. It’s also a more dangerous place for peaceful users, like walkers, bikers and horseback riders.
Updated November 5, 2014
Colorado’s Amendment 67 did not pass, to the relief of most of the state. The measure would have declared unborn human beings as a “person” or a “child” in the Colorado Criminal Code.
It was yet another a personhood measure, but this year Personhood USA, the group pushing these kinds of measures, tried to disguise that fact by calling it the “Brady Amendment,” after a fetus a woman lost in a 2012 drunk driving accident. Naming the measure after a woman’s lost fetus was an attempt to give the measure emotional appeal, because when you can get people to react through emotion, they’ll often bypass their rational thinking.
Coloradans have rejected personhood measures three times now, for good reason. The thinking behind these ballot initiatives is illogical and thus fundamentally flawed.
A fetus is not a person in any legal sense.
Both fertilized eggs and clones represent potential, not actual human beings.
Zygotes, or fertilized eggs, and fetuses lack many of the physical characteristics of human beings. They don’t have brains, skeletons, or internal organs. A fetus cannot engage in human perception or thought. The analogy that fits is that an acorn is not an oak tree and the egg you eat for breakfast is not a chicken.
Fetuses have no social identity, and there is no precedent for giving them such. Names are not legally conferred upon fetuses, only upon babies after birth. The first legal recognition of a person’s existence is their birth certificate. No government on Earth issues “pre-birth certificates.” The government does not issue death certificates for miscarried or aborted fetuses. The government does not issue social security numbers to fetuses, nor does the government confer any rights of citizenship on upon conception.
An eye-opening database publicly available on Google Docs lists known major organized crimes implemented globally by the Catholic church and other religions. The list includes systematic child abductions by the Church (the seizure of millions of babies from unmarried women and girls from the mid 1940s to the mid 1970s who were then adopted out for profit), child and female enslavement, sexual abuse, child pornography, abuse of deaf victims, beatings, severe punishments and use of orphans as “guinea pigs” in human experimental and clinical trials. All entries are documented to authoritative sources or reporting. One example of crimes committed by the Catholic church is the so-called “Baby Scoop Era,” in which unwed pregnant girls were “disappeared” into Catholic “Mother-Baby Homes.” There the girls and young women were fed and housed with minimal attention until they gave birth in rooms alone, without support, assistance, counseling or coaching. The new young mothers were then coerced or forced to surrender their babies for adoption. This human rights crime against women is backed up with a link to a one hour investigative news program by Dan Rather titled “What the Catholic Church failed to tell you: Abominations of the Catholic Church in USA and Canada” that details how from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, Catholic nuns coerced over one million American women and girls to give up their babies. The Church then sold them into illegitimate adoptions for “astronomical profits.”
Women who were held as slaves in Catholic laundries in Ireland are seeking justice for their imprisonment and abuse
A BBC investigation has revealed that Irish nuns from the Catholic church took female children out of church-operated state orphanages and used them as unpaid slave labor in church-owned commercial laundry facilities called the Magdalene Laundries. Women and girls made to work in the laundries were held as prisoners and endured significant abuse. The slave laundries existed into the 1980s and did the laundry for restaurants, railway stations, convents and the airport. Some women were held in the laundries for over 50 years.
The Irish Examiner newspaper investigated the finances of religious orders that operated the laundries in 2012 and found they owned assets of $1.9 billion. (Yes, that’s “billion” with a “B.”).
One woman, the main subject in BBC’s report, escaped the laundry, ran to a nearby church for help, got raped by a priest and returned to the laundry. She became pregnant from the rape. The nuns took her baby away from her at birth and gave it up for adoption. The woman was forced to work in the laundry for 14 years. She was finally reunited with her daughter 40 years after her birth. The woman is demanding an apology — just an apology — from the Church.
Source: Demanding justice for women and children abused by Irish nuns, BBC News, September 23, 2014
One of City Markets political birthday cards, all of which are derogatory to Democrats, and this one towards women
The 24 Road City Market in Grand Junction has a “Political birthday” greeting card section in which all the cards are derogatory towards Democrats and President Obama. One was derogatory towards women in the course of insulting Democrats. None of the cards derided Republicans. The same cards are at the 32 Road City Market as well, so are probably in all their stores.
City Markets are part of the Kroger grocery store chain, a politically right national grocery chain. In 2014 election cycle so far, the Kroger Company has given a total of $23,000 to Republican candidates but only $7,250 to Democrats. The company has also refused to honor more than 100,000 requests from patrons to prohibit customers from openly carrying guns into its stores.
More and more of City Market’s Grand Junction customers are Democrats, but you wouldn’t know it from their “political birthday” card section, in which 100% of the cards insult liberals.
Inside City Market’s “boobs” birthday card
If you are looking for an alternative to City Market, Sprouts Farmers Market in Grand Junction has a greeting card section, too, and it does not contain cards that insult women or Democrats.
