"Savannah may drop history test for tour guides" by Russ Bynum Associated Press October 15, 2015
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Savannah fell to British troops in the American Revolution and surrendered to the Union Army during the Civil War. Now Georgia’s oldest city is preparing to retreat from a law that for decades has required tour guides to prove to City Hall that they know history.
The City Council is scheduled to vote Thursday on a proposed repeal of tour guide regulations — in place since 1978 — that require all guides to earn a city license by passing a history test before they can take paying customers sightseeing. The repeal is expected to pass as the city faces litigation by tour guides who sued in federal court.
Attorney W. Brooks Stillwell, who represents the city, has advised council members to scrap the regulations before a federal judge decides the lawsuit.
‘‘I’m disappointed,’’ said Councilor Van Johnson. ‘‘But I also realize that when you come up against the US Constitution, you lose.’’
A small group of local tour guides sued City Hall in US District Court last November, saying Savannah’s licensing ordinance violates the free-speech protections guaranteed by the First Amendment by unfairly singling out tourism workers who talk for a living. To earn a license, guides must pass a 100-question test covering topics from Savannah’s 1820 yellow fever outbreak to the architects of its historic homes. The study guide for the test is a 111-page book produced by City Hall.
Decisions by other federal courts in similar cases have been divided. In Washington, D.C., an appellate court threw out licensing rules for tour guides. But another appeals court upheld similar rules in New Orleans.
Robert McNamara, an attorney for the Virginia-based Institute for Justice, which represents the tour guides, said he was confident the council was headed toward repeal.
‘‘This is, in no uncertain terms, a surrender on their part,’’ he said.
But Michelle Freenor, owner of Savannah Belle Walking Tours and one of the tour guides who sued the city, said she won’t declare victory just yet.
‘‘It sounds like it’s headed in the right direction,’’ Freenor said. ‘‘It’s sad it took suing the city to get them to listen to us.’’
City attorneys for months insisted that licensing tour guides was a perfectly legal use of the local government’s ‘‘police power to regulate business.’’ They also argued that deciding who’s qualified to give sightseeing tours is vital to protecting Savannah’s $2.29 billion annual tourism economy. The city has about 330 licensed guides.
‘‘We don’t want people who don’t know what they’re doing out there conducting tour services,’’ Stillwell said. ‘‘We do not regulate what they talk about or what they say. But we want to make sure they know what they’re talking about.’’
The city attorney told council members at their last meeting Oct. 1 that the lawsuit prompted the city’s staff to take a closer look at the tour guide ordinance and recommend changes that would take ‘‘some of the issues off the table.’’
‘‘We believe the private sector can do a better job of training and certifying tour guides, but without the government having a role in it,’’ Stillwell said.
--more--"
I don't like the suit.
"Confederate flag carriers indicted for disturbance at Ga. party" by Richard Fausset New York Times October 13, 2015
DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. — In an unusual legal maneuver, a Georgia district attorney has won indictments against 15 supporters of the Confederate battle flag, accusing them of violating the state’s antistreet-gang ordinance during a confrontation with black partygoers in July.
Douglas County District Attorney Brian Fortner, a white Republican elected to the office in 2014, announced the indictments in a news conference Monday. Each of the 15 was indicted on one count of making terroristic threats, and a second count of unlawfully participating in “criminal gang activity.”
Prosecutors say members of the group, which calls itself “Respect the Flag,” threatened a group of African-Americans participating in an outdoor party on July 25.
A cellphone video of part of the episode shows several white men driving away from the party in a convoy of pickup trucks with the Confederate battle flag and other banners, including American flags, fluttering from the truck beds.
The partygoers contend that members of the flag group yelled racial slurs and displayed a crowbar, a knife, and either a rifle or a shotgun, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group in Montgomery, Ala., that is representing some of the accusers.
This is now looking like a completely staged and scripted false flag provocation for purposes of division and censorship of free speech.
Similarly adorned pickup trucks have become a regular sight in many parts of the South since June, when a white gunman, apparently influenced by racist doctrine, massacred nine black worshipers at a Charleston, S.C., church.
They were there before, but forget that and focus on the narrative.
A subsequent effort by some elected officials in the region to remove Confederate symbols from public spaces has provoked a strong negative reaction from some white Southerners, who argue that the symbols are a part of their history and heritage.
The indictments were handed up Friday by a grand jury in Douglas County, a fast-growing county a few miles west of Atlanta that is about 52 percent white and 44 percent black.
In 1990, blacks made up only about 8 percent of the population, according to census figures.
Fortner said the Georgia statute upon which the second charge is based, the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, is “worded very broadly to deal with any type of activity that occurs with a group that’s organized that commits a crime.”
“We respect the rights of all citizens to exercise their First Amendment right,” he said. “But we’re going to require them, when doing that, to respect the rights of all of the citizens to feel safe and secure.”
Tyranny is always introduced in that way, for who would stand against it?
Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and its chief trial lawyer, could not recall seeing an antigang statute used against this kind of group in the past. But he said it was “a very good use” of the statute.
See: Is the SPLC An American Arm of the Mossad?
And yet the name sounds so benign and benevolent, doesn't it?
Fortner said that some of the men involved in the episode had been arrested, and others would be arrested soon.
In a July 27 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a member of the group who was named in the indictments, Levi Bush, said that the partygoers yelled at some members of his group as they drove by. Partygoers then threw rocks at his truck, he said.
Jwho names their kid Levi?
Natalie Lyons, a staff lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Monday that the use of the antigang law was an “apropos application.” The people indicted in the case, she said, “were traveling together as a group, intimidating and terrorizing people.”
Please apply that to the militant Zionist zealots running Israel. Thank you!
--more--"
Let the erasures begin:
"The University of Mississippi quietly took down the state flag on Monday, heeding the calls of those who say its divisive Confederate battle emblem is harming the school’s future in an age of diversity."
Little Rock officials weigh renaming Confederate Boulevard
Boy, 11, accused of killing 8-year-old neighbor with shotgun
Was a Tennessee boy and he did it because the girl wouldn’t let him see her puppy.
Thank God we don't have such problems up Nawth:
Vermont high school to keep ‘rebel’ nickname
Historical society seeks information about slavery
Okay:
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews
Jewish Involvement in Black Slave Trade to the Americas
I've come to find history is pretty much the opposite of everything I have been taught and told.
