Category: Democracy

Activism, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, politics, Republicans violating laws

“Recall Polis” campaign violating laws to gather signatures – county passes Resolution prohibiting taping signs to their buildings

by Anne Landman • August 29, 2019 • 4 Comments

The Recall Polis people at 4:00 p.m. on 8/29/19 violating the law by setting up shop in a public park without obtaining the necessary permits from the City Parks and Rec Department.

Upset citizens have been contacting the City of Grand Junction Parks and Recreation Department and the Mesa County Elections Bureau left and right to complain about the “Recall Polis” campaign violating laws by putting up tables and signage in places that require permitting or where it is prohibited by law.

In the photo above, the Recall Polis people had set up their operation at Spring Valley Park on Patterson Road, a public park. A reader sent the above photo and complained to the City about it, upon which G.J. Parks and Rec Department responded:

Beware electing Janet Rowland as county commissioner again

by Anne Landman • August 24, 2019 • 14 Comments

Former County Commissioner Janet Rowland (January 2005 – January 2013) once compared same-sex marriage to bestiality on a state-wide talk show, drawing condemnation from around the nation.

Janet Rowland is running for Mesa County Commissioner.

Yes, again.

She’s already been a Mesa County Commissioner — from January, 2005 to January, 2013 — but that doesn’t mean her being commissioner again is a good idea. It arguably is not a good idea. From her previous two terms, we have an abundance of experience with her and know what is in store if Janet Rowland gets another chance to be Commissioner.

So let’s take a look at the past and see what it tells us.

Morally and ethically challenged

Certainly Janet has done some good things through her career, like trying to address child abuse and finding homes for foster kids. While those endeavors are laudable, we also need to take into account all the things she’s done that have set a poor example for kids, and our entire community and that have harmed the County.

Plagiarism

Shortly after losing statewide election for lieutenant governor as Bob Beauprez’s running mate in 2006, and while she was previously Mesa County Commissioner, Janet was a guest columnist for the Grand Junction Free Press, at the time a competing newspaper to the Daily Sentinel. She wrote several articles for the Free Press until one day a sharp reader noticed Janet had lifted most of one of her columns word for word from a government-published pamphlet, and brought this information to the attention of the Free Press’s editor.

Feb. 3, 2007 column in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel about Janet Rowland plagiarizing a guest column she wrote for the G.J. Free Press.

The Daily Sentinel reported on Rowland’s plagiarism on February 3, 2007:

A Mesa County official has plagiarized a government substance abuse booklet in her two most recent columns in the Grand Junction Free Press, that newspaper’s editor confirmed Friday.

The majority of Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland’s Feb. 1 column in the Free Press, titled “The importance of a strong parent-child bond,” was lifted verbatim from a 2006 National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism publication titled, “Making a Difference: Talk to Your Teen About Alcohol.”

A reading of Rowland’s unattributed column and the text of the booklet revealed the two are virtually identical. The only differences were found in the column’s first sentence and its lead into several bullet points.

The editor said if Rowland had been a staff writer, she probably would have been fired.

Janet’s first reaction to the plagiarism charge was to claim she couldn’t even remember writing the columns. (Denial.) When that failed to tamp down the controversy, she next said the information she used in her columns had been intended for “mass duplication anyhow,” adding that if people wanted to make what she did out as something evil, that was THEIR prerogative. (Sour grapes.) Next, she blamed the plagiarism on others, saying she had included the necessary attributions in her column, but Free Press staff had edited them out. (Lying and blaming.) Free Press management quickly produced the emails that contained the articles exactly as they had received them from Janet for publication, showing that they contained no references or attributions.

Mesa County residents and Mad Dog PAC put up gun control billboard in G.J.

by Anne Landman • August 17, 2019 • 3 Comments

Mesa County residents fed up with the national epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. are teaming up with Mad Dog PAC of Washington, D.C. to run a billboard in Grand Junction aimed at pressuring congressional Republicans to address the national epidemic of gun violence and rampant mass killings happening around the country.

