Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern North Carolina Now

A current school board member gave me some insight on how the current out of town school board attorney came to represent the school system. During the Covid era some issues arose between the last local attorney to serve as school board attorney and Superintendant Cheeseman, and also between that attorney and at least one board member. Ultimately, she resigned to take another position.

While in Perquimans County, Cheeseman had used the attorney who represents school boards in lawsuits over a million dollars to serve as the general local school board attorney as well. Each local school board pays into a trust run by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) that handles such major lawsuits, and this attorney handles cases for that trust. Cheeseman suggested bringing him in as Beaufort County School Board attorney for routine legal matters, like he had done in Perquimans County rather than retaining another local attorney, and the school board agreed.

Using an attorney with such a close relationship with DPI is a two edged sword. On matters where there is a minor disagreement, his relationships may help positively resolve them for the local board. However, in more major disagreements that cannot be so easily settled, it puts such an attorney in a very awkward position caught between a relatively minor client, and another who is a gatekeeper of his bread and butter.

Commented: Thursday, November 30th, 2023 @ 9:22 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Normally the courts are who would investigate election results. In some countries in Europe, it is automatic that a top court such as the Constitutional Court reviews and approves the election results before they become official. In Grazil, it is the military high command. In others, the courts only become involved if there is a challenge, as has happened in recent elections in London and Berlin. In London, only one district had evidence of irregulatities, so the election was re-run only in that district by court order. In Berlin, the Constitutional Court ordered the entire election re-run. American courts have regretably been overly gunshy about getting involved in election challenges. Those things should be investigated and the challenge proven either right or wrong, not left to fester with no investigation.

Commented: Wednesday, November 29th, 2023 @ 2:43 pm By: Steven P. Rader

I lived for two years under a Communist Party government in eastern Europe where there was a lot more freedom of speech than this thug Varadkar wants to give the Irish people.

Commented: Tuesday, November 28th, 2023 @ 10:45 am By: Steven P. Rader

There is a lesson in that Dutch election for some wimpy GOP politicians who want to wimp out on the immigration issue, and that same lesson is also there in many other recent European elections. Those like Thom Tillis who always go soft on this issue threaten one of the key issues Republicans have that will push us to victory in 2024.

I read that some think it will be bumpy in the Dutch coaltion negotiations, and the lightning rod personality of Geert Wilders may make that so. He has often gone out of his way to court controversy, like announcing a contest for drawing Mohammed cartoons right at the time Muslims were rioting over that very issue, but hopefully they will be able to get beyond that quickly. Those three parties align well on issues. While Wilders party talks of "zero asylum seekers", the New Social Contract campaigned on putting a low cap on total intake of immigrants and asylum seekers at a level of about ten percent of the number of just asylum seekers entering last year. The VVD's new leader has been their party's most forceful advocate of cracking down on illegal immigration and campaigned on things like restricting the ability of migrants or immigrants to bring family into the country. The Party for Freedom and the New Social Contract are both strict sovereigntists who want to reduce the powers of the EU. With the departure of Rutte, the VVD is now less globalist oriented, so they should be able to work that our.

FIghting illegal immigration is a winning issue for conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic.

Commented: Thursday, November 23rd, 2023 @ 2:29 pm By: Steven P. Rader

The climate-industrial complex tries to blame any unusual weather event on "climate change". Like the medieval church blaming such things on punishment from God, the climate alarmists want to blame them today on "punishment from manmade global warming".

A good example was a massive flood a year or two ago in a region of north western Germany, which produced higher floodwaters than any flood event in many centuries. The usual suspects immediately blamed the flood on "climate change". However, it turned out that the main culprit in the severity of the flooding was something that very commonly causes floods to get worse, deforestation. The reason for the deforestation was also telling. THe trees were cut down to make space to build wind turbines and solar farms. So, it was actually climate hysteria that caused the bad flooding, NOT "climate change".

Commented: Tuesday, November 21st, 2023 @ 9:54 pm By: Steven P. Rader

George Orwell wrote decades ago: "Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen." If only he could see his own country, and the western world in general today.

