Comments by John Steed | Eastern NC Now

Cooper is in a bit of a box. If he lets this become law, his liberal buddies will hate him, but if he vetoes it, and the GOP goes for an override, Democrat legislators will be caught between loyalty to the governor or voting in a way that they will not cost them their seat in November.

Commented: Wednesday, June 1st, 2022 @ 5:04 pm By: John Steed

The Board of Elections conducted its canvas of precinct returns today, rechecking all the numbers to make sure they were reported and added up correctly on election night. The canvas confirmed the numbers in the county commission race that Tandy Dunn beat Dawn Slade by 5 votes. The recount of the commissioner primary on the Republican side will be 3:00 PM Tuesday and the result will be certified at 5:00 PM Tuesday.

Commented: Friday, May 27th, 2022 @ 4:32 pm By: John Steed

Great analysis. The north's war crimes in the War Between the States against Southern civilians, in clear violation of both the existing Common Law of War and of the Geneva Convention of 1863, were not a lot different that Russian behavior in Ukraine. Sherman and Sheridan, in particular should have been indicted as war criminals, and Lincoln condoned their actions.

Commented: Wednesday, May 25th, 2022 @ 7:58 am By: John Steed

Conservtives did well most places. Budd clobbered McCrory. Sandy Smith beat back Kevin McCarthy's half million dollars in the 1st Congressional district primary. Both school board RINO's were defeated by anti-CRT conservatives. Pending a likely recount, it looks like two conservatives and a RINO will go to November for the GOP for county commission. Norm Sanderson beat the wind and solar grifters favorite fixer, Bob Steinberg for 1st district state senate.

Commented: Wednesday, May 18th, 2022 @ 6:57 pm By: John Steed

NC's largest and most active gun rights organization, Grassroots North Carolina has strongly recommended Ted Budd for US Senate and Keith Kidwell for NC House. Only a handful of their recommendations are "strongly" recommended but these two are. GRNC notes that both Budd and Kidwell have been very active in pushing gun rights legislation, and that Budd's major opponent, Pat McCrory, vetoed a key gun rights bill when he was governor.

On the US Congress race, GRNC made no endorsement. They noted that Greg Murphy had voted the wrong way on a couple of key gun rights votes, but that Cowden had not returned his survey.

GRNC recommended Norm Sanderson in the 1st Senate District and Tony Moore in the Pitt County state House disctrict.

Commented: Monday, May 16th, 2022 @ 3:00 pm By: John Steed

That smoke is highly toxic from burning lithium. Breathing it can cause severe injury and even death. Lithium batteries do the same thing in electric cars. That is why GM recalled every Chevy Bolt it has ever built and warned anyone who kept the cars not to park them within 50 feet of a building or another car. Every injury from a Chevy Bolt fire has been from people breathing the smoke. Tesla has had the same problem, with one of their cars spontaneously combusting parked outside a home in Pennsylvania a few months ago, causing both car and house to be total losses.

Commented: Sunday, May 8th, 2022 @ 11:55 am By: John Steed

Still spouting that Buzzeo / Varcoe / Langley / Waters drivel, are you Cratch? To be in control requires a majority on a body like a county commission. The guy you call "Emporer" has never had a majority on the commission. At best, he is leader of the opposition. Who does have the power? The man behind the throne, leftie Jerry Langley. If there is an Emporer, he is only a puppet, and the current puppet would be Frankie Waters. That is the group with the majority and the power. The goal this election should be to eliminate Langley's role as the power broker.

What is important is policy, NOT personality. Jerry Langley is the AOC of Beaufort County, although he does not shout his ideology like she does. Here is some research for you; go read the online questionaires Langley answered in his House race. Hopefully they are still online. He is much farther to the left than he postures on the commission. There is not a lot of policy daylight between him and AOC. And this is Frankie Waters' boss, and the one that Slann would cross party lines to support.