The billboard targets Colorado’s Republican Senator Cory Gardner in particular, who is up for re-election in 2020 and is known for taking no action and offering only prayers, platitudes and condolences after every mass killing that occurs.

The Democratic-led House of Representatives has already passed effective gun control legislation, but Senator Mitch McConnell (Republican, KY), Majority Leader of the Senate, has blocked the bill from coming to a vote to appease the National Rifle Association which works to stop legislation aimed at making Americans safer from gun massacres.

The anti-Cory Gardner/gun control message will be on the billboard on I-70B in front of Sprouts and Rimrock Marketplace, on the board facing west, where it will be visible to drivers coming into Grand Junction. The message will be up for one week starting next Tuesday, August 20, and will stay up longer if donations are received to keep it up longer. If enough funds are received the message will also go up on additional boards around town.

Contact Anne Landman for information on how to donate to the billboard campaign.

Consumer advocacy, Democracy, politics

There’s a seat on Grand Junction Regional Airport Board up for grabs

by Anne Landman • May 27, 2019 • 1 Comment

Want to gain some influence in town, and have a voice without having to get elected? Here’s another chance to do just that.

With self-declared “deplorable” Grand Junction City Councilman Duncan McArthur leaving his his seat on Council, yet another position besides his Council seat has opened up: a seat on the Grand Junction Regional Airport Authority.

The seat is currently being offered to the public, albeit quietly. You have to dig a little to find information about the vacancy and how to apply, but the page with what little information there is about the airport board is here.

Now’s your chance! City seeks to fill open City Council District E seat

by Anne Landman • May 21, 2019 • 3 Comments

The $64,000 plaza in front of Grand Junction City Hall, installed for the purposes of circumventing laws regarding separation of church and state and keeping the Ten Commandments tablet on public land.

If you’ve ever wanted to serve on Grand Junction City Council but didn’t want to have to endure a campaign and election to do it, now is your chance.

City Councilor Duncan McArthur is stepping down from his seat on Council because of health problems, and City Council will be choosing his replacement.

Mr. McArthur represents District E (map). To be eligible to fill this vacant seat and if you want to obey the law, you must have lived within the boundaries of District E for a minimum of 12 months. The boundaries include all of the green area represented on this map, and comprise a strip of land between 7th and 12th Streets running south from Orchard Ave., all City land south of D Road/Riverside Parkway, and all City land on Orchard Mesa. The eastern boundary extends to 32 Road, but the City is a hopscotch of parcels to the east, so if you’re interested in the seat, consult the map to see if your residence is within City boundaries or not.

ACLU Sues CO State Senator Ray Scott for Blocking Constituent on Social Media

by Anne Landman • May 13, 2019 • 26 Comments

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

May 13, 2019

MEDIA CONTACT:

Vanessa Michel, Director of Communications

Office: 720-402-3112, Mobile: 917-399-0733

Deanna Hirsch, Media Strategist

Office: 720-402-3122, Mobile: 720-971-2393

ACLU Sues Colorado State Senator for Blocking Constituent on Social Media

DENVER – ACLU of Colorado filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court this morning against Colorado State Senator Ray Scott for blocking constituent Anne Landman from his official Facebook and Twitter pages. Landman, a resident of Colorado Senate District 7 in Grand Junction, speaks out regularly on public policy issues and writes about Colorado politics on her blog. She also uses social media to interact with fellow constituents and elected officials. Landman had been able to interact with Scott and others in these spaces until June 2017, when she wrote an article critical of Scott’s position regarding climate change and posted it on his official Facebook page. In response, Scott blocked Landman from his Facebook page and official Twitter account.

