Archive for April 15th, 2010
Obama operative David Kernell's trial begins next week
Thanks to Conservatives4Palin for keeping on top of this — Obama operative David Kernell’s trial begins next week, which should be very interesting.
Kernell, if you recall, is the Boticelli-curled “little rascal” who is the son of Obama-supporting Democrat State Rep Mike Kernell. In 2008, prior to the November election, in an effort to assist Obama, self-proclaimed “Obamacrat” Kernell hacked into Sarah Palin’s private email account, changed her password (to “popcorn”…get it? Kernell…kernel…popcorn…HIGH-LARRY-US!), posted her private emails, and gave access to her account to anyone who’d want it.
We’re not legal scholars, but those last bits are where we believe Kernell’s in the most trouble.
He systematically cracked Palin’s password reset system, by taking all of her biographical information and then guessing what her Security Question answers were (which, we believe, had something to do with her growing up in Wasilla). Maybe you have done this with an ex, or a cheating spouse. Sebastian did it with his ex David after he cheated on him. David’s passwords to everything were “Louellaluv”, which is mother’s name, plus part of a nickname Louella uses for herself (Luvvie). That took all of thirty minutes to figure out, once Sebastian sat down and decided to guess David’s passwords.
David’s mommy complex and inability to remember anything too complex gave him up. Kernell had to be much more sleuthy with Palin’s password, because he didn’t actually guess it and instead used the Security Reset to bypass that.
We think he might have not gotten into any legal trouble if he had just stopped there, and merely snooped around in Palin’s account.
But, we took the added step of taking the account away from Palin, posting its contents for the world to see, and then giving access to that account to anyone who’d want it by posting the new password he created online.
We don’t know if political motivation should factor into this, but we believe it should. He didn’t do this on a lark, and didn’t do this because of a personal connection to Palin…he did it because he wanted to disrupt the Governor’s life, throw a wrench into her vice-presidential campaign, and help Obama by hurting her.
It reminds us of the campaign operatives who went to jail a decade or so ago for jamming the phones of an opponent’s headquarters, so calls could not get through. We’re not sure what that man was charged with, or convicted of, but we bet someone out there knows.
What Kernell did sure feels similar. He took down Palin’s communication system via that email, exposed her private materials, and gave access to a valuable resource to the general public.
He should do prison time.
Lots of it.
Please help us continue to monitor this trial, and shed any legal insight you can gleam onto what’s going on with David “Popcorn” Kernell, or his pop, Mike the Tennessee state rep.
Research & Tech Help: Ideas to Breitbart ourselves going forward
We realize the lot of us are at a crossroads here.
There are no longer journalists in Chicago, especially not in the LGBTQ community. When we read the papers, we see, clearly, that the real story’s not being told, and that the Leftist agenda permeates everything. Add on top of that the Daley Machine’s influence on the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and there’s a shocking amount going on that never makes the news, that’s never talked about.
What Andrew Breitbart’s doing on BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BreitBartTV is incredible. What Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe did to ACORN was amazing. Citizen journalists are the future, and America’s only hope of shining bright lights on the crime and corruption the Left does not want reported.
That said, we realize there’s a real need for someone to expose more of what’s going on in Chicago, and to do that with video, Breitbart-style.
We’ve never especially wanted to become the guys to do this, because for the longest time we’ve maintained this fantasy of someday being able to go back to our “regular lives” and leave politics behind us. Though we love most of you out there, we have to be honest when we say that writing for this site takes an enormous amount out of us, with very little payback. Dealing with the trolls and reading the endless hatemail wears on us, especially when we’re sick, or just exhausted from trying to keep up with the fast pace of life in a tax-choked big city. It’s hard just keeping our heads above water, let alone churning out original content and reporting on things we think the MSM is ignoring (deliberately).
But, we collectively came to the realization some months ago that this is our watch, this is our time, and that America needs gadflies now more than ever. So, whether we set out to fill this role or not, this is where we’re at, and we’ve built a strong enough readership and network that can’t go to waste — not when the country needs this resistance to everything unconstitutional and dictatorial the current administration is forcing upon us.
We are not tech guys, by any stretch of the imagination. One of the “fabulous” genes we lack is a gay man’s typical lust for all things new and gadgety. We barely own cell phones. Some of us have no idea how to pick up our voicemails. Texting is a rarity. We have no idea how to film, edit, and create videos.
