Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern North Carolina Now

Trump has come back quickly with a very strong woman for the AG job, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. She has the backbone to do what needs to be done at DOJ, and IMHO is a better choice than Gaetz was.

Commented: Thursday, November 21st, 2024 @ 9:46 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There was a second attempt in Beaufort County to vote twice. A voter who voted in early voting also showed up at his precinct on election day and tried to vote again. He was turned away because the computerized record showed he had already voted. I don't know the party alignment of that one.

On the military mail-in voter, apparently the elections board had a screw up and somehow sent him two ballots. In spite of that screw up, every voter knows they are only supposed to vote once, and it shows criminal intent to vote the second time, especailly since he tried to cover his tracks by sending them in on different days.

It looks like the election day early voter will be referred for prosecution, but not as certain on the mail in voter.

Commented: Wednesday, November 20th, 2024 @ 11:23 am By: Steven P. Rader

The Biden regime has been promoting censorship abroad by collaborating with and funding anti-free speech organizations in other countries. Hopefully that money will be redirected to pro-free speech organizations soon after Trump is sworn in.

In the UK, for example, the Biden regime has been funneling money into a pro=-censorship group, and every bit of that money ought to be redirected to the Free Speech Union.

Commented: Thursday, November 14th, 2024 @ 3:43 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There is a big difference between saying some things that are over the top online, on one hand, and actually DOING awful things like Mo Green who funded ANTIFA / BLM rioters and lots of other far left stuff, including in education such as those pushing inappropriate sexual content for kindergarten classes and removing school resource officers from the schools. Or Josh Stein, who was the only attorney general in the southeast to fail to go to court to protect our girls from the radical Biden-Harris Title IX attempted rewrite. By sitting on his hands while other AGs were out there defended young girls, Josh Stein was siding with those who want to require girls sports teams to include biological boys and require biological boys to be allowed in girls locker rooms and restrooms. That is ACTUAL evil, not just spouting off online.

Commented: Tuesday, November 12th, 2024 @ 9:20 am By: Steven P. Rader

Mark Robinson was an awful candidate with incompetent campaign staff. Anyone with his known political baggage either has to 1) find a way to "innoculate" early in the campaign and spin it in a way that is not harmful, or 2) not run. He did neither and just hoped it would go away. When Stein took his words out of context and distorted them, Robinson's campaign failed to counter. There were issues like boys in girls sports that were there to use against Stein, and which were highly efective in races where they were used, but Robinson's campaign just ignored them. A lousy candidate with a lousy campaign organization will almost always fail, and he did.

Trump was a great candidate with a great record running against a lousy candidate with a lousy record. Even with the biased Democrat media's open help, Harris had no chance.

Morrow was a good candidate with a good message, but the baggage on Robinson hurt other GOP candidates running statewide. She also had a far left dark money group hit her hard trying unfairly to tie her to Robinson. In real life, Robinson had supported Morrow's primary opponent, and after Morrow won the primary, Robinson would often not even mention her race when he called on rally attendees to vote for the rest of the statewide GOP ticket. The dark money group was funded by the radical left national teachers unions and by Soros. As a result of this dark money campaign, NC now has our most radical far left Superintendnat of Public Instruction coming in for the next four years. God help our schools.

Commented: Monday, November 11th, 2024 @ 8:20 am By: Steven P. Rader

From what I hear Republican election observers will be provided the backbone nationwide to stand up for their rights if the Democrats try again to pull the stunt of kicking them out of the rooms where the ballots are counted, as happened in multiple big urban counties in swing states in 2020. There should be attorneys standing by to help fix that problem before it festers and becomes a big question mark on election integrity as it did in 2020. We knoe the Democrat tactics, and should be ready to counter them to keep our election secure. I think in our area, eastern North Carolina, we have good teams of election officials who have a reputation as straight shooters in most precincts. It is the big urban counties that have been more prone to question.

We did not have that problem in North Carolina in 2020, but in that election we were not a target state. Now we are, so we will be more on our toes. Personally, I am happy to be serving as one of the NCGOP's roving attorneys with statewide observer credentials. The best way to keep elections honest is to have the largest number of eyes possible watching the process. Republicans have seen an outpouring of citizen observers to be part of that process.

