Bring it.   Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens is taking on Mayor H. Ford Gravitt of Forsyth over an obvious violation of the state’s open meetings act.  Click for background. Olens v. Gravitt Thursday, July 25, 2013 at 9:00 a.m. Forsyth County Courthouse 100 W. Courthouse Square Cumming, GA 30040 Be there! Be there! Be there! Here’s Politifact’s take on the case.  It says Mayor H. Ford Gravitt’s claim “We don’t allow filming inside of the City Hall here unless there is a specific reason” is false. Actually, it’s wrong, not false, since that’s what he did.  But, as noted in Brambleman,  “It is a strange and serious business, to make a lie the truth.” h/t  Nydia Tisdale

Update: McNeil has been released from prison in a plea deal that avoided a retrial in the error-filled case. It really just compounds the injustice, however. Click here and here for more details. * * * Even before the Trayvon Martin case, African-Americans were well aware that measures such as “stand your ground” pose a danger to them due to unequal application of the laws. Salon writer Rania Khalek has written about a six-year-old case from Cobb County, Georgia–a suburb of Atlanta–that may serve as a textbook example of this: Not too far from Sanford, Fla., a black man named John McNeil is serving a life sentence for shooting Brian Epp, a white man who trespassed and attacked him at his home in Georgia, another…

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Remember that cop who pulled the gun on the kids at McDonald’s in Cumming, Georgia? Well,  the Forsyth County District Attorney does. The wheels are grinding. He’s been indicted for aggravated assault. Meanwhile, the Hamburglar got away. Read more.

If you haven’t seen this, it’s news to you. Go Dawgs! From the UGA Alumni Blog: Alumnus earns award for thriller based on Forsyth County Congratulations to Jonathan Grant (AB ’76) who recently received the Gold Benjamin Franklin Award for popular fiction from the Independent Book Publishers Association. His book, Brambleman, was honored for its excellence in editorial and design. The Benjamin Franklin Awards are considered one of the the highest national honors for small presses and independent publishers. Brambleman is the story of an Atlanta writer, Charlie Sherman, who is tasked with finishing a dead professor’s book about the mob-driven expulsion of nearly 1,000 African Americans from Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1912. The story takes a wild turn when Charlie thinks he…

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Here’s a brief Independence Day excerpt from the award-winning novel, Brambleman. This  paragraph helps explain how the madness started: And so Pappy just kept rockin’ and spittin’ and gettin’ more ornery. The last time Charlie had been in Forsyth County, exactly two decades after his first visit, he and Momo got into an argument over flying the Rebel flag on the Fourth of July. Charlie, who had come to resent even being at Pappy’s house, saw the flag as an insult to the United States as well as his liberal Yankee world view. After Momo threatened to kill him with his bare hands, the old man called Charlie a “n****r-loving cocksucker” and ordered him to get off the property. Armed with his…

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From the Associated Press, via ajc.com: SANFORD, Fla. — In testy exchanges, George Zimmerman’s defense attorney insinuated that the young woman who was on the phone with Trayvon Martin shortly before he was fatally shot was not believable because of inconsistencies in her story. But 19-year-old Rachel Jeantel held firm in her testimony about what she heard over the phone while talking with Martin the night the unarmed teen was shot and killed by Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. read more.