Tag: Mike Kernell

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Politics Politics Feature

Gun Sales and Paper Ballots Are On the Agenda This Week

Given the number of shootings in Memphis and Shelby County, issues of firearms are never very far from public consciousness. One matter of more than usual relevance to the subject was scheduled for consideration by the Shelby County Commission this week.

This is the matter of gun shows in the county. At intervals during the year, large exhibitions of weapons for sale are staged at Agricenter International in East Memphis — and are ballyhooed in advance on billboards.

As gun fanciers and area motorists must surely know by now, the next such gun show, a two-day affair, will be held at the Agricenter on December 14th and 15th. Current gun laws allow the sale of weapons on such occasions without the invoking of backgound checks or other regulations in effect at other venues selling weapons.

The existence of gun shows, therefore, is regarded by many as constituting a loophole in laws to control the sales of firearms.

Shelbycountytn.gov

Tami Sawyer

If Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer has her way, the Agricenter (aka the ShowPlace Arena) will soon cease to be a site that can be used for gun shows.

She is offering a resolution for discussion at Wednesday’s meeting of the body’s law enforcement committee requesting “that the administration decline the use of property owned and operated by Shelby County Government for purposes of hosting gun shows, effective January 1, 2020, with the exception of any contract already in place at the adoption of this resolution.”

Sawyer’s resolution notes that “from January 1, 2016 through November 1, 2019, a total of 4,449 weapons offenses (misdemeanor and felony) were reported in Memphis,” and the U.S. attorney for the Western District said that “in the first three quarters of 2018, Memphis and unincorporated parts of Shelby County reported 3,659 gun crimes.”

The attorney noted further that “the U.S. Attorney’s Office has established a multi-agency task force sting, Operation Bluff City Blues, to reduce gun crime and restore public safety in Memphis and Shelby County.”

By prior action of the commission, Shelby County owns an “operation and management” contract over use of the Agricenter and will do so until June 30, 2024, and therefore has the right and opportunity to control the building’s use.

Since “gun shows are the antithesis of promoting public safety and community peace and harmony,” and “promoters of gun shows have available to them adequate private facilities with which they could contract to conduct these activities, and, upon the example of the City of Knoxville, which has enacted similar legislation opposing the use of public arena space for gun shows,” Sawyer’s resolution seeks that “gun shows be banned on property owned and operated by Shelby County Government, effective January 1, 2020, with the exception of any contract already in place at the adoption of this resolution.”

Preliminary debate on the resolution is scheduled for this Wednesday, with further discussion and a vote on the measure expected on Monday, December 9th.

• The latest in a series of legal efforts to force a revamping of Shelby County’s voting procedures was brought before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati this week, with an expedited hearing on whether a group of local plaintiffs have standing to file suit in the matter.

At stake in the suit is the issue of whether electronic voting per se can be relied on or whether Shelby County should return to conducting its elections by hand-marked paper ballots.

On behalf of themselves and other Shelby County voters, Carol Chumney, Mike Kernell, and Joe Weinberg were scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday, with Chumney presenting oral arguments.

This week’s hearing is a follow-up to previous legal efforts, including one that was rebuffed in October 2018 by U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker, who turned down a request for a temporary restraining order against the use of the county’s current voting machines for that year’s November elections. 

Judge Parker declared that “the mechanism of elections is inherently a state and local function and federal courts should be cautious” and ruled that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to sue regarding the matter.

The plaintiffs appealed and were ultimately granted this week’s hearing. Their suit alleges the touchscreen voting machines used by Shelby County are outdated, insecure, and unable to produce a voter-verifiable paper trail, and that a variety of other security mechanisms are necessary to prevent possible distortion of election results.  

Weinberg, a long-familiar presence in local efforts to amend the county’s voting procedures, said the plaintiffs are seeking something beyond the possible introduction of “paper-trail” technology to append to the present Diebold voting machines or to any other computerized machines that might be acquired.

In a speech to the Kiwanis Club of Memphis in September, county Election Administrator Linda Phillips declared that Shelby County should be able to hold elections with paper-trail capabilities by August 2020. Phillips said the county is in the process of acquiring equipment that would make possible a process combining electronic scanning with paper trail records.

Plaintiff Weinberg said this week, however, that only a reversion to the use of hand-marked paper ballots would reliably limit potential abuse. “Basically, anything digital can be hacked, including ballot-marking devices or the scanner you might use with paper ballots.”

