Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern NC Now

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

I was present at the school board meeting where this was brought up. Cheeseman's comments were mostly CYA of blaming someone else, with nothing very specific about what had been done to prevent this problem in the future and keep this inappropriate material away from students. He said he talked to the community college president but was extremely vague about what was achieved, if anything, in those talks. I am not interested at all in CYA. I am interested in concrete action to stop this indoctrination of children.

Commented: Thursday, September 28th, 2023 @ 7:11 am By: Steven P. Rader

Poland recently gave asylum to a Christian family from the Netherlands which was being persecuted for their beliefs in their home country. They might be a good option for this family, as also might be Hungary. It is sad when the US expells a family like this and it is sad that some western European countries persecute Christians.

Commented: Tuesday, September 26th, 2023 @ 6:05 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Who are really getting screwed by the Biden regime's unlawful and unconscienable border policies are the legal immigrants. These people often wait years to come legally, and spend hundreds of dollars on fees and fill out forms on just about every aspect of their lives, which are examined by immigration authorities. They have to have extensivve medical examination, and if they have serious medical problems, they don't get in. They ahve to file an affidavit of support showing an American will guarantee their support for the first five years. It is extremely unfair to those who do it the right and legal way to let in just anyone who shows up at the border who we know nothing about, have no medical background, criminal record background or anything else on them. We do not even know if they are giving the correct name.

When I worked in eastern Europe, I had an employee who wanted to immigrate to America with his wife. They both had college degrees, he as an accountant and she as a lawyer, and spoke excellent English. They were unsuccessful as there were no open immigration slots for their country. They then applied to Canada, which took a look at their skills and language ability and gave them immigrant visas, and they now are citizens of Canada. People like them are a whole lot more deserving of US immigrant status than those who arrogantly come across our border illegally demanding we take them.

The US Chamber of Commerce is one of the elitist organizations demanding mostly temporary worker permits that reduce the wages of working Americans. Many of them, like Disney was caught doing, had their American high tech workers train foreigners with termporaty work permits, then fired the Americans. That behavior should be illegal and ought to entitle the fired American workers to sue the companies that do that.

Commented: Sunday, September 24th, 2023 @ 12:04 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There is a War on Free Speech being waged by the left and the globalists and it is a war on democracy itself. Free speech is the cornerstone of democracy, and without it there can be no democracy. The Biden regime is part and parcel of this attack on freedom of speech, but cannot be as open because they are hamstrung by our First Amendment. Like in Orwell's novel "1984", they want government to be the "Ministry of Truth" that controls what everyone has to believe.

If Republicans fail to regain control in 2024, our republic is in dire jeopardy.

Commented: Thursday, September 21st, 2023 @ 8:54 am By: Steven P. Rader

The response of the school superintendant was a mixed bag, which he announced at the School Board meeting tonight, but not in a context that board members could weight in on it. To his credit, he did run down what happened, and of course the blame game was on a community college employee. What seemed to build a fire under him from his explanation seemed to be that the Education First Alliance publicized it, not that this inappropriate material was given to Beaufort County school children.

Cheeseman probably spent half his time on the fact that whoever put up the link for the article (but not the article itself) incorrectly mentioned Brunswick County. He was really vague about what would be done to stop this in our schools in the future, if anything. That left a big concern. A quiet talk with the community college president and sweeping it under the rug just won't do when we need our students protected from indoctrination with radical gender ideology.

"It's really somebody else's fault" does not protect our kids.

As to Bob's crazy contention, doctors do not "assign" gender to babies any more than they "assign" cancer or covid to patients. They examination the patient and report when the facts of that examination show them. Gender is biologically determined at conception from what chromosomes are present, and can be, and usually is, factually determined well before birth by ultrasound images. Doctors do not look at a baby that is biologically a boy and "assign" it to be a girl. That is far left ideological nonsense.

Commented: Tuesday, September 19th, 2023 @ 7:56 pm By: Steven P. Rader

This lawsuit alleges that children do not have the life experience to give informed consent to these far ranging changes, and that seems a common allegation in similar lawsuits. It makes sense. When one has to be 21 to buy alcohol, 16 to 18 to consent to sexual intercourse, 18 to get a tattoo, etc., allowing children to consent to permanent mutiliation of their bodies does not make good sense.

Commented: Saturday, September 16th, 2023 @ 8:27 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Lt. Governor Mark Robinson keeping his mouth shut on casinos while other candidates for governor were actively opposing them is the latest disappointment from Mark. When he wants to assert himself on something, the Lt. Gov. has quite an ability to make himself heard, but on too many issues important to conservatives he has been missing in action. This is the latest, and follows his failure to engage on Obamacare Medicaid expansion, and on the Green New Deal. I am aware he was briefed in detail on the latter by conservative experts on the subject but still chose not to get involved. As presiding officer of the Senate, he could be a strong voice for conservative causes but for some reason on a great many of them has chosen to stay silent.

I was a big fan of Robinson when he ran for Lt. Governor but the luster has worn off. I am now looking at State Treasurer Dale Folwell, a conservative who actually engages, and usually engages succesfully on key issues, as the best of the field for governor.

One other huge blunder that has concerned me about Mark Robinson is his lack of political savvy. Two years ago, we had a conservative former legislator gearing up to take on establishment liberal Sen. Jim Perry in the primary. Out of the blue, Mark Robinson endorsed Perry, which the team working on the primary decided made it a lot more difficult to expose Perry's liberal record, and the effort was shelved. If Robinson made that bad endorsement without checking the lay of the land in the district, it was a reckless and stupid move. If he knew that there was a conservative effort afoot to challenge Perry, and chose to stand with the more liberal candidate, that would also be concerning. Either way, it opened the eyes to a number of conservatives in the area that maybe Robinson was not ready for prime time.

Commented: Saturday, September 9th, 2023 @ 12:35 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Buzz, the misuse of AI is already being seen in Poland's parliamentary election campaign that is now going on. An opposition party has a TV ad attacking the governing populist / nationalist right Law and Justice Party by faking the voice of the current Prime Minister.

Commented: Tuesday, September 5th, 2023 @ 4:58 pm By: Steven P. Rader