Much to our detriment, as we see clearly this is the future, and we’re dragging our knuckles far behind.
What we need your help with is doing some research on how we can make the next leap in our evolution, and start thinking about acquiring discrete video equipment that we can use to do investigative journalism here in Chicago, getting the stories the MSM refuses to report on.
To be honest, a large part of what we’ll do will most likely involve going to Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky’s office and recording her staff being as rude, unprofessional, and downright nasty as they usually are. There have been many, MANY, instances where we’ve gone to one of her field offices to give her representatives a piece of our minds, and we’ve been sworn at, told we “don’t matter”, and have been shocked by the vulgarity and hubris on display by people who supposedly work for taxpayers.
We wish we’d been wired, with button hole cameras taping the whole thing.
We’d put all that on YouTube and embarrass Schakowsky, while showing voters just who their Representative in Congress really is and how her staff conducts itself.
Then there’s other people in Chicago who we see out and about regularly, behaving badly, who are part of Mayor Daley’s bigger schemes. If only the public saw these people for who they really are, the city’s future could be affected, as Daley would not so easily get his way. One example of this is Ron Huberman, whom Daley is grooming to be his successor as Mayor. Huberman, who is openly gay, lives a lavish lifestyle while presiding over a failing school system that’s at war with the Teachers’ Union over 1,300 jobs he wants to cut. Huberman is in Sidetracks regularly, where he behaves like a giant ass, and often talks about how stupid most of the kids in CPS are. He laughs at them, ridicules their parents, and makes it quite clear he’s just place-holding this position until he can be elevated by the Mayor to something more important, further building his resume so that he can be Mayor himself upon Daley’s retirement.
If footage of him carrying on in public like this got out, and the parents in CPS saw this, and heard what he says about them and their children, the guy would be toast — and Daley’s succession plan would collapse with him.
It’s shocking to sit down and think about what an impact we could actually have if we just wore a wire and a button hole camera in a jacket wherever we went in this city. Watching Breitbart, and the exploits of Giles & O’Keefe, we realize the only way for bad apples to be exposed is if regular people started doing the exposing, and started essentially filming everything that goes on that’s of any importance.
We all need to not just be citizens, but citizen-journalists, to fill the void that’s been left by actual, degreed journalists who forfeited their positions when they sold out completely to the propaganda aims of the Left.
So, that brings us to our crossroads — do we continue to be guys who recognize the need for more citizen-journalists and just talk about it, or do we take the scary step and force ourselves to fill that niche here in Boystown? The summer is coming, and instead of just reporting on all the crime we see, and the gangs that terrorize the neighborhood, maybe we should step up to the plate and start recording what’s going on, learn to edit and upload those videos, and shame Mayor Daley and the Police Chief into cracking down on the Southside thugs who have turned the gayborhood into their personal hate-crime hunting ground. The neighborhood associations and special commission setup to handle this problem have failed to make anything better for the last three years…but these people have not taped what’s going on, and have not exposed it.
What if we did? Would that make a difference?
Won’t know unless we try.
Here’s where you can really help: we know nothing about tech, but we’ve outlined the sorts of things we want to do out in the field, observing, recording, and reporting what’s going on in our city.
Can you research specific equipment we’d need to achieve these goals? What would be the best audio/video equipment we’d need to do covert work like this? And the emphasis is on the covert not just because of the potential to catch people like Schakowsky or Huberman in stings, but because when dealing with the gangs terrorizing Boystown, we want to be able to record their activities, out on the street in low light at night, without them having any idea they are being recorded. For our own personal safety, we can’t walk around with a handicam, so we’ll need to find something totally surreptitious and well-concealed, but which can still record at good quality and pick up sound well enough to catch conversations in bars or other events that might be newsworthy.
Can those of you with good tech knowledge help us compile a wish list? This way, we can start saving up for the equipment, while we learn the software and technical skills we’ll need to start using all of this to do the job reporters in Chicago refuse to do — for whatever reason.
Because, honestly, we just can’t sit here and do nothing and watch our neighborhood come under attack again this summer without doing something about it. There’s no way we can chase off the gangs of Southside thugs who have been committing so many crimes here in Boystown — not physically chase them off — but maybe if we shine the light on this problem the liberals here in the gayborhood REFUSE to shine on it, and give this matter national attention, the Mayor and his Ministers of Grace will be embarrassed enough to put an end to the Center on Halsted’s misguided mission to bring the Southside’s crime north to victimize us and our friends.