Moms Demand Action’s ad against Kroger’s policy of allowing patrons to brandish weapons in its stores
The November, 2014 elections will determine whether western Colorado can finally pull out of its negative economic and political spiral. But many people are so busy making a living and caring for their families that they don’t have time to study up on the candidates and issues. To make things easier for everyone, AnneLandmanBlog is providing this handy voter guide. Here is a list of how to vote if you are unhappy with our area’s status quo, want to protect the gains we’ve already made at the state level, keep extremists and unethical candidates out of public office, get rid of legislators who have failed to help western slope citizens and to make some badly-needed positive changes here western Colorado:
United States Senator: Mark Udall
House Representative for District 3: Abel Tapia
Colorado Governor/Lieutenant Governor: John Hickenlooper/Joe Garcia
Secretary of State: Joe Neguse
State Treasurer: Betsy Markey
State Board of Education: Henry C. Roman
State Senate, District 7: Claudette Konola
State Representative, District 55: Chris Kennedy
County Commissioner, District 2: Mark N. Williams
County Clerk and Recorder: Jennifer Manzanares
Mesa County Sheriff: Write-in candidate Benita Phillips
Amendment 67 (Fetal personhood): NO
Amendment 68 (Large-scale gambling to fund schools): NO
Proposition 104 (Forces school district boards to have open meetings): NO
Proposition 105 (Shall genetically-modified foods be labeled as such?): YES
Referred Measure 2A (Shall the town of Palisade allow retail recreational marijuana shops within the town?): YES
Referred Measure 2B (Should the town of Palisade tax the sale of retail recreational marijuana to economically benefit the town?): YES
Referred Measure 2C (Should the town of DeBeque tax the sale of retail recreational marijuana to economically benefit the town?): YES
Related posts:
It’s Time to End GOP Rule in Mesa County, Nov. 2, 2014
Why a Fetus is Not A Person, Oct. 31, 2014
Mesa County Clerk, Sheila Reiner, Makes 2nd Major Screw Up in Palisade Ballots, Oct. 18, 2014
Phillips: WaPo Cites Mesa County Sheriff’s Office as Misspending Public Funds, Oct. 15, 2014
All You Need to Know About Mesa County Politics, All in One Place, Sept. 17, 2014
Sheriff Candidate Mike Harlow: The Ugliest Face of Mesa County, July 13, 2014
CO House Rep. Ray Scott’s Weird 2014 Bill, Oct. 9, 2014
Ray Scott Tanks Club 20 Debate, Sept. 12, 2014
Colorado Senate District 7: Claudette Konola w. Ray Scott, The Club 20 Debate in Full, Sept. 10, 2014 (video)
CO Rep. Ray Scott Throws Women and Kids Under the Bus, July 29, 2014
Clueless CO House Rep. Ray Scott Denies Climate Change, June 24, 2014
McInnis Campaign Fails to Get Permission to Post Signs, Oct. 6, 2014
Congress Suspended Rule to Rename “McInnis Canyons,” Aug. 27, 2014
Petition: Change the name of “McInnis Canyons” Back to Previous Name, Aug. 24, 2014
Benita Phillips is Mesa County’s only woman candidate for Sheriff, running as a write-in. She and her husband live in Palisade.
Benita Phillips, Mesa County’s first female candidate for Sheriff, has pledged — and asked her opponents to pledge — that if elected they will conduct a public investigation into corruption in the Sheriff’s Office, and take steps to prevent future corruption and preferential dealing.
Her challenge comes after the local GOP’s top candidate for sheriff, State Senator Steve King, was charged with three felonies and two misdemeanors for allegedly falsifying time cards while working at the Sheriff’s office, embezzling public property and failing to report all his sources of income — a requirement for state legislators. King stepped down from the race after the charges were made.
Phillips specifically asked all sheriff candidates to pledge to openly review and amend any policy of the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office that supports what she calls “a culture of double-dipping.”
State Senator Steve King worked at Colorado Mesa University (CMU) at the same time he worked at the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. An investigation revealed that he occasionally billed both entities for the same time he worked.
Ray Scott may be running out of gas after several terms in the state legislature, after not really getting anywhere anyway in trying to pass bills since January, 2011
Things aren’t going very well for poor Ray Scott, the incumbent Republican candidate for Colorado Senate District 7. The senate seat he is after will soon be vacated by longtime Mesa County GOP favorite son, Steve King, who currently is facing multiple misdemeanor and felony charges for theft and failing to report income as required by legislators. King’s fate may not be directly tied to Ray Scott in any way, but it certainly doesn’t help the beleaguered local GOP, which has put forth a truly embarrassing long string of inept and/or discredited candidates for office.
