Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern NC Now

X (Twitter) has lately been cancelling the accounts of European Idententarian (nationalist) sites, after its new CEO met with EU censors. That is bad enough, but the EU now wants to force plattorms to censor Americans posting on American-based sites, and that is outrageous.

What needs to be set up is a way to sue the EU when they censor Americans. The problem is that foreign countries (and probably the EU) have sovereign immunity to suits by individuals. Howver, states and countries can sue the EU. What should work is for a state government to set up a Free Speech Omsbudsman, who would be empowered to sue in the name of the state on behalf of state citizens who were censored. Juries shoudl be allowed to impose punitive damages.

Commented: Tuesday, September 5th, 2023 @ 11:27 am By: Steven P. Rader

After the 2000 election, a bi-partisan majority felt there were deficiencies in US elections, and a bi-partisan naitonal commission headed by former Democrat US President Jimmy Carter was set up to recommend measures to improve it. Since then, the Democrats have gone the opposite direction of Carter's recommendations and made things worse. They have used control of states where they were in the majority to do that and in other states have tried to use the courts to do so. As a result, the flawed 2020 election made 2000 look pristine.

For example, photo voter ID is an international gold standard for election integrity, used in every developed country in the world on a national basis EXCEPT the US. Democrats have fought that tooth and nail here in the courts. We are just now finally getting a watered down version of it in North Carolina after years of trying. Many lesser developed countries also use photo voter ID, and indeed it was used in all eight of the foreign elections where I served as an international election observer.

Then there are mail-in ballots which Jimmy Carter twenty years ago identified as being particularly prone to voter fraud. Instead of tightening them up as Jimmy Carter recommended, the Democrats have gone loosey-goosey with them, making voter fraud much easier. Indeed, a few Democrat controlled states have gone ALL mail-in ballots. None of the foreign elections where I served as an international election observer allowed any mail-in ballots at all.

There are other examples where the Democrats have gone the opposite direction from the Carter Commission's recommendations, and in doing so, they have made our elections less secure.

The biggest red flag in 2020 was kicking Republican election observers out of the ballot counting rooms in mulitiple key big urban counties in swing states. In none of the eight foreign elections where I was an international election observer was there ever even a hint of kicking out party election observers or civil society election observers. That is something that would be expected in a Third World police state.

Commented: Friday, September 1st, 2023 @ 11:56 am By: Steven P. Rader

It a battle of the wits, you are totally unarmed, Bob. All you can do is rehash generalities fed to you by your extreme left talking points, and many of those are bogus. You do not discuss specifics on anything, because those are way over your head. Do some research of your own and you might learn something to be able to discuss things intelligently for a change.

The United States Constitution gives states the authority to determine election rules and as a result there are wide variations among the states. For example, a few states are all mail-in while others have very limited mail-in provisions. Mail-in ballots are some of the most problematic on fraud, as none other than Jimmy Carter pointed out. Procedures to verify initial registrations and to remove ineligible voters also vary widely and can have major impact on the quality of elections. The corrupt practice of ballot harvesting is illegal some places, legal in others, and in a gray area in still others. The list could go on.

There is also the quality of administratioon of election laws, and that also varies widely, even within a state where the very same election laws are in place. When the corrupt Tammany Hall machine was rigging elections in New York City, that did not mean that elections were rigged everywhere else in the state, for example.

Commented: Thursday, August 31st, 2023 @ 11:31 am By: Steven P. Rader

Bob, you clearly know nothing about elections except the talking points of the extreme left which you are a member of, and those are very often bogus. That is why you are quick to jump to the usual label of the extreme left for anything that does not fit their narrative, which is "conspricacy theory".

On the other hand, I have dealt with elections in many different roles, from serving as the chief lawyer for a statewide political party for five years, to serving as an international election observer in eight foreign elections, including being chief of the observation mission, training on NC election law, and being appointed by Molodova's Central Election Commission as a member of its Working Group on Campaign FInance Reform.

There were lots of red flags in the US 2020 election that should have been thoroughly investigated but were not. Without such an investigation, there is no way to tell if the election were honest or if it were fraudulent. Those who claim either are making political statements unsupported by fact.

Commented: Wednesday, August 30th, 2023 @ 12:09 pm By: Steven P. Rader

You are badly mistaken on the actual facts, Bob. Election procedures vary widely in the United States because our Constitution gives control of elections to the states and not the national government. Within states, there are areas that are well run and honest and those that are not. At the height of Mayor Daley's corrupt Chicago political machine, elections in downstate Illinois rural counties were honest and aboveboard.

After the 2000 election, a national commission was set up, chaired by Democrat former President Jimmy Carter to make recommendations on election security and ballot integrity. One of the recommendations of Carter's commission was that mail-in ballots provided a lot more opportunity for fraud than casting ballots at the polls on election day. They suggested that to the extent that mail-in ballots were used, it should be minimized.