Orwell also wrote: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Commented: Monday, November 13th, 2023 @ 4:46 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There goes Bob, and his wacky definition of "truth" again! The two statutes cited very definitely do exist. What is up for question is thier interpretation, and apparently the SCOTUS has not pronounced on that as yet. Common sense says that "early voting" as it is practiced today under state "no excuse" absentee voting statutes makes a total mockery of those two federal statutes, but there is an open question as to whether the SCOTUS whould have the 'nads to strike those state laws down, at least as to federal elections. Unfortunately, American courts have shown much more reluctance to tackle election shananigans than their counterparts in Europe.

Commented: Monday, November 6th, 2023 @ 6:05 pm By: Steven P. Rader

What really injected politics into Covid response was the change at the World Health Organization (WHO). The director of WHO during the Covid era was Tedros of Ethiopea, the first non-physician to head the WHO ever. Throughout its previous history, all directors had been physicians but Tedros was a politician and bureaucrat. He liked to call himself "Dr. Tedros" but that degree was an academic PhD (public administration or political science or the like) not a medical MD. Politicking by Communist China won the position for Tedros over a much better qualified British physician.

When it was led by professional medical people, WHO had devised a pandemic emergency plan that relied on herd immunity, but after Communist China adopted the lockdown strategy, their WHO apparatchik Tedros followed suit and junked the well prepared herd immunity strategy. That was all about politics, not about science or medicine. The few places that stuck to the original WHO plan of herd immunity, like Sweden, did much better on battling Covid than those who followed the new WHO Chinese lockdown plan.

The first western country to fall for the lockdown plan was the UK, and that was all politics, too. The best epidemiology and viroloty minds in the country from Oxford and Cambridge proposed a herd immunity plan and that is the way the government was headed until a lesser light from Imperial College London used a PR campaign with blatant scare tactics delivered through the media to stampede the government to move to a lockdown strategy instead.

Fauci just followed in their footsteps.

Commented: Sunday, November 5th, 2023 @ 5:56 pm By: Steven P. Rader

In this past legislative session, when Rep. Kidwell introduced legislation to be sure our school board had authority if they should choose to adopt a curriculum that the far left opposed, he was told by legislative lawyers that it was not necessary and that the North Carolina law cited in this article already gave them authority to do that. The education bureaucracy both in Raleigh and locally wanats everybody to think they have a veto but under the law they do not. We need more school board members who are willing to exercise the authority that the law gives them on curriculum.

Several states, notably Florida and to a lesser degree Texas are pushing back against these domineering textbook companies. If it has any of the alphabet soup of woke - CRT, DEI, ESG, SEL, etc. - Florida will not approve it.

Commented: Sunday, November 5th, 2023 @ 9:55 am By: Steven P. Rader

More ignorance. Nobody is found "guilty" in civil court. Any jurisdiction with an objective jury pool would have tossed out that nothingburger.

Commented: Monday, October 30th, 2023 @ 2:00 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Prendiegirl, you must have missed what was happening all over the country in school board elections. There has been a vast earthquake of turning out do-nothing board members for those pledged to take a meat ax to "woke". What is driving this is that with students at home during Covid, parents saw the crap that was in their curriculum and became angry. School boards even in major urban counties are being replaced with conservatives who want to end the "woke" garbage. It is even impacting other elections, like in Virginia, where it was a key factor in electing Republicans to all statewide offices.

Here in North Carolina, a poll by the Civitas Institute found that 71% of North Carolina parents were concerned about indoctrination of their children in the public schools. That says a lot about why voters are turning against "business as usual" school board members who just go along with whatever the education establishment puts forward.

I know that there is a little political cult that sees Hood Richardson hiding behind every bush, but Hood Derangement Syndrome (which is like Trump Derangement Syndrome) is not the explanation of voters turning to known conservatives in Beaufort County or any other school board elections.

Many conservatives, including myself and former State Representative Sandy Hardy helped encourage conservative candidates to run in the last school board election. All of those elected were strong personalities who stand on principle and are not led around by anyone. They research the issues themselves and make up their own minds.