Can you help us build a list of things we’d need to look into to make this possible? Be as plain-spoken and tech ignorant as possible, and don’t assume we know what you are talking about, because when it comes to audio/video anything, chances are we’re clueless.
Pie Hole Update — another casualty of the crime surge in Boystown
It’s been a little while since we’ve updated you on the status of Pie Hole Pizza here in Boystown, a place we all love very much, and will miss when it closes next month (as far as we understand, they’ll shut down some time in May, since their lease is up as of June 1st).
This is a tough one for us to report on, because we really like the cast over at Pie Hole, who are all such interesting and creative people. Zany is a good word for them, and “cast” is apt as they are pretty much a reality-show without an audience. It’s a brightly colored, odd little world over there, open late at night here in Boystown. We took the place for granted as part of our community, and are genuinely sad to see it go.
It was really only during the 2008 campaign that we discovered Pie Hole, when we’d order pizza just about every night to feed the people who came over to phone bank at Buzzquarters while we were running volunteer operations for Hillary Clinton here in Boystown. That’s when we became Pie Hole regulars. We’re not big pizza-eating guys in general since, if we ate pizza all the time, we’d literally be BIG pizza-eating guys. Big in the sense that would make us not only pariahs here in the waist-conscious gayborhood, but would entitle us to our own zip code, the way we could shovel a sausage-and-marshmallow Afterschool Special in, if given the chance. There’s a reason Oprah lives in Chicago, folks, and it’s related to pizza.
It’s a shame this place wasn’t part of our lives before the campaign, because we wish we had a few more years of adventures late at night at Pie Hole. Many stories and posts on this site were, at the very least begun, if not fully written, on slips of notebook paper or on napkins at Pie Hole, after hanging out together at Sidetracks, Roscoes, or Cocktail just around the corner.
We feel like we came late to the party, just as the balloons were deflating and all the drinks were running out. But, it is what it is.
We also feel very conflicted and torn reporting on the latest installment in the drama of what’s happening to Pie Hole, because while we love the business and the people who work there, and After School Special is our favorite pizza of all time, we have to side with the neighborhood on a lot of the criticism of Pie Hole’s business model too.
And, this is as tough for us as it is whenever we have to confront a good friend about something bad that person does — but we wouldn’t be who we are if we didn’t tell it like it is, even if it means calling out someone we like.
In Pie Hole’s case, as much as we love the place, love the pizza, and love their cast, we need to address the issue of the gangs it attracted late at night and what management could have done differently to keep Pie Hole from being a nuisance to many in Boystown.
We’ve talked about, at length, the surge in crime in the gayborhood in the last few years, since the Center on Halsted opened and started aggressively courting young black youth from the Southside to come to Boystown to hang out all day at the Center. They gave them free food and offered a club house to use as a base, where they’d spend all day plotting their nocturnal activities — which involves putting white gay men in the hospital on a frequent basis as soon as the weather turns nice for spring, summer, and early fall.
What started happening, about two years ago, was this: the gangs would hang out at the Center on Halsted until it closed, sleeping, eating, and planning their attacks in the neighborhood. At 10 or 11, when the Center closed, these thugs would then amble outside, to loiter in front of the Center or hang out on the street corner there, or along the Center’s wall on Waveland, leading to the Whole Foods parking lot and the alley there. From roughly midnight until 2am or so, as people would start leaving bars drunk, the thugs would work the side streets, looking to overpower any single guys they could spot, hunting like wolves looking for the weak and disoriented.
Pie Hole comes into all of this since it’s open really late, until 3am (5am on weekends).
And, management never chased these thugs away. They’d take over Pie Hole’s outdoor patio, and would hang out in front of the building, since management made a conscious decision to not chase them away.
This is an instance where a very nice person, Pie Hole’s owner, meant well but ended up contributing to the problems the community’s facing.
The thugs weren’t buying anything, were disturbing the peace, were intimidating and harassing passers-by, but Pie Hole didn’t want to be like everyone else and “chase them away”. Add in the fact that, because these “kids” are black, there’s a racial element to all of this as well, and the situation gets very complicated.