You have said you think taxes and spending are not important and that illegal immigration is just a "distraction" but to real conservatives those are key issues.

You also do not seem to understand the concept of the Uniparty, which is made up of establishment Republicans and liberal Democrats who collude with each other, the mushy middle. Strong conservative Republicans, and for that matter left wing Democrats generally stand for principle of one sort or another, and are not Uniparty. Langley's incestuous relationships with weak and vain "Republicans" is the very definition of Uniparty. Frankie Waters is part of that and Dawn Slann wants to be.

You spout the Langleyite excuses for bloat in our county government.

The conservative Democrat used to have quite a population in NC politics but they are now an extinct critter. The best Democrat politicians one finds today are the opportunists who occasionally might vote the right way. On the Beaufort County Commission, the Democrats we have are a pair of progressives, Langley and Booth.

Face it, Cratch, in Beaufort County politics you are backing the progressives and the fellow travelers of the progressives. You also advocate a Uniparty arrangement to run our county government that is anti-cpnservative. There was a time, long ago that there were conservative Democrats on our county commission, but that time is long past.

Leadership on our county commission should be organized around principle - conservative principle - NOT power, ego, and ambition, as it has been under the Langley cabal.

Commented: Saturday, May 7th, 2022 @ 4:13 pm By: John Steed

WEF leader Klaus Schwab is the 21st century incarnation of Hitler and Stalin combined, and his book on the "Great Reset" is this century's Mein Kampf. Klaus is one of the most dangerous totalitarians in the world. Glenn Beck has written a great book exposing him and the totalitarian "Great Reset" one of whose slogans is "you will own nothing and you will be happy". Another Schwab slogan is "Build Back Better" which has been copied by globalist politicians in the US, UK, and Canada. Globalism is the enemy of freedom and we must all fight it if we are to preserve liberty. Climate alarmism is an intergral part of globalism, we must stand against that as well.

Commented: Friday, May 6th, 2022 @ 7:50 pm By: John Steed

Bottom line is that the Democrats on the NC Supreme Court are politically corrupt and abused power for partisan purposes. Using these highly partisan "assistance special masters" is how they gerrymandered our state. When we get an honest state Supreme Court, the legislature needs to do a new and honest map.

Commented: Thursday, May 5th, 2022 @ 11:18 am By: John Steed

Mr. Cratch does not seem able to show ANY specific policy positions advocated by Mrs. Slann in her campaign that support his contention that she is a "conservative". What she has been is a stealth candidate who is extremely evasive on issues. Her one major point about being "non-partisan" just screams Uniparty. I have challenged him to do that and he comes up with crickets.

His "patrioto" term continues to just seem weird. I did a search on "patrioto" and "Trump" and in scanning the first ten pages found nothing on that term. Every search result used the term "patriot" NOT "patrioto". Then I tried the term "patrioto" by itself and after scolling through a number of pagges found a page on Patreon which was a weird mixture of Spanish and English and referred to "la familia Patrioto" and "il Donaldo Trumpo" So the term does seem to be Spanish, but why would someone in an English speaking country be using a Spanish term? When the person using it also calls the illegal immigration issue a "distraction" one wonders. In that search, the other results also actually use the term "patriot" not "patrioto".

Mr. Cratch also uses the phrase "making Beaufort County great again". I know the agenda for making America great again, and totally support it, but clearly the use of that term for Beaufort County is something entirely different. Perhaps Mr. Cratch would care to explain what he means. Does it refer to the Langley agenda of taxing and spending?

Mr. Cratch contends that there must be some conspiracy of Republicans behind a Democrat candidate, but that is clearly all based on conjecture due to "it happened somewhere else" but does not even back up where the "somewhere else" is.

Commented: Wednesday, May 4th, 2022 @ 7:14 am By: John Steed

One famous disinformation campaign in war still impacts us today, the fake narrative of the "Fort Pillow massacre". The northern media falsely accused General Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate cavalry of executing captured black soldiers after capturing Fort Pillow in west Tennessee in 1864. That lie continues to be spread today as fake "history". This was a deliberate media distortion at the time.