Phillips had said in September that there would be disadvantages to a return to voting by paper ballot alone.The chief problem, she said, would be the high rate of voter error. As an example, she said that “4 to 5 percent” of absentee ballots, which are executed on paper, contain some kind of error. She added, “How many elections can you recall in which the margin of victory was 5 percent or less?”

The failure of attempts to persuade local and state election officials to make voluntary changes made necessary the suit against the County and State Election Commissions, Weinberg said.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Notes on Council, School Board Races

CREDIT: JB

Not to be forgotten (but largely overlooked, all the same) as we approach the August 2nd election date is a race to fill a vacancy on the Memphis City Council and four races for positions on the Shelby County Schools board.

By definition, these positions apply exclusively to Memphis, in the case of the council seat, and mainly so for the school board positions.

CITY COUNCIL, SUPER-DISTRICT 9, POSITION 2: The council seat, an at-large position for roughly the eastern half of the city, was formerly occupied by Philip Spinosa, who resigned in May to take a job with the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce. The seat is now occupied, on an interim basis, by funeral home director Ford Canale, who was appointed to the vacancy by a majority of the other council members. Canale and six other candidates are now seeking the right to fill out the duration of Spinosa’s term.
JB

Council Candidates at Woodland Hills: from left, Erika Sugarmon, Lisa Moore, Tim Ware, Charley Burch (at mic)

The other six are Charley Burch, Tyrone Romeo Franklin, Lisa Moore, Erika Sugarmon, Tim Ware, and David Winston. There have been two public forums to which all the candidates have been invited. Both were held last week — one at the Olivet Worship Center at Woodland Hills on Tuesday, the other at Mt.Olive C.M.E. Church on Thursday. Only candidates Burch, Moore, Sugarmon, and Ware took part, and, while no one bothered to mention Franklin and Winston, the absence of interim Councilman Canale drew significant attention from those present.

In fact, Canale’s ears had to be burning on Tuesday night. Music producer/realtor Burch talked about him at length, casting him as the “plant” in a saga whereby a cabal of business elitists, special interests, and council incumbents are determining who is and can be on the council — and pretty much everything the council does.

“The council knows how they’re voting before they come into the room [the City Hall auditorium],” Burch asserted. “There’s empirical evidence of it.” And Canale’s appointment was a case in point. “The fix was in,” said Burch. “I’m not running against one great candidate up here” he said, a sweep of his arm indicating the fellow candidates on stage with him at Woodland Hills. “But I am running against Canale, because he has a plan to keep us out. … I’m the main one they don’t want elected.”

Moore, who runs a non-profit called Girls, Inc., was of similar mind on Tuesday, speaking of active “collusion” between the council and City Hall on behalf of “a well-orchestrated plan,” where “the rich get richer and the rest of us just watch and struggle.” She called for “equity” efforts in every neighborhood, a crash program in public transportation, and a developed educational plan. Former teacher Sugarmon, the daughter of Memphis civil rights pioneer Russell Sugarmon and a self-proclaimed “people’s candidate,” called for community development programs that would “trickle up” economic progress. Tim Ware, who has had a lengthy career as an education consultant, called for the city to resume its spending on public schools, an idea that the others approved as well.

There was more from all four, much of it sound, some of it more freely speculative, and most of it was repeated at Mt. Olive on Thursday in a program sponsored by the NAACP via its VIP901 election-year campaign and shared with school board candidates. Burch, who has union support and promised to restore the lost pension arrangements of the city’s first responders, and Moore had sounded the leitmotif: that city government was in the clutches of a self-aggrandizing clique, for whom the newly named Canale was just the latest tool.

The Rev. Kenneth Whalum, pastor of the church sponsoring the first council forum and a former school board member, had joined in the verbal abuse of Canale, whom he ridiculed for the fact that the not yet elected councilman’s picture was said to have been mounted already on the City Hall auditorium wall.

Congratulating the other candidates, Whalum said, “All of them were very impressive. They‘re all eminently more qualified than Ford Canale, who didn’t think enough of you to show up. Vote for anybody but Ford Canale. … Put one of these people on the city council and make them take that picture down.”

SHELBY COUNTY SCHOOLS BOARD

At stake on August 2nd are the SCS seats for District 1, 6, 8, and 9. The candidates who turned up for the second half of the NAACP bill at Mt. Olive were basically the same ones who had been at a forum the week before at Bridges downtown. They were: incumbent Chris Caldwell and Michelle Robinson McKissick in District 1; incumbent Shante Avant in District 6; and incumbent Mike Kernell, Kori Hamner, and Joyce Dorse-Coleman in District 8.