Local students win essay contest awards of $500 and $250

by Anne Landman • March 30, 2019 • 1 Comment

An awards ceremony will be held tomorrow, Sunday, March 31 at 1:15 p.m. in the Monument Room of the downtown Mesa County Public Library to announce the winners of Western Colorado Atheists and Freethinkers‘ 2018 Student Essay Contest.

The contest, announced last September, was open to all middle and high school students in Mesa County. The topic for submissions was the importance of separation of church and state to our country, and our democracy.

A student from Grand Junction High School won the high school award of $500 and a student from Redlands Middle School won the middle school award of $250.

AnneLandmanBlog Voter Guide: Grand Junction City Election 2019

by Anne Landman • March 27, 2019 • 4 Comments

Wondering how to vote in the City of Grand Junction 2019 election?

Following are AnneLandmanBlog’s recommendations for how to vote in the 2019 City of Grand Junction April 2, 2019 Regular Municipal Election.

I reached my conclusions about which city council candidates to vote for by listening to interviews, knowing the candidates personally or knowing something about them and their history in town, and considering factors like how well-funded their campaigns are. Decades of living in Grand Junction helps put this in context.

Lessons from past G.J. City Council elections

by Anne Landman • March 16, 2019 • 1 Comment

Rick Brainard, one of the best-funded candidates who ever ran for Grand Junction City Council, was backed to the bitter end by the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce and the Old Guard Republican Establishment

Were you around for the 2013 City of Grand Junction election?

If not, then you really missed a doozy.

That was a year in which Grand Junction residents learned some big, important lessons about city council elections.

Here is one of them:

The best-funded candidates for city council are often the WORST people to sit on city council.

Sen. Ray Scott absent for full Senate vote on oil and gas bill, SB 19-181

by Anne Landman • March 14, 2019 • 4 Comments

Ray Scott’s tweeted this photo of his front door in Denver at 8:34 a.m.today, instead of making sure he was at the Capitol to vote with the full Senate on SB19-181, a bill he’s been telling everyone will kill oil and gas development in the state.

Mesa County’s State Senator Ray Scott didn’t even bother to show up for the full Senate vote today on SB19-181, the oil and gas overhaul bill that will change the mission of the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission from fostering oil and gas development to instead making public health, safety and the environment top priority in consideration of oil and gas drilling permits.

The bill passed on a party line vote of 19-15, and now heads to the full House for a vote.

But instead of heading to the Capitol for the vote as taxpayers pay him to do, Scott stayed home and tweeted a picture of all the snow by his front door in Denver.

Sign the letter: Prioritize people’s health and safety above unfettered drilling by supporting SB 19-181.

by Anne Landman • March 8, 2019 • 2 Comments

Firestone, CO home explosion due to oil and gas lines, April, 2017 (Photo: CBS)

In a reaction to a letter the Mesa County Commissioners sent to the state legislature opposing SB19-181(pdf), Mesa County residents can now easily add their names to a letter that urges state legislators to PASS Senate Bill 19-181, a landmark bill to refocus the mission of the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission away from fostering oil and gas development to instead protecting public health, safety and welfare and the environment when considering new applications for drilling.

The bill was crafted with input from Erin Martinez, who lost her husband and brother in the explosion of a hidden gas flowline under their house in Firestone, Colorado in April of 2017. The bill will require public disclosure of flowline information.

City Council may be staring down the barrel of another ACLU lawsuit over criminalizing homelessness

by Anne Landman • February 20, 2019 • 2 Comments

On the same night that Grand Junction City Council will consider adopting an inclusiveness proclamation that says the City “desires to ensure that the human rights of all citizens are protected,” council will also vote on whether to amend city code to ban camping on public property, which will effectively criminalize a homeless population who has nowhere else to go.

That’s the view of the ALCU of Colorado, which has taken a great interest in the proposed change to city code, and considers it another attempt by Grand Junction to target homeless people and criminalize them.

