SOURCE
THE BIG FEED — 2011
Saturday, Oct. 15-16 at the Yuma County Fairgrounds, Yuma, Colo.
The entry to this event is FREE with a $5 donation and one food item to share!

The BIG FEED is an annual event and action held by M12. It is a celebration of the regional landscape, experimental art and architecture, food, music, culture and community. It is a forum to connect community members and artists in a casual atmosphere, as well as an opportunity for the larger public to learn more about the groundbreaking work presented by the attending community members, artists, musicians, critics, and curators. Landing somewhere between a family reunion, potluck dinner, symposium, and festival, The BIG FEED is held every second weekend in October. The event is open to the public and free with a $5 donation and one food item to share. For more information on the event and the organization please visit the M12 website.

Art of the Rural is also on Facebook.

The Topeka City Council is butting heads with Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor, who announced Sept. 8 that due to budget cuts, his office would no longer prosecute misdemeanor cases, including domestic violence cases, in Topeka. This change left it to the City of Topeka to enforce its ordinance against domestic battery.

If the City Council repeals the ordinance, battering cases will no longer be prosecuted in Topeka unless the district attorney reconsiders.

In the meantime, victims of violence are in grave danger. Already, since Sept. 8, the district attorney has rejected at least 30 domestic violence cases. Eighteen people arrested in Topeka for domestic battery have all been released from county jail when no charges were filed.

04/27/2011
Maternity wards are closing in rural areas already underserved by physicians. Rural women need a new model for prenatal care and more options for birthing.

Apr 29, 2011 12:09AM

Polygamous sect leader Warren S. Jeffs has been moved to a West Texas jail that is closer to his group’s Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado but allows somewhat fewer opportunities to communicate with the outside world.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints leader was taken from the Reagan County Jail in Big Lake, Texas, to the Schleicher County Jail in Eldorado on April 20, said Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran.

Though he declined to specify why Jeffs was transferred, Doran said the move makes it easier for authorities to bring Jeffs to San Angelo, Texas, for court appearances. Eldorado is about 25 miles closer to San Angelo, and even when Jeffs was housed in Reagan County, he was still transported by Schleicher County sheriff’s deputies, Doran said.

Full story

April 28, 2011

The man who has been the public voice of Utah’s highest-profile polygamous sect said Thursday he can no longer stand up for jailed leader Warren S. Jeffs.

“I came to the point where Mr. Jeffs’ conduct was indefensible and have chosen not to defend it publicly or privately,” said Willie R. Jessop.

Authorities have accused Jeffs, 55, of spiritually marrying six underage girls, some as young as 12. He is facing sexual-assault and bigamy charges connected with two of those girls and is in a Texas jail awaiting trial.

Full story

April 27, 2011

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided to keep a polygamous sect’s property trust under government control Wednesday, siding, for now, with a state court judge in a heated judicial standoff.

The appellate judges blocked a federal court order that would have temporarily returned control to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for the first time since the state of Utah took over the trust six years ago.

Court-appointed administrator Bruce Wisan will continue to run the trust but is barred from making any major changes.

U.S. District Judge Dee Benson ruled in February that the state takeover was illegal and this month signed the order temporarily returning it to the FLDS.

Then 3rd District Judge Denise Lindberg, who oversaw the administration of the trust following the state takeover, issued her own order blocking that move. She directed Wisan to disobey Benson’s order to turn over all records.

Full story

The United Order of South Dakota, which is the legal name of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints community 15 miles southwest of Pringle, has paid none of its 2009 property taxes, which were due last year. The United Order of South Dakota is more than two years past due for part of its 2008 taxes that were due in 2009. It paid the 2008 property taxes due on four of its nine parcels of property, according to the Custer County Treasurer’s office.

County Treasurer Dawn McLaughlin said the late tax payments were unusual for the group, which had always paid its previous property tax bills on time and in cash.

The FLDS practices polygamy as a religious belief, and its president and spiritual leader, Warren Jeffs, is in a Texas prison facing charges of bigamy and sexual abuse of a child. He has been imprisoned since 2007, when he was convicted in Utah of being an accomplice to rape. That conviction was overturned by the Utah Supreme Court. Whether or not Jeffs’ legal problems are contributing to financial problems for the Pringle compound isn’t clear. On Monday, FLDS elder William E. Jessop filed papers in Utah to replace Jeffs as FLDS president.

No one knows exactly how many people live at the Pringle-area compound, which is notorious among its neighbors for its secrecy and for having a guard tower on its property along Farmer Road. The best estimates, based on residential wastewater system plans submitted to the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources, is around 100 people. Residents of the compound don’t respond to media requests.

In addition to its arrears, the group will owe another $80,424.80 in 2010 property taxes this year, McLaughlin said. If the tax bill goes unpaid, the county will have the legal right to start proceedings to acquire the property in December of 2012, she said.