So what did the Democrats push hard for in 2020, led by partisan Democrat lawyer Marc Elias? More mail-in ballots, the very thing Jimmy Carter said were most prone to fraud.

Having election observers present is a key to honest elections. But what did the Democrats do in 2020? In key counties in multiple states they either kicked or tricked Republican elections observers out of the counting rooms, or in some cases seated them so far away that it was impossible for them to observe the count. That is simply not something that is done when one is running an honest and aboveboard election.

Commented: Tuesday, August 29th, 2023 @ 4:45 pm By: Steven P. Rader

According to the information dug out by the New York Post, those meetings with top members of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's staff at the White HOuse were with the White House Counsel's office, and that does carry a strong stench of abuse of power for election interference.

Commented: Monday, August 28th, 2023 @ 4:21 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Most Confederate soldiers were like my great grandfather and my great great grandfather. They did not own slaves and slavery had nothing to do with why they enlisted to defend their country from foreign invasion. Less than ten percent of white southerners owned slaves in 1861.

It was only later in the war that the north decided to try to make slavery their excuse for invading the south. In March 1861, the US Congress, totally controlled by the north as the first seven southern states had already seceded and withdrawn, adopted by the required super majority the Corwin Amendment to the US Constitution, which would have enshrined slavery in the Constitution and made it impossible to abolish without a furhter amendment to the Constitution, and promulgated it to the states for ratification. Lincoln specifically endorsed the Corwin Amendment in his first Inaugural Address. Even after the north decided to say the war was supposedly about slavery, they admitted yet another slave state, West Virginia, to the union to join the four other slave states that adhered to the northern governnment.

Tearing down historic monuments is what Chairman Mao Tse-Tung did in his "cultural revolution" in Communist China. Those who advocate the same thing in the US or Europe can legitimately be called Maoists. That includes you, Bob. It certainly includes BLM.

Commented: Friday, August 25th, 2023 @ 8:30 am By: Steven P. Rader

One of those reports came from the Special Counsel invetigating the Trump / Russia hoax and the other from the Inspector General of the Justice Department (inspector generals are independent of agency bosses). I think either of those officials, both of whom conducted ezxtensive investigations to prepare the reports, know a heck of a lot more on this subject than an internet troll,

Commented: Wednesday, August 16th, 2023 @ 6:35 pm By: Steven P. Rader

While the Jan. 6 set up does have some paralells with the Reichstag fire and the Nazis, an even closer playbook for the Democrats was the so-called Twitter Revolution and the Communists in Chisinau, Moldova in 2009. The Democrats in the US are a lot better in the blame game than the Communists, and they seemed to have learned some lessons in demagoguery there, but Americans are starting to see through it.

I was working in Moldova when the Twitter Revolution went down, and my office was only three blocks from where it happened. When I first heard they were going to hold the Jan. 6 protest, I immediately thought of the way the Twitter Revolution had been manipulated by the Communists.

The cause of the two events was the same, an election that reeked of fraud, and a protest over that election. The Twitter Revolution was so named because students used Twitter to get a crowd together to protest the Communist government in front of the Presidency building. The first night was peaceful, and leaders of the pro-western parties addressed the student protesters.

The next morning, the crowd was much larger with high school students joining the university students, and was peaceful in the morning. In early afternoon, a group showed up all at once with big canvas sacks full of rocks. They used the rocks to break their way into the Presidency and led the ransacking, depending on mob mentality to get students to join in. After destroying the first two floors of the Presidency, they moved across the street and ransacked the Parliament building. It was later discovered that most of this group of agitators who suddently showed up were Communist activists from rural parts of the country where they would be less likely to be recognized. The rest were criminals let out of jail on condition they participate in the attack.

The Communists went into full blame game mode. Their media control was like that of the Democrats in the US, One nationwide TV network was government run and the other had been illegally taken from Romania's TVR1, and given to a Communist money man. The news told only the Communist narrative. The government run channel, Moldova Uno, put together a "documentary" that was really a propaganda piece entitled "Attack on Moldova" and ran it repeatedly. It interspersed video of pro-western party leaders addressing the peaceful crowd with shots of the ransacking of the two buildings the next day.

Fortunately, this had a happy ending for the country, if not for the students who were beaten and a few killed by the Communist police. The Communists had not cheated quite enough and although they had a majority to elect a prime minister, they lacked by one seat the super majority needed to elect a president. The new election required by the Constitution allowed the pro-western parties to counter the frauds of the first election, and defeat the Communists, ending the last communist government in Europe. I have confidence that American voters, like those in Moldova will see through the fake blame game where J6 is a dead ringer for the Twitter Revolution.