As a business, Pie Hole alienated a lot of customers by siding with the gangs, who drove business away in droves. Many people were too scared to go there for pizza after the bars, because they did not want to deal with the Center on Halsted gang (perched at their late-night stomping grounds). Pie Hole also made a lot of enemies in the Boystown business and property owning community, since people saw the throngs of thugs acting wild and crazy there every night, and began to associate Pie Hole with the upsurge in crime.
Just like with the Center on Halsted, if Pie Hole didn’t afford these criminals a club house, they wouldn’t be terrorizing Boystown as they’d have no base of operations. And that’s just what the neighborhood at large came to see Pie Hole as…the Center on Halsted After Dark.
When we heard Pie Hole was losing its lease, we at first couldn’t understand why the neighborhood was letting an interesting and fun business like this close down. There’s nothing else like it in Chicago, and it’s a gay-owned, gay-staffed, gay-serving establishment we thought the whole community would rally behind. But, the more we dug into this, and the more we talked about the situation with other business owners, the more we realize a much bigger issue was in play…and it was the simple fact that the neighborhood feels that Pie Hole, like the Center on Halsted, contributes to the crime by giving the criminals a playground and clubhouse from which to operate.
That’s why no one rallied to help Pie Hole…they are glad to see it go, because they think part of the crime problem will go with it.
It’s hard for us to admit, because we love the place, but that’s probably true. There were some nights last summer when Pie Hole had to close early because the Center Gang had assembled in such large numbers, and caused such a ruckus, that the police were called. Many times, we felt unsafe walking passed the restaurant, or decided not to stop in for a slice, because the “kids” hanging around were just too loud and aggressive.
The whole thing’s a major eye-opener for us.
Sometimes, even if you really like something or someone, you have to accept the reality that there’s bad as well as good, big picture, with whatever that is. Maybe losing a business, and a part of the community, ends up being best for the community in the long run, as hard as that is to accept in the moment.
Nothing’s ever as cut and dry, black and white, or simplistic as we’d like it to be.
We’ll miss the sausage and marshmallow pizza, the pies named after local drag queens, and all the late night laughs…but will we miss the crime if the gangs scatter earlier in the night when they no longer have a place to hang out?
The answer to that’s pretty obvious.
As much as we like pizza, we love seeing our neighborhood become a safer place with less thugs and hoodlums even more.
A Palin-Romney Alliance?
This is an incredibly interesting development.
Sarah Palin, at the Tea Party in Boston yesterday, pushed forward the idea of Palin supporters and the Romney crowd joining forces, this early in the game, with a Palin-Romney ticket.
The MSM is reporting it as Romney-Palin, but the Governor never said that. Putting Palin second is just the MSM’s favorite hobby of sexism and misogyny rearing its head again.
Where a Y-chromosome is required to top a national ticket, according to those clowns.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it hundreds more times, this year alone, we’re sure, but we have come to realize that Sarah Palin is the sharpest, most shrewd, and most brilliant political strategist around today.
She has the power to single-handedly prevent the fracturing of Republicans the Democrats have pinned all of their hopes on. She also, by nature of her embrace of the Tea Party Movement, will stop the Democrats from propping up a third party candidate to steal Republican votes. If the DNC tries to fund something like that — a Ross Perot spoiler, most likely in the form of someone like Ron Paul — Palin will surely rip that man to shreds and completely discredit him.
In our opinion, Sarah Heath Palin is the only thing standing between Dr. Utopia and a second term. She lives rent free in the White House, occupying a choice place in the current president’s suite of nightmares. She is this administration’s kryptonite.
You betcha.
Romney’s ground operation is strong. Almost all of the young Republicans we know here in Illinois are already on board with Romney. Perhaps Palin is trying to avoid a bloody battle for the nomination similar to what Hillary Clinton went through in 2008, since like Clinton she’d be battling an already established ground team AND her own party, since it’s clear the RNC is backing “it’s his turn” Romney.
We wish we had connections into the Palinverse so we could know what she is thinking, but we’re strangers to Alaska and Palin’s circle of friends. We get no inside scoop from Wasilla, no matter how much we’d love it.
Would Palin run in 2012 as Romney’s VP, postponing her own presidential run until 2020? That’s an interesting prospect…but we’d still much rather see Romney as Palin’s VP.