The school board seminar at Mt. Olive was lively and reasonably thorough, though it lacked some of the spice that had been contributed at the earlier Bridges affair by candidates Michael Scruggs in District 1; Minnie Hunter and Percy M. Hunter in District 6; Jerry A. Cunningham in District 8; and Rhonnie Brewer in District 9. Incumbent Billy Orgel of District 8 did not attend either forum.

At Bridges, the questions given the candidates were more numerous and more pointed, including one about how to deal with the factor of LGBTQ students that some candidates circled around and others answered with sentiments of simple acceptance. Another question at Bridges that received some lip service at Mt. Olive was that of whether the School Board should be enlarged to include at least one student member. At neither venue was there an outright endorsement of that idea.

[Note for future forum planners. Bridges is an inviting place to have an assembly, but its acoustics, at least when hand mics are being swapped around, are far from ideal]

At both Bridges and Mt. Olive, the school board candidates stressed the importance of involving students’ families in the schooling process, but all of them made the case for increasing resources, from any or all of the funding sources. They all, as well, called for more wrap-around services and such auxiliary personnel as counselors, social workers, behavioral specialists, and the like. And everybody thought teachers deserved more rewards. JB

Board candidates, from left, Mike Kernell, Joyce Dorse-Coleman, Kori Hamner, Rhonnie Brewer

Other notions that found general favor were that of after-school activities and programs to combat what incumbent Avant called the “summer slide.” Though the issue of the district’s optional-schools program was not addressed systematically, there was a certain sentiment, voiced most specifically by McKissack, that the curricula of non-optional schools should be upgraded. As for the problem of differing school formulas — including charter schools and IZone and ASD institutions — the candidates favored some version of sharing resources but tilted toward preserving the norm.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

David Kernell, Whose Email Stunt Made History, Dies From Effects of MS

David Kernell at the time of his 2010 trial

David Kernell, whose father, Mike Kernell, is a School Board member and a moderate former Democratic state Representative and who, like his activist parents, was no political firebrand, died in California last weekend, more or less as a footnote to the 2008 presidential campaign and, in particular to the now stalled career of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who was — and is — regarded as the most unlikely and eccentric nominee for national office prior to the rise of Donald Trump.

The word “footnote” is a quite literal word choice, because, while Kernell, a young man of significant gifts and promise, who had just reached the age of 30, has a page in Wikipedia, that page consists of a single line which links to a longish article entitled “Sarah Palin Email Hack.”

Now that he is deceased — of natural causes related to multiple sclerosis — perhaps the proprietors of Wikipedia will be respectful enough to assign Kernell more space in his own right. While the “email hack” of Palin, which would earn him almost a year’s imprisonment, drew abundant publicity, both during the 2008 campaign and during the 2010 trial of young Kernell, then a University of Tennessee economics major, he had given evidence of being a truly round character with numerous roads to possible influence and success.

His quasi-Caesarian handle, “Rubico,” made (temporarily) famous because of the hack, was also used for Kernell’s online chess competitions, which would see him ranked among the top 10 percent of national players. While a student at Germantown High School he had won a state chess championship.

He had also developed skills as a naturalist, and after completing his degree at UT after serving his time at a minimum security prison applied his cybernetic abilities to the development of facial recognition software that could help identify children susceptible to abuse.

Palin herself, who in 2008 and at Kernell’s trial had likened the hack of her private email to the transgressions of Watergate, had mellowed to the point of contributing a sort of eulogy herself this week:

“I can not fathom losing a child, at any age, and can only imagine the sorrow,” Palin wrote on her Facebook page.. “I am so sorry for [the family’s] loss. As the Kernell family said, the 2008 incident does not define David. He went on to do good for his family and community. I would ask the public to let David’s good memory supersede anything else. My family and I pray that David’s family is enveloped in peace, knowing God has their son, awaiting a reunion someday.”

In today’s political environment of Wikileaks espionage, stolen emails and online misrepresentations, David Kernell’s offense in 2008 was a modest thing indeed — something, as his lawyer argued, closer to a “prank” than to a crime.

What he had done, essentially, was to guess Palin’s online password from publicly available biographical information, gone in out of curiosity, and published a few harmless odds and ends from her email correspondence on the imageboard 4chan, along with the new password he had devised for Palin’s email account once he’d hacked his way in.

The incident, while it technically made Kernell eligible for both felonies and misdemeanors, was a stunt that may have embarrassed Palin but caused neither her nor her campaign any permanent harm. It was nevertheless an invasion of privacy, and the fact that Kernell had attempted to erase evidence of the hack on his computer qualified as obstruction of justice and was the proximate reason for his year’s worth of prison time.