The United Order of South Dakota’s property near Pringle includes at least nine buildings, mostly high-quality, large log residences that are assessed at more than $5 million. They are spread over 140 acres in a secluded, fenced, forested area on the rim of Red Canyon. They most recently constructed a 13,000-square foot two-story chapel and education center that will be valued at more than $1.3 million by the county’s director of equalization when completed. Total 2011 property tax valuation for the compound is about $5.6 million.

The details are horrific: Susana Chavez, an internationally renown poet and long time activist who spoke out against the decade-long femicide of woman in Juarez, was found murdered this week. She had been tortured and suffocated; her left hand had apparently been dismembered with a saw.

Chavez is one of over 500 women in Juarez who have been found murdered in the last decade. And her death has caused an uproar because she had been one of few to speak out against the growing femicide, coining the phrase, “Ni una mas,” (“Not one more) and routinely criticizing local authorities for refusing to properly investigate the crimes. Her death has cast new suspicions about local authorities’ ability to handle the cases. That is to say that they’ve largely chosen to ignore them; so far, 92 percent of cases of women who’ve been murdered in the region remain unsolved.

Many who knew and loved Chavez are accusing authorities of trying to silence the publicity surrounding her murder. Within days of her murder, police announced the arrest of three suspects, two of whom were under 18 years old. Police said that Chavez had gone out drinking with the suspects and was killed after refusing to have sex with them.

The story is sketchy to those who knew and loved Chavez, and report that she had actually been on her way to meet friends at a local restaurant on the night that she initially disappeared.

Full story

 Since I decided it was a term I could use, as in, “I have invitations from friends to visit wonderful places but I stay at home like a hefted sheep,” I looked it up. I didn’t use the dictionary, I Googled it. I found an article about one of my favorite subjects: our connection to our landscape, our sense of place, and how it molds us. 

The author, writing in the London Times, believes that people who move from place to place develop “a sense of anomie that comes in a society constantly and unhappily on the march from one place to another. This is what social dislocation really means: dis-location, to be taken from the place you know to somewhere you do not, but carrying always the internal desire to return to the place you were once hefted.”

He goes on, ”I am certain that people grow into a landscape, and landscapes grow into the bone, leaving a permanent imprint that survives down the generations. If sheep carry a memory of place, so must every human, no matter how far we travel from our hefts. Place marks us all, and leaves its traces.”

I wonder about those of us who have gathered together around the Rural Woman Zone. Do we each have a sense of connection with the rural places where we live? What kinds of traces and memories have place left in us?  What are we connected to? The people? The landscape? The culture?

What if we are connected to a place – the landscape, the remoteness, the river, the trees, the sky, a place where we it’s quiet and we can raise our own food, or get on a horse and ride across the countryside – but we aren’t a part of the local culture because it is too conservative, or racist, or patriarchal?

What do we do if we have a disconnect between our ties to the landscape and the culture? How different from the local culture and political landscape are you? Do you live in your rural area because it is your culture and you find your community there? Or have you self-marginalized in a remote place because you have chosen to live apart from the world, or to live in a landscape that you love in spite of a disconnection with the local culture?

Next time: Questions about disconnections: Are you a gun control advocate living in a “Second Amendment” culture? Are you a dove among hawks? Are you a minority or anti-racist advocate in a racist community? Are you the lone blue spot in a sea of red? 

This is a topic of discussion on Rural Woman Zone on Facebook. 

Complete article, Are you hefted? by Ben MacIntyre

The ruling means that individual donations and political parties will be outspent to the point they are meaningless. The message will be controlled by the corporations and all of the money they have at their disposal. Candidates will be picked and supported by corporations acting in their own interest. This essentially disenfranchises actual “people” — makes our participation in the political processes and our votes completely inconsequential. As Keith Olbermann said in his special comment, “no actual persons will be required for elections in the U.S.”

Leading Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg and some of his colleagues circulated a memo saying the ruling will “drastically alter the landscape for candidates and political parties,” there will be an avalanche of outside spending, and “the political party as we know it is threatened with extinction because it will face spending limits outside groups don’t.”

People are alarmed and are taking action to urge Congress to pass laws to undo the damage. That may not be possible before the 2010 election.

Picture compliments of National March for Campaign Finance Reform member

President Obama’s statement on the ruling  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-JMDeKOGA

Facebook Group National March for Campaign Finance Reform
 

Complete text of Justice Stephens’ dissent

Move to Amend
http://movetoamend.org/its-time-change-rules
 
Alliance for Democracy
http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/
 
Sourcewatch
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch
 
Center for Media and Democracy
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/632/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1883
 
The Court’s Blow to Democracy – NY Times editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22fri1.html?hp