What really happened? Fort Pillow had been manned for some time by a regiment of white Tennessee Unionists commanded by a failed lawyer from that area, who had been conducting a reign of terror on local citizens. Many of Forrest's cavalrymen had been recruited from that part of Tennessee so they were well aware of it. The Union command was also aware of it and the bad PR it caused, so they added a second regiment to the fort, a black regiment, which as with all black union regiments had white officers. The white colonel of the black regiment had longer service than the failed lawyer commanding the white Tennessee Unionists, and so was senior officer and able to restrain the Tennessee Unionist reign of terror on civilians.

Early in the battle for Fort Pillow, the senior colonel was killed in action and the failed lawyer resumed command of the fort. He decided that giving whiskey to his troops would have them fight better, so he opened the fort's liquor stores. The officers of the black regiment ordered their own troops not to consumer the liquor, but the white Tennessee Unionists passed around the whiskey among themselves.

Forrest's troops got the upper hand, and it appeared the fort was about to fall. A truce was called to discuss a surrender. A Union gunboat on the river violated the truce by trying to move into a more advantageous position, and a Confederate battery on the river fired a warning shot over its bow to warn it to maintain position. The gunboat stopped trying to violate the truce, but drunk white Tennessee Unionist soldiers hearing the cannon shot decided the battle must be back on and started firing at Confederate soldiers, and the battle resumed.

When General Forrest's troops breached the walls of the Forst on one side, some of its garrison from both regiments tried to flee in the opposite direction, where they ran into more of Forrest's troops. Some groups of drunk white Tennessee Unionists surrendered, then changed their minds and started shooting, causing some Confederate casualties. As a result, Confederate troops became more wary and if there was any ambiguity in an apparent surrender, they did not accept it. While it was the drunk white Tennessee Unionists who most often had an apparent surrender rejected, some of the soldiers from the black regiment also were effected. Given the surrender and then change their minds acts of Union troops, the Confederates were certainly justified in the steps they took in response.

The Union newspaper reporters conveniently failed to mention why this situation occurred and also that most of the Union soldiers whose surrenders were not accepted were white Tennessee Unionists rather than black soldiers. They had a narrative they wanted to present.

The war crimes in Ukraine, on the other hand, are extremely well documented.

Commented: Saturday, April 30th, 2022 @ 9:12 am By: John Steed

Judges who abuse their authority like this to usurp legislative functions need to be impeached and removed from office.

Commented: Thursday, April 28th, 2022 @ 9:36 am By: John Steed

Mr. Cratch, you are spouting the same line as Ron Buzzeo, Paul Varco, and Frankie Waters have been spouting - two carpetbaggers and a scalawag. They want to make a conservative elected official who has never had control of either the county commission or the county GOP as their boogeyman. I wonder who sold you that fairy tale, one of them or someone else?

The problem in county government is that far left Democrat kingmaker Jerry Langley has for years been spliting Republicans so he can control who has the title of chairman and who is then dependent on him for their majority. We have let the leftwing Democrat minority (2 out of 7) control our county commission by finding egotistical Republicans willing to be useful idiots for Langley in exchange for a title. Frankie Waters is the current useful idiot, as was Jerry Evans before him. This has been going on for years. It is very clear from Mrs. Slann's statements that she is open to also being a useful idiot for Langley.

Most county policy is decided in the backroom between Langley, Waters, and the county manager. Waters' majority depends on Langley, so Langley has the whiphand.

The only way to dethrone Puppetmaster Langley is to elect Deatherage and Dunn to the county commission this year.

Commented: Wednesday, April 27th, 2022 @ 8:25 pm By: John Steed

There is an old saying in politics that "ya dance with who brung ya." Republican voters expect our nominees to reflect a set of principles and to organize levels of government around those principles. Mrs. Slann clearly rejects that.