While David Kernell may have enjoyed, by his own statement at the time, a momentary high from the success of his hack, he never perpetrated anything directly malicious with it, and by all accounts, came to regret what he had done. He accepted his punishment and, as indicated, resolved thenceforth to use his gifts and ingenuity on behalf of society as a whole.

Hopefully, his amended Wikipedia page will come to recognize that fact, as his family and many friends and Sarah Palin herself do. His death leaves a palpable sense of loss.

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Politics Politics Feature

With Election Less Than a Month Away, Patterns Are Taking Shape

CREDIT: Jackson baker

We are now less than a month away from August 7th, when the final votes in the Shelby County general election and state and federal primaries will be counted, and distinct patterns are taking shape.

Those races that were expected to be the most closely watched ones at the beginning of the election season — for the 9th District congressional seat, for Shelby County Mayor, for District Attorney General, for the District 29 state Senate seat, and for Juvenile Court Judge and Juvenile Court Clerk, among others — continue to command attention.

Although several circumstances — including charges and counter-charges, endorsements, demographics, and the like — are potentially influencing voter reactions, one factor that cannot be overlooked is the perennial one of money. Some candidates have it in spades, while others are struggling.

A word of caution: Lest it be forgotten, two candidates in the May 6th primaries for county offices — Kenneth Whalum, running for the Democratic nomination for County Mayor, and Martavius Jones, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the District 10 County Commission seat — nearly won races against highly favored opponents with more visible campaigns and vastly more funding.

Credit those outcomes to the power of name recognition, which remains a major factor in the current scene.

For what it’s worth, however, here are three examples:

• City Councilman Lee Harris, who is campaigning aggressively in his Democratic primary effort to unseat District 29 state Senator Ophelia Ford, garnering endorsements by the bushel and across the political board, is also raising disproportionate amounts of money — he boasts a 10-to-1 ratio over Ford’s in the reporting quarter ending June 30th. (His edge in money on hand is somewhat lesser — $28,646.29 to $11,549.66, a shade less than 3-to-1).

• Incumbent Republican County Mayor Mark Luttrell, whose ads have been omnipresent on TV of late, has a marked financial advantage over Democratic nominee Deidre Malone, with a reported $132,417 on hand as of the June 30th report, against $38,915.

• Rather famously, the Democrats’ nominee for District Attorney General, Joe Brown, whose colleagues on the party ticket were counting on him for help, both from the luster of his “Judge Joe Brown” TV fame and from his bankroll, has hit snags in both respects and reports only $745 on hand as of June 30th, compared to $269,227 for his opponent, Republican incumbent D.A. Amy Weirich.

In all three of these cases, the financial underdog is seeking a tactical edge elsewhere.

Ford had her first public event last week, a fund raiser/meet-and-greet at the funeral home of brother Edmond Ford on Elvis Presley Boulevard, gathering around her not only numerous members of the still powerful Ford extended family but supporters from elsewhere on the political spectrum, notably GOP County Commissioner Terry Roland, her former opponent in a 2005 special election.

Malone continued with a series of events targeting various components of the Shelby County body politic — meeting, for example, with a group of women’s rights advocates on Saturday at Pyro’s Pizza on Union, and contrasting her strong pro-choice stance with what she described as positions on Luttrell’s part that were ambivalent at best, particularly in his having chosen to disenfranchise Planned Parenthood in 2011 as the county’s partner in employed Title X federal funding for women’s health.

Brown, meanwhile, was working the grass roots, especially in the inner city, with his “Law and Order Tour” with sidekick Bennie Cobb, the Democratic nominee for Sheriff. He presided over an event last week at the Central Train Station downtown and made appearances at forums, like one held at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church on Sunday, where he continued to levy attacks on Weirich, blaming her for negligence in the matter of the much-discussed rape-kit backlog and questioning her use of federal and state funding.

• Early voting for the August 7th elections begins this Friday, July 18th, at the Shelby County Election Commission’s downtown location, and will continue there and, from Monday, July 21st, at 21 satellite voting sites until Saturday, August 2nd. (The locations of the satellite sites will be posted at memphisflyer.com.)

• In the wake of several meetings of the Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee hashing out disputes over the party’s endorsement of judicial candidates but leaving them intact, a group of Democratic lawyers, including former party chairmen David Cocke and Van Turner, is issuing its own ballot — including judges left off the party endorsement list whom they deem deserving.