Though, truly, Palin’s supporters would show up in legion no matter what position she occupied on the ticket. She’d also single-handedly remove Romney’s “Mormon problem”. With her on the ballot, and all the excitement she generates, it’s inconceivable for the MSM to turn Mormonism into an election-losing burr for Romney. We can already imagine Palin, in her plain-speaking way, shooting down every nasty thing said about Romney.
And, if she’s allowed to run as herself, the way she wanted in 2008, and was set loose to go for the jugular the way she should, from Day One, she could completely obliterate the current president and vice president.
We would give anything to be on that campaign. Really and truly. Sign us up today.
What think you about all of this?
How do you take Palin’s words in Boston?
Do you see a Palin-Romney alliance forming?
If so, what do you think this means for the GOP, and its chances in 2012?
Questions for Israeli Expert
Today we have a very rare opportunity to sit down with an expert on Israel for a few hours, to interview her in person and ask just about anything we want.
We’ll be checking this thread until around 6pm or so CST today, so please give us some questions to ask her.
What have you always wanted to know about Israel?
Is there something going on currently you would like to hear more about?
If you found yourself across the table from an Israeli policy expert, what would you talk about?
We’re going to print out this thread and ask her every question you come up with, so please ask anything that you like, as much as you like, and we’ll report back in the next few days when we have the chance to type it all up.
We’re very excited and looking forward to the interview, and hope it’s the first of many such instances where we can have a conversation with an expert like this and expand our knowledge of a topic.
Our love for Israel is second only to our love for America, as we see Israel as this country’s greatest friend and most important ally. We’re shamed by the way the current president treats our friends, and angered by the way he bows and scrapes before our enemies.
We’re curious to hear what the Israelis themselves think of Dr. Utopia, and what they foresee for US-Israeli relations in the future.
Tax Day Tea Party Open Thread
We think the Left has made a critical and perhaps fatal mistake regarding the “Tea Party Movement” in this country.
First, the Left, with MSM complicity, demonized the Tea Partiers, with Anderson Cooper famously deriding them as “teabaggers”. The problem with this is that, while the people who get up on the stage and speak at these events might be crazy people (at least they are, largely, here in Chicago) or have personal agendas driving them (once again, see Chicago, and the likes of Jon O’Hara and others speaking at the Tea Party here today), the CROWD assembled are normal, suburban, average Americans who have more likely than not never participated in any kind of protest before.
They are mad as Hell, they aren’t taking it anymore, and Democrats are absolute fools for inventing the fiction that these are radical, fringe, dangerous bigots. To the contrary, they are some of the most decent people we have ever met, pushed to the point of breaking by the runaway spending of this administration and a Congress that completely ignores the will of the people.
So, the first mistake Democrats made was alienating all of these voters, and letting the mask slip enough so that millions of us (ourselves very much included) now know there is no such thing as a fiscally conservative, pro-Life Democrat anymore. Then, they made the mistake of attacking the Tea Partiers, and further driving them away from the DNC.
The current mistake being made are the efforts to infiltrate and disrupt the Tea Parties.
Who knows what’s going to happen today, but there is potential for unmitigated disaster today — for DEMOCRATS.
Talking about masks slipping, it’s also become clear the Left is driven by a certain breed of radical: destructive, malicious, immature, spoiled. These are the sorts of kids who turn up in legion to create anarchy at global trade conferences, seizing those meetings as excuses to cause riots in the streets of Seattle or Washington. They want to see the world burn. They like causing chaos. Most of them appear to be trustafarians, or at the very least suburban kids gone bad from too much liberal parenting. They’ve never worked hard to build anything up, never had to worry about putting food on the table, so of course they want to smash, crash, and demolish everything that’s come before them. If they can’t leave their mark by creating something, they’ll do it by attacking everything others worked hard for.
THAT’S what the Democrat Party has become under Obama and his gang of thugs.
They are completely misreading the leaves at the Tea Parties. They think these are Republican events, when in reality these are Independent voters speaking up, and Democrats are trying to shout them down.
It’s folly, and we’ve never studied anything like this before — save for the reactions of Versailles to the broiling resentment and discontent in the people in the last days of Louis XVI. The Bourbons didn’t understand, or seem to care, what was going on. They attacked their own people instead of listening to them. And they sure paid the price.
Democrats will be facing just that at the ballot box come November.
They will only make whatever’s to come worse by causing mischief and havoc today.
Thursday Open Thread: April 15th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Thursday?
What are people talking about in your home towns?