Ray Scott faced off with Democrat Claudette Konola in the recent Club 20 candidate debates, where he took a real hit.
Claudette opened the debate by linking Scott and his party with some of those truly bad candidates, including Steve King and former congressman Scott McInnis, who got his buddies in Congress to name a federal wilderness area named after himself in violation of congress’ House Rules, and who stepped down in disgrace from the 2010 race for governor amid allegations of massive plagiarism.
Scott opened at the debate by saying he probably wouldn’t even have gotten up that morning if it hadn’t have been for the debate. Not exactly the level of enthusiasm an incumbent legislator should project with an election just weeks away.
Many Mesa County residents noticed the almost complete lack of local media coverage of the Club 20 debate between the candidates for Colorado’s State Senate District 7, Claudette Konola (D) and Ray Scott (R). The Daily Sentinel offered only one short quote from each candidate, and the local television stations ignored this important debate completely. In the interest of helping western Colorado citizens get adequately informed about the Senate District 7 candidates, we offer a two-part video (credit: Bill Hugenberg) and a transcript of the Senate District 7 candidates’ debate.
A new research paper shows that daughters spend more than twice as much time caring for their elderly parents than sons, and when daughters are in the picture, sons tend to reduce what little caregiving efforts they make and leave the burden to the sisters. The study, titled “When Gender Trumps Everything: The Division of Parent Care among Siblings,” will be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
The study found that daughters provide an average of 12.3 hours of care to elderly parents per month, compared to just 5.6 hours of care provided by sons.
The study’s author, Princeton sociology doctoral candidate Angelina Grigoryeva, concluded that by pushing most of the duties of caring for aging parents onto their sisters, brothers also shift the financial burden and physical and mental stress of providing that care onto their sisters.
Grigoryeva’s research found that women tend to base how much time they spend caring for elderly parents on competing concerns, like how much time they need to devote to their own families and careers, while men base the the amount of caregiving time they spend on whether or not they have a sister or sisters who can handle those responsibilities.
Colorado Rep. Ray Scott proudly poses with a hot sports car while Mesa County’s poorest women and children go without health insurance
Colorado House Rep. Ray Scott may love fetuses, but he doesn’t care much about women and apparently doesn’t think much of kids, either.
Besides being a chronic no-show at election-time debates sponsored by the League of Women Voters, in January of 2012 Ray Scott co-sponsored HB1130, a bill titled “Penalties for Violent Offenses Against Fetuses.” The bill’s very title ignores the fact that typically the woman surrounding the fetus would be the primary recipient of any violent acts perpetrated against the fetus. But in Ray Scott’s mind, women matter less than their fetuses.
Ray Scott even supported a fetal personhood amendment in the past. Such proposals are among the ultimate affronts to women, since they are religiously-based efforts that would make it a crime for women to use some forms of contraception, in accordance with Mr. Scott’s own personal religious beliefs.
Mesa County Sheriff write-in candidate Mike Harlow
It’s no surprise that Mesa County’s tea party faction endorsed custom holster-maker and write-in candidate Mike Harlow for sheriff.
What is a surprise, though, and a huge embarrassment for Mesa County citizens, is that Harlow got the endorsement of anyone at all.
Harlow’s smugness and extreme hate-filled views reveal one thing: he is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.
If his writings are any indication, contempt and hostility ooze from Harlow’s every pore.
A portion of the postcards delivered to Congressman Scott Tipton on Friday, July 11, by members of the Grand Junction Gun Club .
A new citizens’ group in Grand Junction is saying “no more” to gun violence. The group came together to advocate action be taken to reduce the growing number of mass gun slaughters occurring in the U.S.
On Friday, July 11, 2014 the Grand Junction Gun Club presented Congressman Scott Tipton (R-CO) with 1,500 postcards from constituents in his district saying “Not One More” person should be killed by gun violence. 150 of the postcards were from residents of Grand Junction. The postcards were collected by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Everytown for Gun Safety, two national groups working to overcome the inaction by Congress on the issue of growing gun violence.
The words were inspired by Richard Martinez, whose son Christopher Martinez, was one of the six people killed in the May 23 gun massacre in Santa Barbara, California. In a statement to the media after his son’s death, Mr. Martinez said,
“When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say ‘Stop this madness!’ Too many people have died. We should say to ourselves, ‘NOT ONE MORE!'”
His words inspired a national movement to urge legislators to enact measures to reduce the number of guns getting into the hands of unstable and violent people. The Grand Junction Gun Club is standing in support of the survivors, families and communities throughout the U.S. that have been affected by mass shootings.
The perpetrator of the Santa Barbara shootings, Elliot Rodger, sought retribution against women for rejecting him and to punish young men whom he believed lived a better life than he did. Rodger visited a shooting range to train himself in shooting handguns and owned a Glock 34 pistol. When he finished his gun rampage, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