These include Probate Court Judge Kathleen Gomes, Criminal Court Judge Mark Ward, and General Sessions Judges Bill Anderson, Phyllis Gardner, and John Donald, among others.

• The first fully separate cattle call for Board candidates took place Monday night at the First Baptist Church on Broad under the joint sponsorship of several ad hoc education organizations.

Present and accounted for were Chris Caldwell and Freda Garner-Williams in District 1; Stephanie Love in District 3; David Winston in District 5; Shante K. Avant in District 6; Miska Clay Bibbs in District 7; and Roshun Austin, Mike Kernell, and Damon Curry Morris in District 9.

Absent from the event, which took place during an off-and-on thunderstorm, were Teddy King and Anthony D. Lockhart in District 3; Scott McCormick in District 5; Jimmy L. Warren in District 6; and William E. Orgel in District 8.

The format called for each candidate to make an introductory statement and field one question from the moderator, Daarel Burnette II of the education periodical Chalkbeat Tennessee subbing for Keith Norman, the church pastor, who was absent. Though Burnette’s question was the same for each candidate, having to do with the candidate’s foremost objective as a prospective board member, there was a fair amount of variety in the answers elicited, most of them sensible and well informed, concerning issues ranging from curriculum to parent-teacher relations.

A final round of questions was solicited from the audience. Fielding a question about the desirability of separating “politics” from education, Kernell, a longtime state representative from southeast Memphis, was unique in embracing that inevitable pairing, saying that his experience and entrée with the state legislature could have positive results for his district and Shelby County Schools (SCS).

The nine-member SCS board being elected in this year’s school board elections from the city of Memphis and unincorporated areas of Shelby County replaces the provisional seven-member board, which was elected from the whole of Shelby County.

One of the members of the outgoing seven-member board, David Reaves of Bartlett, was an interested spectator Monday night, chatting amiably before the event with several of his current Board colleagues who were taking part in the forum. Reaves is now a County Commissioner-elect and will be swapping chairs in September.

Monday night’s event took place under the auspices of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. Ad hoc co-sponsors included representatives of Students First, Stand for Children, and the aforesaid Chalkbeat Tennessee.

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David Kernell is Out From Under

David Kernell in 2009

  • David Kernell in 2009

David Kernell is a free man, as of Wednesday. Kernell, you may remember, was the sometime Memphian and University of Tennessee student who, more or less as a prank, was able to access then vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email account back in 2008, performed some minimal mischief, let others in on the secret, (including the Palin account’s password) and ultimately got himself canned, judged, and sentenced.

Shouldn’a done it, that’s for sure. It was invasion of privacy, any way you cut it. He apparently posted a few family pictures and email messages that were innocuous (and apolitical). Bad enough. Worse was his disclosure of Palin’s password. Actually, his own password. No professional hacker he, all he had done was guess at the code word Palin used to protect her account, employed the email provider’s standard software to change the password, and got in there on his own. Whoopee!

In the process, he left enough tracks that anybody from a Tenderfoot Boy Scout to the FBI could have discovered his identity. The FBI did, he stood trial in Knoxville, fairly sensationally, and was found guilty of a felony. Presiding federal judge Thomas Phillips (a Republican appointee, by the way) ordered him to a halfway house — a fairly lenient reprimand — but the U.S. Bureau of Prisons,which in the federal system, has ultimate authority over internment ((Hmmm. What do you liberty-loving Tea Parties think about that?), overruled Phillips and sent young Kernell to prison for a year.

Kernell has long since done his time and went on to complete his degree at UT, but he remained under the supervision of the U.S. Probation Office. This week, at the request of Kernell’s attorney, Phillips had the prerogative to remove that provision, and as the Knoxville News Sentinel‘s Jamie Satterfield (who very skillfully reported on these matters of record) said, David Kernell was finally free.

Kernell is the son of longtime state representative Mike Kernell, a Memphis Democrat who served from his late boyhood (oh, 20-something) until he was forced, via Republican-controlled redistricting, to run against fellow Democrat G.A. Hardaway in 2012 and was defeated.

Something of a Teddy Bear, the well-liked and conscientious Kernell was a loyal Democrat but enough of a free-thinker that he had numerous friends across the aisle. One of them, Republican state representative Jim Coley, was prominent at a testimonial affair arranged in Kernell’s honor last winter.

Rep. Kernell conducted himself with admirable aplomb and grace throughout the ordeal of his son, but he did not escape — be it a curse or a blessing — the limelight. There was the following, for example, from lalate.com:

palinmikekernell.jpg

Go figure.