Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern NC Now

The Democrats are trying to freeze out Biden's primary challengers, one of whom is a sitting Democrat Congressman, and it is sad that Republicans have allowed them to do that here in North Carolina. At worst, they could have had one Republican absent for that vote and the other two vote NO to show Republican opposition. This is heavy handed machine politics by the Democrat hierarchy to force feed Biden to their voters. It is an assault on democracy by the "Democrat" Party. And, yes it is a very Soviet style ballot to be offered one choice when others are running.

Republicans have never dictated this sort of thing to our voters. I remember the first primary I was active in 1972, when Richard Nixon, the closest thing Republicans ever had to a machine politician, was being challenged by two sitting Republican congressmen, one, Congressman John Ashbrook (R-Ohio) from the right, and the other one from the left. In his announcement, Ashbrook accused Nixon of "running on George Wallace's platform (from the 1968 campaign) but carrying out Hubert Humphrey's". These challengers were not frozen out of the primary and caucus process as the Democrats are now trying to do to challengers to circle the wagons around Biden.

Commented: Thursday, December 28th, 2023 @ 12:22 pm By: Steven P. Rader

The actual brief filed by former Attorney General Ed Meese and the two law professors is itself not readily available, Bob, but the legal theory behind it is well explained in the news coverage. Given who filed it, I trust their conclusion. One of those articles, the one in Red State, which is the better one, was written by a lawyer who has a practice in federal criminal law, not some hot shot journalist. He clearly has obtained the brief and read it to provide his analysis. I wish he could have put up a link to it, but he hasn't.

Commented: Monday, December 25th, 2023 @ 4:57 pm By: Steven P. Rader

I look at the choices in our primary as 1) who will make the best governor and fight for GOP principles, and 2) who will make the strongest candidate.

As to being the best governor, I rely on my experience as a political appointee inside the Jim Martin administration, and my observations of the Jim Holshouser and McCrory administrations. There are two important aspects to look at, 1) who will stand up for principles, and 2) who has the ability to staff an administration with solid people who will carry out the policies and principles of the administration.

As to staffing a government office, Graham is an unknown quantity as he has no record on that. Folwell has an excellent record of getting the right people on his staff to get things done on his agenda, while Robinson has a very poor record on that. Folwell is the very clear choice on this criteria.

As far as promoting solid GOP policy in government, Graham has no record on this as he has never been in office, but has pushed some very non-Republican policy as a private citizen. Folwell has a strong record of taking the bull by the horns, pushing hard, not being afraid of the special interests and getting things done on GOP policy. Robinson started off great with his crusade against woke curriculums in the schools, but after getting himself a lot of publicity on that, dropped the ball. He has not picked up the ball on ANY key policy issue since. Folwell, again, is head and shoulders ahead of the others on this criteria.

When it comes to electability, both Folwell and Robinson have good track records, but Folwell has won consistently, and so far Robinson only once. Graham has no track record. Graham pissing off the farmers means he has the least shot at election. I have some concerns about skeletons rattling around in Robinson's closet which have been aired on the Daily Haymaker and the Democrats are probably holding in reserve if he is the nominee.

Everything considered, to me, Folwell is the clear choice.

Commented: Sunday, December 24th, 2023 @ 2:20 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Bob, how it is moral or ethical to give those who willfully and wantonly break our immigration laws and lie to our officials about fake asylum claims preference over those on waiting lists who have applied properly and sit and wait properly and legally in their home countries for what immigration slots we may have available? Those on the waiting lists are properly vetted on criminal bankground, and fully examined medically, and they are trying to do it the right and legal way. Why should they be at the back of the bus behind lawbreakers?

When I ran a program in Moldova I had an employee who applied to come to the US as a legal immigrant. He had worked for years for an American organization and handled our accounting, complying both with Moldovan and US laws. His wife was a law student, and they both were very fluent in English. There were limited slots for immigration from Moldova and a long waiting list unless he scored on the "visa lottery" where he had no luck. Finally, he applied to Canada instead. The Canadians found their economy needed his accounting skills but required him to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which is a difficult test but he passed on the first try. He and his wife had to take comprehensive medical exams and undergo an extensive background check, both of which they passed with flying colors. He is now a citizen of Canada living in Alberta, working as an accountant, and his wife went back to school, changing her major and is now working in Canada as well. When I think of people like him who tried legally and were unsuccesful, but Biden is letting in a raft of Venezuelan prostitutes who are unvetted lawbreakers, it is very frustrating.

