[Update: the photos have now been transferred to Open Salon. Each of the 3 posts is entitled "Occupy Grand Junction"] 

I am unable to embed any photo images from Occupy Grand Junction into my blog here despite repeated attempts and carefully rereading and following the instructions. My only option appeared to be to post them on WordPress and let the RSS feed transfer them to here, hopefully not bizarrely mangled or weirdly cropped. I haven't had any problems in posting photos mixed with text to my WordPress blog----until today. Tonight WordPress only allowed a maximum of three one-mp jpeg images per blog post and blocked me from adding any text. I have no diea why but I couldn't work around it. So I created three (3) successive  posts with 3 photos each.

I apoligize for this tech-clumsy, inelegant solution but I really wanted to share the photos of Occupy Grand Junction on Open Salon.

 This was the first 'Occupy' gathering on Colorado's Western Slope. You may have read that cops in Denver rousted out the Occupy Denver folks from Lincoln Park, near the state capitol building, in the wee hours of this morning (Saturday), arresting 24 in the process. Denver officials announced the park was now closed indefinitely to anyone and everyone unless they first secured a permit.

The Grand Junction turnout was small, about 50 to 75,  but spirits were high. There were people of diverse ages, backgrounds, and appearance.A first General Assembly is scheduled for this evening. A small number have vowed they will risk arrest to stay overnight on the lawn of the old Mesa County Courthouse in defiance of a newly-created city ordinance. Grand Junction, a farm town with a population of about 58,000 (11% Hispanic, almost all the rest white)and a roughly equal number of people living in surrounding Mesa County outside the city limits, is traditionally very conservative. Grand Juncion is 240 miles west of Denver and about 300 driving miles from Salt Lake City. It is the largest city between those two metro areas, 540 miles apart from each other. The City Fathers a few years ago planted the Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn. Under pressure, they added the Bill of Rights and other memorials in granite as  additional exemplars of moral authority to share the space rather than remove the Ten Commandments. So any turnout, any public surfacing of dissent and demands for reform is a remarkable accomplishment in such an arid, stern, and unsympathetic enviornment. It is a  politically, religiously,  culturally conservative town. More power to them--or I should say, to us!  One man held a sign that simply admonished, "Get it!" I loved that. Obviously the rest of the world gets it.

Hopefully the photos will be arriving via the RSS feed soon.