Commented: Monday, November 4th, 2024 @ 2:09 pm By: Steven P. Rader

I am afraid this happens in North Carolina, too. My brother has a friend who bought a vacant lot in a subivision that had been platted some years before and built a house on it. When he went to the Wake County Board of Elections to register to vote, they asked him if the five people registered to vote at that address still lived there. He told them that NO, it had been a vacant lot and nobody had ever lived there. Some months later, he checked and found the voter registration of all five still active. Some of the names were Hispanic and some not.

Commented: Thursday, October 31st, 2024 @ 12:54 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There were successful lawwuits over FEMA bungling after Katrina, and FEMA bungling has been much worse after Helene

Commented: Wednesday, October 30th, 2024 @ 2:43 pm By: Steven P. Rader

While there are indeed some greedy people at the local level who gouge on gas prices, the major reason they are so high has to do with the energy policies of the Biden-Harris administration. As soon as they got into office, they started going after the oil and gas industry with closing down pipelines, restricting or eliminating access for oil companies to prime exploration areas, and a lot of lesser bureaucratic nitpicking. Gasoline prices responded almost immediately by skyrocketing to this anti-energy administration. Kamala Harris is even more radical than Biden in this policy area. We also have to remember that the cost of energy adds to the cost of everything else we buy. The Biden-Harris moves on energy had a big impact, for example on the cost of food. American consumers cannot stomach another four years of this.

And, yes, I do avoid buying at Speedway.

Commented: Monday, October 28th, 2024 @ 1:45 pm By: Steven P. Rader

It is statutoty law in North Carolina, and statutes can be repealed by a majority in the legislature. Putting it in the Constitution means that cannot be done. Plus there is one situation not covered by statutory law that is already being exploited in other states, and that is local governments including school boards allowing foreign citizens to vote in their local elections. This amendment closes that loophole.

Other states are taking this route, and given what the Democrats are trying to do with illegal immigration, it is very wise that NC do so as well.

Commented: Saturday, October 26th, 2024 @ 2:12 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Unfortunately, US courts are way too gunshy on election challenges, and almost never even let them get to the evidentary stage. It is different in Europe, and there elections get overturned and ordered re-run when fraud appears. In Ukraine for example, the entire parliamentary election was thrown out due to fraud and ordered re-run in the Orange Revolution case. In Germany last year, the entire state parliamentary election for Berlin state in Germany was thrown out for fraud and ordered re-run. In the UK, the election results for the Tower Hamlets section of London were thrown out for fraud and ordered re-run. The citizens who successfully challenged those elections were civic minded patriots. I have personally had the pleasure to meet the two Ukrainian lawyers who won the Orange Revolution case.

Commented: Thursday, October 24th, 2024 @ 4:56 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Yes, I think the discoverty phase will be interesting as plaintfif's counsel start digging into where this garbage came from, and what new defendants will be brought into the case. I strongly suspec one of them will be named Josh Stein.

The timing of the CNN hit piece speaks volumes that it was election interference.

Commented: Monday, October 21st, 2024 @ 11:04 am By: Steven P. Rader

Yes, having our school board attorney being halfway across the state instead of local, and being chairman of one of the most leftwing Democrat county organizations in NC, are issues, and significant, but they are not the biggest concern with the present arramgement. That is the potential conflict of interest in having somebody whose most significant clients tie him closely to the liberal state education establishment also represent at the same time a more conservative local board.

Potential conflicts arise all the time between local government units and state government entities. Having served as General Counsel, or chief lawyer, for the largest department of NC state government in the Jim Martin administration myself, I am well aware of that potential. I am also aware that it can be very real with the school systems as well if you have a local board that will stand up to the Raleigh establishment. We had a school board attorney from a nearby county active in a political organization of which I was an officer back in the late 1970s and he told us that one of the biggest things he had to deal with was telling the state DPI that NO, they did not have the authority to tell his local board what to do on a variety of matters.

That conflict of interest is very relevant currently on curriculum. Legislative legal staff advised Rep. Kidwell that the county board of education had full authority to adopt whatever curriculum they wanted. This school board attorney, however, who is tied into the state education apparatus in Raleigh, keeps telling them they have to follow the state DPI on curriculum.

That is why the weak as water local School Board policy provision on Critical Race Theory is crafted with an excpetion you could dirve a Mack Truck through. It waives the prohibition if state curriculum provides for CRT.