How in the world can you justify letting in arrogant, self-entitled lawbreakers in preference to those you go through the expensive and timeconsuming, and often unsuccessful process to come legally?

Commented: Thursday, December 21st, 2023 @ 1:51 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Political terms in Europe often have different meanings than in the US. In Europe, "progress" or "progressive" are often found in names of parties of the right as the winning party in Serbia. This began in Denmark fifty years ago, when Danish millionaire tax lawyer Mogens Glistrup founded the Progress Party, which ran on a three point platform of "abolish the income tax, abolish the welfare state, and fire the bureaucracy", coming in a strong second place in the party's first parliamentary election contest. Glistrup's run away success led Norwegian dog kennel owner Anders Lange to form a similar party at the last minute before a Norwegian parliamentary election, running on a shoestring and winning two seats. That party changed its name to the Progressive Party, and also adopted a very strong anti-immigration message and has been a player in Norwegian politics since, joining several coalition governments.

Of course, the term "progressive" was a key political term of the Soviets who used it to define a combination of card carrying communist party members and fellow travellers who followed a similar ideology but were not actual party members.

The term "liberal" is used differently in Europe than in America. What Americans would call a "liberal" in Europe would be called a "socialist" or "social democrat". The term in Europe still generally means what Americans now call a "classical liberal", which includes support of small government, low taxes, free enterprise, and individual liberty.

Commented: Monday, December 18th, 2023 @ 8:23 pm By: Steven P. Rader

The Free Democrats are a good example of a party that deviated from the old political saying that "you do not piss on your base". A "classical liberal" party that has always stood for low taxes, small government, and individual liberty, it postured itself in past elections to the right of the Christian Democrats on immigration, and more skeptical than the Christian Democrats of green energy. It largely abandoned its positions on those issues when it joined the present coalition, and its voter base has punished it for that in just about every subsequent local election. The polls show a big drop in its support for the next national election. From the contact I had with people from the FDP when I was working in Europe, their stances in the current government have been out of step for the party.

This is an issue that some Republican politicians need to learn, most specifically Mitch McConnell at the national level and Phil Berger at the state level. There comes a point where voters in the party base just will not tolerate playing footsie with the Democrats.

Commented: Saturday, December 16th, 2023 @ 6:31 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Bob, what has happened is that court after court said "we are not allowing you to litigate those election issues to determine if they are true or not". They did not allow discovery or hearing on the facts. That is a very different response by American courts as compared to European courts on election contests.

In Georgia, there are two cases which might acutally get into the facts on what happened election day. One is a civil suit in federal court financed by Mike Lindell, where an Obama-appointed judge has ruled the case will go to trial and actual facts can be produced to the court. She did not shut it down on prelimary motions like so many other courts. The other is the Fani Willis prosecution of Trump and others, where one of the defendants has issued wide ranging subpoenas to gather evidence of election fraud. That could prove a huge problem for Willis, as the court is going to have to allow in exculpatory evidence for a defendant on the charges she has brought. Her scheme against Trump may blow up in her face.

Commented: Thursday, December 14th, 2023 @ 4:12 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Growth????? The massive forced bussing ordered by Judge McMillan was a losing situation for everybody. The students bussed out from the predominantly black high schools to majority white high schools did not want to go, the blacks already there were caught in tricky, delicate, and uncomfortable situations due to resentments from the blacks being bussed in. For whites there was a lot of chaos that disrupted education.

These problems persisted beyond that first year. The very next year, the first white student walkout occured at South Mecklenburg. A white girl whose class was in the school library asked to go to the restroom and did. When she walked in, there were some of the Second Ward black girls in there cutting class and they jumped her, holding her down and beating her while she called for help. A student government officer was walking down the hall toward the principal's office, heard the cry for help, and went in and rescued her. The only student disciplined was the white boy who rescued the girl, who was suspended for going in a girl's restroom (different era, I guess!). The next day there was a student walkout and protest, which most white students and many of the rural blacks as well, from what I was told, participated in. Unfortunately, my high school German teacher, Mr. Idol, got fired over that. He had gone out for a pizza the evening before the walkout, and there were a bunch of students in the pizza place talking about the incident and what to do about it. Mr. Idol had agreed it was wrong to suspend the rescuer and not the assailants and suggested a petition to take to the school board. Apparently that was enough for the principal to blame him for the walkout and protest.

