Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern NC Now

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It is statutoty law in North Carolina, and statutes can be repealed by a majority in the legislature.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

WTIB radio is collecting supplies for the western counties. Glenn Beck's MercuryOne charity is, too.

Commented: Tuesday, October 1st, 2024 @ 11:56 am By: Steven P. Rader

A poll of North Carolina parents found that 71% expressed concern about political indoctrination in public school classrooms. This issue came up due to the woke agenda being pushed in the schools, which is mostly leftwing fiction instead of real history. The so-called 1619 Project is a good example, and its creator has even admitted it is not real history. That is the sort of thing the left wants to substitute for real history.

What the woke want to do with our history is the same thing Chairman Mao did with Chinese history. As George Orwell wrote: "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."

Commented: Tuesday, September 24th, 2024 @ 5:12 pm By: Steven P. Rader

We ended up with Mark Robinson as our Lieutenant Governor because the 2020 primary for that office had two major candidates, Robinson, whose comments supporting gun rights at the Guilford County Commission had gone viral nationally, and former State Senator Andy Wells of Catawba County, who was in thick with the green energy grifters. Republicans voted on issues, not race, and it was gun rights vs. "green energy".

Most active Republicans I know of voted for Dale Folwell as our nominee as governor, as he had a much better record on a broad range of issues. Unfortunately, Robinson had much better name recogmition with voters overall, partly because the media tended to cover him more than Folwell.

For the record, I voted for and supported Robinson for Lt. Governor in 2020, and voted for, contributed to, and supported Dale Folwell for governor in 2024.

Commented: Tuesday, September 24th, 2024 @ 11:19 am By: Steven P. Rader

It is political malpractice that Republican candidates and party leaders are not constantly calling out media bias in this election. Media bias for the Democrats has been documented for decades, but it has never been as bad as in this election. Senator Jesse Helms always called out media bias, constantly reminding voters that he had to run against six opponents, the Democrat candidate plus the editors of the five largest newspapers in the state. In this day and time, it is the alphabet networks of the MSM rather than newspapers, but it is the same issue. When the ABC News coverage of Harris was 100% positive and their coverage of Trump 93% negative, why in the world were they allowed to control a presidential debate? They were wearing their political bias on their sleave.

I voted for and contributed to Folwell. He was clearly our best candidate for governor.

Commented: Monday, September 23rd, 2024 @ 10:41 am By: Steven P. Rader

I guess then that you would claim that the "International Herald Tribune" is not a newspaper because all of its articles are verbatim from either the "Washington Post" or the "New York Times", and that it is not "journalism".

Commented: Thursday, September 19th, 2024 @ 9:41 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There have been studies going back decades showing heavy political bias in the major networks, so it makes no sense to depend on them to be controlling presidential debates if we want them to be fair and objective. With ABC News coverage this year, it has been 100% positive for Harris and 93% negative for Trump, so why should anyone expect any different in the debate? The problem with the Commission on Presidential Debates was that they always turned to these biased networks for debates.

We had a chance of something better when the RNC dumped the Commission on running the debates, but then failed to follow through and we ended up with something worse. The solution is negotiating debates openly. Realistically, finding knowledgable moderators who are both objective and unbiased is almost impossible in today's polarized society. The best solution is two moderators, one chosen by each side. The fact that a particular side chose a particular moderator will make it damaging if that moderator gets too one-sided and that would act as a safety valve.

The other option would be something like a modified Lincoln-Douglas debate, where half the questions came from each candidate. That way neither candidate gets protected by biased moderators from questions they do not want to have to answer. That worked fine for Lincoln and Douglas, so it should be fine for politicians today. Lincoln and Douglas had no moderators at all, but it may be wise to have one moderator who at least keeps time and turns microphones on and off appropriately but has no control over the substance of the debate.

Commented: Monday, September 16th, 2024 @ 1:22 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Political bias to the left has been rampant in the media for decades, but the open rise of "advocacy journalism" in recent years has meant the mask of objectivity has increasingly fallen off. The media is a horrible place to find comeone who should be neutral in a debate setting.

The sad thing is that RNC was working to straighten this problem out but then dropped the ball, allowing the worst manipulation of debates in US presidential election history. The Commission on Presidential Debates has had a history of choosing biased moderators, although not as bad as the ABC News duo, so at Chairman McDaniels initiative the Republican National Committee withdrew from the Commission debates to negotiate debates directly with the Democrats. Her successor, Michael Whatley, then dropped the ball and did not start begotiations. This allowed the Biden camp to put forward their debate plan directly to Trump while Trump was tied up with the Stalin Show Trial in Manhattan and thus had little room to manuever. That allowed the Democrats to, in effect, set the rules.

If Michael Whatley had had the competence to follow through on what McDaniel started, we would never have had that ultra-early debate that set up the Democrat coup against Biden, and the Trump - Biden debate would have been what occured Tuesday, too late for the Democrats to oust Biden as nominee. And we certainly would not have had partisan hack moderators like we had Tuesday.

Commented: Thursday, September 12th, 2024 @ 8:43 am By: Steven P. Rader

The way the RNC handled the presidential debates is gross political malpractice. First Ronna McDaniel led a vote to abandon the Presidential Debate Commission, which has always tilted the process toward Democrats. So far so good. If RNC had followed through and started negotiations with the Democrats for debates, as they should have, they could have avoided Biden's sudden debate demands catching them flatfooted. After Romney left, her successors failed to follow through. If there had been debate negotiations underway, Biden could never have gotten away with his demand for that very early debate. He would have been wiped out in the first debate, BUT it would have been after the Democrat convention, tying their hands to do anything about it, and Trump would now be facing a demolished Biden and have a cakewalk to November. Instead, thanks to incompetence at RNC we have a competitive race.

Commented: Tuesday, September 10th, 2024 @ 7:12 pm By: Steven P. Rader