The Communists cheating had fallen one seat short of a presidential super majaoity, so while they could elect a prime minister they could not elect a president, so the parliamentary election had to be re-run.

Commented: Wednesday, August 16th, 2023 @ 1:12 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Many NC Republicans beleive that Unaffiliated voters in the primary push the nomination to the left, not the right because it allows the Democrats to play in GOP primaries by temporarily switching to Unaffiliated, and there is anecdotal evidence that this goes on to some degree. When John McCain,a moderate, won the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, his victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina were what put him in the pole position. Both of those states are open primaries, and exit polls showed that if only Republicans had been voting in the primary, McCain would have lost both states and probably not been the nominee.

The complicating factor is that looking at voting behavior, about two thirds of Unaffiliated voters here in Beaufort County, and probably almost that many statewide, vote straight ticket Republican in the general election. Many of them are conservatives who are put out with the establishment wing of the party, but there are other electments there, too. I was on the state GOP executive committee when we voted to open our primary to Unaffiliated voters. The theory was that if we did, they would get used to voting Republican and would re-registerer as Republicans, but that has not been happening. There are two other blocks of Unaffiliated voters, those who usually vote straight ticket Democrat in the general election, which is the smallest group of Unaffiliateds by voting behavior, and those who cast split tickets. If there was a way we could exclude the latter two groups and allow those who typically vote straight Republican in the general election to vote in our primary, that would be ideal, but as a practical matter there is no way to do that.

Commented: Friday, August 4th, 2023 @ 7:13 am By: Steven P. Rader

Suppressing free speech and hiding vaccine side effects are NEVER the right thing to do in a free country. Why things got back to normal is because certain political leaders, like the Swedish govenrment in Europe, and Governors deSantis and Noem in the US got rid of the lockdowns and mandates and showed they were useless and harmful.

Commented: Saturday, July 29th, 2023 @ 3:40 pm By: Steven P. Rader

You've got that right, Stan, and when the machines screw up, getting recourse is often dificult.

There was a case in the UK where a man got a ticket in the mail from a speed camera saying he was driving over 400 miles an hour on a British motorway. He sent a letter back saying that this could not possibly be right because he drove an old Toyota, not a jumbo jet. He got a letter back that the machine was always right and he should pay up.

There was another case some years ago when this issue was hot at the legislature, when a legislator brought up the case of one of his constituents. She had received a red light camera ticket in the mail from a town she said she had never been to in her life. Further, on the day she allegedly ran the red light, she could document that she was in intensive care in a hospital in Las Vegas, and the car was in the parking garage there. The town still did not want to cancel the ticket.

Commented: Thursday, July 27th, 2023 @ 11:47 am By: Steven P. Rader

If Trump were still president, we would not have a war in Ukraine. A series of blunders by Biden showing his weakness encouraged Putin to invade. The fake "environmental crisis" is a made up load of hooey and Biden throwing away money hand over fist on that is a huge threat to our economy.

Commented: Thursday, July 27th, 2023 @ 10:22 am By: Steven P. Rader

As is so common these days, the Democrats are putting their ideology over common sense.

Commented: Sunday, July 23rd, 2023 @ 5:13 pm By: Steven P. Rader

In the Orwellian lexicon of the "woke", the word "inclusion" really means exclusion - eccluding those who don't believe in wokeness. It is part of the obnoxious and totalitarian cancel culture. One use of this term that really stood out was at a UN conference on "inclusion" where a representative of Iran used it to call for the extremination of people of the Jewish faith, and no one stood up to object. That fits with the woke definition of "inclusion" which really means exclusion.

George Orwell, call your office. Newspeak is HERE.

Commented: Thursday, July 20th, 2023 @ 7:32 am By: Steven P. Rader

I'll bet Bob has never been to South Africa. I have spent several weeks there myself, and this weather is much colder than normal there. It almost reminds me of the "Global cooling and coming ice age" scare of the first Earth Day back when I was in college. That was the environmental disaster du jour back in those days. Now, the scaremongers have found that climate patterns do not fit with their global warming theory either, so they call whatever happens "climate change". That covers all bases, but it also shows they are just flailing.

Commented: Saturday, July 15th, 2023 @ 10:24 am By: Steven P. Rader

How does one spell "boondoggle"? N-C-I-N-N-O-V-A-T-I-O-N.

Brant hit the nail on the head when he mentioned fascism. The "corporate state" is the key economic tenet of fascism, and "NC Innovation" is a concept that would have warmed Mussolini's heart. This program does have some similarities to socialism, but at its heart it is truly fascist.

Commented: Thursday, July 6th, 2023 @ 7:34 am By: Steven P. Rader