A couple of years later, bussing was still festering as an issue in the Mecklenburg County schools. When a bussing dispute arose in Boston, somebody got an idea to bring some students up from those schools to tell Boston that bussing was okay, and did so. This infuriated many other students who still were upset over bussing, and the next day, anti-bussing demonstrations broke out at all of the high schools and some of the junior highs in Mecklenburg County, and from the news footage I watched, there were both white and black students participating in those protests.

Judge McMillan paid a personal price for his radical social engineering court order. He was a member of the Myers Park Country Club, the most elite upscale country club in the county. My brother's girlfriend's family were also members so I heard the impact there. After McMillan's order, the rest of the members gave him the silent treatment, refusing to talk to him. He would try to talk to people he had known for years and they just ignored him like he was not there. He stayed away months, apparently hoping it would blow over but it did not. When he went back, he was still given the silent treatment. His ruling made him a pariah in the community.

Bob, you use the term "growth" and that might be an appropriate term if you used it in the sense of a "growth" that is discovered on a liver, kidney, or other vital organ. Bussing severely damaged the educational experience of all races. It is a very distinct issue from integration, something that was positive for education.

Commented: Monday, December 11th, 2023 @ 10:50 am By: Steven P. Rader

I was one of the guinea pigs on your sides social experiment on massive forced bussing, Bob. The school system I attended was the defendant in that lawsuit and it brought chaos to my senior year in high school as we were the first impacted. Judge James McMillan broke with previous law with a radical new ruling.

When I started at South Mecklenburg High School in 1968, we had a black community in Pineville, NC and a number of rural black communities in our attendance zone, and they made up a bit under 15% of the student body. Black and white students got along well and we had no problems.

McMillan's ruling required all schools countywide to have an arbitrary ratio of 70% white and 30% black. South Mecklenburg lost a few of the black communities in rural areas that had attended the school, and had a massive influx of students from the Second Ward High School in central Charlotte, which was closed and the students bussed a long distance to our school (and some bussed to other high schools).

The students from Second Ward did not want to be at South Mecklenburg. When our coaches tried to recruit their top athletes for our teams, most of them refused to play for SouthMeck. There was a well organizaed "student government in exile" among the Second Ward students who demanded their high school be reinstated and themselves returned there. A number of prominent black businessmen and professionals who had been involved in Second Ward's alumni organization publicly quit the NAACP blaming them as the lawsuit plaintiffs for the loss of their school.

At the other predominantly black high school, West Charlotte HS, which remained open, there was an assembly held to tell students where they would be bussed to the following school year. The students responded with loud boos and walked out of the assembly in protest. The radical activist Judge McMillan never bothered to ask actual black students where they wanted to go to school.

My senior year, when the forced bussing came in, was absolute chaos. Bomb threats, race riots, racial assaults, and similar problems were a common occurence, things that never happened my first two years of high school. The blacks who had been going to SouthMeck and those bussed in from Second Ward were constantly at loggerheads, and sometimes physical fights broke out between the groups. Those bussed in, who did not want to be there, resented those who felt at home at SouthMeck.

Serving on the Interclub Council, my junior and senior years, all of our clubs saw a big falloff in participation. While the blacks from Pineville and the rural areas still participated, there was almost no participation from the newcomers from Second Ward. Part of that may have been their long distances to home made afterschool activities impractical, but part of it was they did not feel a part of our school and resented being sent there.

Race relations took a huge nosedive from Judge McMillan's radical social experiment. I particularly felt sorry for the black students who had been part of our school before bussing being treated so badly by the Second Ward newcomers.

And, Bob, our schools were in full compliance with what the law was prior to McMillan's radical ruling, but he changed the law on us and everyone else.

Commented: Friday, December 8th, 2023 @ 10:53 pm By: Steven P. Rader

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