"Art of the deal"? President Trump is certainly smart enough to know that when you have a 5 to 2 majority, there is no need whatsoever to have to "deal" with the two in the minority. And when those two are leftwingers, there is even less reason to do so. If you look at the responses of Langley to political questionaries when he ran for NC House, he is WAY off in left field, as bad as AOC.

Of the incumbent candidates, there is a clear choice. Stan Deatherage has been a champion pushing conservative and MAGA issues, while Frankie Waters has joined with the Democrats in opposing them. Any thinking patriot would support Deatherage and oppose Waters. The two non-incumbents break down the same way. Dunn is a budding Deatherage and Mrs. Slann is a budding Frankie, only maybe slightly smarter than Frankie.

We will not have an "all Republican" commission. There will be two Democrats on the board. The question is on leadership. Leftwing Langley has had a long run of dominating the county commission by splitting the Republicans and being the kingmaker. He has for years pulled the puppet strings of "Republican" commission chairman. Frankie WAters is so thrilled with the trappings of power that he is a useful idiot for Langley, and he is not the first one. What really needs to happen this election is to end Langley's dominance of our county commission. With all her talk of not being partisan, there is little doubt that Mrs. Slann is angling to also function within Langley's orbit. On the other hand, Tandy Dunn's tag line on his ads last campaign were "I will not sell you out to Jerry Langley". He clearly gets it while Mrs. Slann does not.

"Qualified?" The main thing a chairman does is run the meeting, and if anyone has ever watched the videos of commission meetings or been there in person, saying Frankie Waters is competent to run a meeting is downright laughable. The main thing that voters need in a commission chairman (and vice chairman) however is dedication to conservative and MAGA principles, something that Waters and Langley are NOT. We also need someone who will not let their puppet strings get pulled by the liberal bureaucrat we have as our county manager. When Waters is not being controlled by Langley, he is being controlled by the county manager, who is way too involved in making policy instead of just carrying it out.

Commented: Wednesday, April 27th, 2022 @ 7:42 am By: John Steed

Red light cameras are un-American. They are a police state mechanism. A driver, not a car owner commits a driving offense. Punishing a car owner when there is no good evidence of who is driving is appalling. Greenville should be ashamed of itself.

Commented: Friday, April 22nd, 2022 @ 7:47 am By: John Steed

Jann, I concur that all of us need to do our own research and more of it, and if we do, the choices in the county commission race get real simple. Among the incumbents, Stan Deatherage has a strong record of supporting the America First agenda and a pro-taxpayer agenda. Frankie Waters is the polar opposite, having a record hostile to both the taxpayers interests and the America First agenda. Those records are there to be researched and are very clear cut.

Researching the two non-incumbents is a bit more difficult. Tandy Dunn has a website with some info. Dawn Slann does not. Both have circulated campaign materials and spoken at events. Tandy consistently has shown himself to be a friend of the taxpayer, and when he had discussed it, supports an America First agenda. Slann's campaign material avoids taking issues on anything except being against "partisanship" (maybe running Unaffiliated would have been more honest of her). Her public appearances are all over the landscape, seemingly wanting to tell whatever group she was in front of what she thought they wanted to hear. She talked a conservative leaning game in front of the Beaufort County Conservative Club but pandered heavily to the Chamber of Commerce at the latest candidate forum at the Turnage Theatre. Where does she really stand? Who knows, but the attack on "partisanship" sounds a whole lot like the Uniparty. Prior to running, she did make some good statements against the government's Covid overreach, but she now seems to have gone silent on even that. She is a real "pig in a poke".

Commented: Monday, April 18th, 2022 @ 4:42 pm By: John Steed

According to people who were there, YES she did. She also openly says on her palm cards that she will not be "partisan" (i.e. vote according to Republican principles). That smacks a lot of Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Frankie Waters, etc.

Commented: Thursday, April 14th, 2022 @ 5:59 pm By: John Steed