I know that there is one of the school board members up next year who at least has a heart in the right place on school issues, but it takes more than that. It takes a backbone to stand up against the "woke" agenda. That aspect is still to be determined, as there will probably still be opportunities to show the presence or absence of such backbone. There are also two liberal Democrats on the board who will not deviate from woke and need to be replaced.

If you really want to credit the person most responsible for pushing for a better school board in Beaufort County, that would be former Belhaven Mayor Adam Oneal. Adam first got involved with education issues in helping parents fight some of the stupid Covid policies in the county schools, and went on to pick up on other concerns of parents.

We still have a school board that adopts common core math injected with "woke" for its math curriculum. The county schools curriculum direstor falsely told the board that the Bridges curriculum was not common core, and when people researched it and found out it was, he had to admit that it was. There is more work to be done. Parents, conservative school board members, and conservative legislators have been fighting common core math for years since it first showed up in our state.

Commented: Friday, October 27th, 2023 @ 1:33 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Stan, if you are referring to the phone call Raffensberger recorded from Trump that the Democrats make such a big deal over, if you listen to the whole thing instead of the snippet they push, he is making a point to Raffensberger about why he needs a full recount as the hurdle he has to get over is fairly small. There is nothing at all criminal about pushing for a full recount. Heck a LOT of Democrats have done that and then claimed to find new boxes of ballots in closets, trunks of cars, and whereever that just happen to be mostly Democrat. That has happened in several races for Senate, governor, or Congress. Never any criminal investigations but they have stolen a number of public offices that way.

I have never known of Republicans in recounts to claim finding "missing" ballot boxes. They have just wanted a second look to see if things were counted correctly. In Georgia, there were some really questionable activities in the election night count, especially the mail in ballot count for Fulton County, where they ran off the election observers. What was recorded on a security camera that they apparently did not know was filming was appalling to say the least.

Commented: Wednesday, October 25th, 2023 @ 10:34 am By: Steven P. Rader

You are clueless, Bob. One of the things that pressures defendants in criminal cases is the enormously high cost of criminal defense, which can ruin people financially from a major case. Sure Trump cannot be pressured on that because he is very wealthy, but neither can the poor because the taxpayers are paying for their appointed lawyers. It is the MIDDLE CLASS defendants that feels this pressure. They have neither the money of the wealthy nor the free lawyers of the poor.

It is the middle class targets of this partisan prosecutor who are vulnerable to this pressure. If they do not dance to her tune, they face financial ruin and potential heavy jail time. It not about truth, it is about conforming to her narrative. When this is going on in a political prosecution, as it is, then democracy in our country is hanging by a thread.

Commented: Tuesday, October 24th, 2023 @ 11:26 am By: Steven P. Rader

The squeeze by the far left Democrat prosecutor in Georgia on other defendants is a huge danger to coercing questionable testimony against President Trump. It is a targeted version of the common prosecutor squeeze on co-defendants. Most prosecutors just want to bolster their conviction record, and having a co-defendant rat out other defendants helps them get convictions. When a co-defendant pleads to a lesser charge in return for "truthful testimony", truth is not measured by whether it would pass a polygraph, but whether it works with the prosecutor's theory of the case. Deviate from what the prosecutor wants, and one loses his or her plea deal.

In a run of the mill case, if the prosecutor gets one defendant to flip, they will go along with that defendants version of what the others did, which is often tilted. For example, in a four defendant capital murder case where I was first chair counsel for one of the defendants, another co-defendant flipped and told a version to minimize his role and portray much larger roles for the other three. The DA just wanted convictions, so he went with that. Four defense attorneys for other defendants concluded that based on other known facts, the "cooperating defendant" was almost certainly the triggerman and the instigator of the murder, but he put that off on others.

Now take a DA like the one in Georgia who has an agenda in the case, a particular defendant she is after. No other defendant is going to get a plea deal unless they tell the story the way that DA wants to go after that particular defendant. It doesn't matter what the actual truth is, they have to conform to the "truth" as that DA sees it.