Court rules Fort Collins ordinance banning topless women violates the U.S. Constitution

by Anne Landman • February 16, 2019 • 5 Comments

The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled February 15, 2019 that a Fort Collins, Colorado city ordinance prohibiting women from baring their breasts in public and punishes them for doing so while putting no similar restrictions on men violates the U.S. Constitution.

Two female plaintiffs and an unincorporated group called “Free the Nipple” sued Ft. Collins over an ordinance the city enacted in 2015 that made it a misdemeanor for a woman to bare her breasts in public for anything other than breastfeeding. Violations were punishable by a fine of up to $2,650 or up to 180 days in jail. The ordinance did not specify the same for men.

Lessons from the Shutdown

by Anne Landman • January 28, 2019 • 7 Comments

Donald Trump just put America through the longest federal government shutdown in history, single-handedly keeping over 800,000 federal workers from being paid for over a month, hobbling law enforcement agencies and airport security, blocking immigration proceedings, causing delays in airline flights across the country, forcing hundreds of thousands of people into having to make hard decisions between paying their mortgages, buying their medicine or feeding their kids.

In the end, neither Mr. Trump nor the country gained anything at all from this exercise, but we did learn some important lessons from it.

Annual Grand Junction Women’s March draws huge crowds again

by Anne Landman • January 21, 2019 • 2 Comments

The third annual Women’s March in Grand Junction on Saturday, January 19th, drew an enthusiastic crowd of about 2,000 liberal and progressive western slope residents who came out to support women’s rights, equality for women and gay, lesbian and transgender people, people of color and immigrant communities.

Rep. Scott Tipton votes to continue government shutdown, keep federal workers unpaid

by Anne Landman • January 14, 2019 • 1 Comment

House Rep. Scott Tipton voted to keep inflicting financial pain on government employees to help President Trump extort American taxpayers for $5.6 billion to pay for a 2,000 mile wall between the U.S. and Mexico. (Chart courtesy of the Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction.)

The western slope’s House representative in Washington, D.C., Scott Tipton, voted AGAINST a bill on Jan. 6 to end President Trump’s shutdown for most federal agencies.

The bill, HR 265, passed the House by a wide margin — 243 to 183 — and would have funded most of the parts of government that are shut down, including food safety inspections, child nutrition programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program), rural utilities programs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Farm Credit programs and other crucial agencies and functions on which Americans depend.

Currently over 800,000 federal employees are furloughed or working without pay due to the shutdown, negatively impacting commerce across the country.

Ridgway passes single-use plastic bag ban

by Anne Landman • January 9, 2019 • 2 Comments

Autumn Sagal, Indigo Krois, Elani Wallin and Maizy Gordon (Photo: Telluride Daily Planet)

On December 12 the Ridgway Town Council passed an ordinance (pdf) banning single-use plastic bags and urging residents to curtail their use of other single-use plastics like straws, single-use food take-out containers, coffee stirrers, soda bottles, disposable water bottles, eating utensils and food packaging.

The ordinance states single-use plastics have “severe negative impacts on the environment” on both a local and global scale, that they “contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, litter, atmospheric acidification,” and cause problems with water sources and harm wildlife. Ridgway’s Town Council also passed the ordinance to help reduce the amount of waste going into the town’s landfill.

Hate in Grand Junction, Halloween edition

by Anne Landman • October 31, 2018 • 49 Comments

This sign was placed on our lawn tonight, positioned facing the house. We were out to dinner and to Best Buy earlier in the evening and when we came back, the subdivision was filled with cars parked along the streets, indicating lots of out-of-area trick-or-treaters were in the neighborhood. The sign wasn’t there yet when we got home. When we got home, we left the front of the house dark and went to the back to watch TV. When I took the dog out for his last walk tonight just after 10:00 p.m., I found this sign placed on our lawn. We have political signs on our lawn for Chris Kennedy, Sen. D-7 and Tanya Travis, HD-55. But this looks pretty planned. If anyone has any tips about who did it, please contact me.

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