The current Durham attorney's big education client is the NC School Boards Association, a group run by very liberal bureaucrats that tends to be in lockstep with the liberal bueraucrats at DPI. That organization is dominated by the liberal school boards of the big urban counties. They took no action, for example, to assist local school boards against Biden's attempt to hijack Title IX. The current Beaufort County school attorney is on retainer to this state body to handle major lawsuits against local school boards. All the local boards which are members pay into a fund to cover such lawsuits. It is a stretch for school board members to claim he "represented" county schools "at the state level" before they hired him as county school board attorney. Who he actually represented, and it would be a major client for him, was the fund managed by the NC School Boards Association. Only if Beaufort County schools had been sued would he have been called in to represent them. It seems there are more than one attorney who does that as the Davidson County School Board which is now being sued over suspending a student over his asking a question about "illegal aliens" in class is being represented by a different attorney in that lawsuit.

As to the partisan or ideological nature of legal positions in government, my time in the Martin administration showed clear examples of that. At the end of the administration, the incoming governor was of a different party, Democrat Jim Hunt, and he removed all of the departmental general counsels immediately on taking office and replaced us with Democrats. Governor Martin had similarly replaced all the Democrats he had inherited when he took office with Repuvlicans.

Governor Martin's own General Counsel advised department general counsels not to request Attorney General opinions because Democrat Attorney General Lacey Thornburgh was likely to put a partisan flavor to them. Two AG opinions pertaining to our department that I shot down shows how politics can enter into these things. In one AG opinion they "overlooked" a statute that was right on point and destroyed their argument. In another they cited the opening provisions of a federal statute, which seemed to support their position, but ignored the next few sentences of the same statute that destroyed their position. While legal issues can often be in a grey area that can be argued either way, in those two instances the AG's pffoce played fast and loose with the statutes involved to push the politically driven result they wanted.

I do not know when the contract of the current school board attorney is up for review, but when it is, all of these issues need to be thoroughly discussed. The position should also be put out for tender to local attorneys in Beaufort County and nearby counties.

Commented: Tuesday, October 15th, 2024 @ 8:24 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Democrats have a very long history of blaming their opponents for what they are doing themselves. When you hear a Democrat attack, look very closely at the Democrat Party and you will see the very same thing they are trying to blame others for. The lawfare against political opponents is a prime example.

Commented: Tuesday, October 15th, 2024 @ 8:32 am By: Steven P. Rader

What is going to be key for the British Conservative Party is going to be having leadership that will develop a cooperative relationship with the populist right Reform Party led by Nigel Farage. Polling puts both parties close in national support, and indicates that working together, they could achieve a parliamentary majority in the next election. Fighting each other, they will divid the conservative vote and let the left in again. The five seats Reform won in parliament this year were all taken from the Conservatives, but more recently, Reform has been capturing Labour seats in local government special elections. I have read that the Bow Group, the oldest conservative think tank in the UK is not impressed with either candidate in terms of working cooperatively with Reform.

Commented: Friday, October 11th, 2024 @ 11:08 am By: Steven P. Rader

Bob is misrepresenting who it is that removes voters from the rolls in NC. It is the DEMOCRATS who have a majority on the NC state Board of Elections and on ALL 100 county Boards of Elections in North Carolina. At the state level they are ultra-partisan Democrats, at that. THAT is who has the power to remove people from the voter rolls. Republicans are in the minority and do not have that power. Is Bob just uninformed or is he deliberately spouting misinformation?

Commented: Friday, October 4th, 2024 @ 12:18 pm By: Steven P. Rader

We do need to get these heavily biased liberal networks OUT of the debate business. They are neither neutral nor fair and have a very long history of skewing debates to the Democrats and the left.

Rona Romney McDaniel, although generally rather incompetent at RNC, did have one great idea. She pushed through a vote at the Republican National Committee to dump the Commission on Presidential Debates and have the parties negotiate the terms directly. The Commission had a long history of putting pro-Democrat debate moderators in place.
Unfortunately, her successor did not follow through, allowing the Biden campaign to jump out first and set debate perameters even worse than the commission.

In 2028, the RNC needs to engage early with the DNC on debate arrangements. The most important thing is a fair moderator team. Since finding anyone who is genuinely neutral is almost impossible, and IS impossible in the major media, the best arrangement is to have two moderators, one designated by each side. Like the Lincoln - Douglas debates, the gold standard of American political debates, half of the questions should come from each campaign.

Commented: Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024 @ 9:46 am By: Steven P. Rader