Paul Manafort and Roger Stone both came forward to reveal that anti-Trump prosecutors offered them sweetheart deals if they would tell what the prosecutor wanted against Trump. They knew the prosecutor's version was a lie, so they accepted time in prison rather than lie for a crooked prosecutor.

The financial burden of contesting any of these cases would likely break most of the co-defendants financially, and enough charges are piled on that they would do significant jail time if found guilty. These defendants, especially the lawyers among them, also know they are facing a jury pool that will be highly unfavorable to President Trump or anyone associated with him. The places where these cases were brought were chosen for that very reason. These defendants want to survive this and have a life on the other side, and all of this creates an enormous pressure to just say whatever it is the DA considers "the truth" in order to save their own skins. Few have the stamina of Manafort and Stone to do what is right and stick to the actual factual truth.

Donald Trump is facing a kangaroo court in Georgia, and that is a threat to American democracy. Of course, the DC and Manhattan situations are not much better. At the very basic level, without a change of venue to get an unbiased jury, the Georgia, New York, and DC cases all present fairness problems in a big way and need a change of venue at a minimum but it is highly unlikely that will happen.

Welcome to the new American banana republic.

Commented: Monday, October 23rd, 2023 @ 6:34 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Ken Buck, one of those stabbing the GOP caucus in the back, had the audacity to send me a fundraising email a day or two ago. I told him to stick it where the sun does not shine.

I am on his mailing list for giving his US Senate campaign some money some years ago. He was the candidate backing by several national conservative organizations against McConnell's candidate. When McConnell's boy lost the primary, McConnell did everything he could to undercut Buck so he would lose the general election. I initially was pleased to see him win a House seat, but in the last year or so, he has started going off the reservation quite a bit, and this is the latest one. Now I would be inclined to send a contribution to his priimary opponent.

Republican activists are fed up with the Ken Bucks of the Congress.

Commented: Saturday, October 21st, 2023 @ 3:14 pm By: Steven P. Rader

The next step, as always happens is the Democrats will sue. They are now fresh out of luck in the state courts, so it will be in federal court. Hopefully the legislature's attorneys have covered all the bases from the most recent SCOTUS redistricting case out of Alabama, so that should also fail to get anywhere. But the Democrats will still make a show of it, and will probably judge shop to find an Obama judge who will stop the process at least for a while with a temporary restraining order. Hopefully, there expected song and dance can be disposed of quickly.

Commented: Thursday, October 19th, 2023 @ 3:10 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Maintaining proper deed records, and that means hard copy records having primacy, is important to the citizens of Beaufort County. The best path to accomplish that is to try to get people working together and not descend into warring factions. Proper policy is what is important here, not personalities.

Stan, you are quite correct about the hard copy index, as well. When I was doing real property work as an attorney, I was always very leery of a computer index, and there is a very good reason for that. With a hard copy index book, it is easy to pick up a variation in a name that can reveal documents that may impact the title you are searching. A computer index is only going to spit back the name exactly as it is put in the computer. I first encountered a computerized index of more recent filings in Pitt County over 20 years ago, and was so uncomfortable in relying on it, I never did any further real property work in that county.

The space problem is real, something I could see coming years ago. There are ways to temporarily put bandaids on it, but none of them are going to work long term or even medium term and not even very acceptable short term. We need hard copy deed books and index books, and we need more space in the Register of Deeds office to accomodate them.

As a practical matter, when there are multiple people working on titles at one time, using the books allows everyone to work instead of waiting in line to use the computer terminals. For permanence, hard copy records are more secure. In the days of computer hacking, expecially on the cusp of AI making that potentially much easier and more far reaching, relying exclusively on computerized records is asking for trouble. Further, we could easily have major computer outages if the Earth experiences another massive solar eruption of the scale of the Carrington Event of 1859. We have come all too close to that several times since.

Our elected officials have a duty to Beaufort County citizens to maintain our courthouse records in a usable and permanent form, hardcopy plus digital or microfilm backup. We need all of our elected officials to work toward that goal.

Commented: Wednesday, October 4th, 2023 @ 12:19 pm By: Steven P. Rader