Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern NC Now

The policies of Biden and Harris have played a big role in the large number of Haitians in the US illegally. Biden and Harris by executive decreee deemed everyone of Haitian origin to be of "Temporary Protected Status" meaning they won't be deported unless that status is revoked. Even Obama did not do that. Biden and Harris have made the US a magnet for Haitians by guaranteeing they will not be deported.

Trump can revoke that when he gets back in office, and send them home, but if Harris stays in, the Haitians will stay indefinitely and keep coming.

Commented: Monday, September 9th, 2024 @ 2:56 pm By: Steven P. Rader

That kid's online posts about shooting up a school would have been enough for a law enforcement agency to initiate a commitment procedure against him based on his being a threat to himself or others a year before the shooting happened. The FBI knew all about those online threats, but neither they nor local law enforcement did anything. That is where the fault lies. Those civil commitment proceedings are available in all states and have been for many many years. They afford full due process rights. Law enforcement knew about this deranged kid and dropped the ball. Civil commitment laws do a much more thorough job in dealing with the mentally ill and they are already in place.

Commented: Saturday, September 7th, 2024 @ 9:38 am By: Steven P. Rader

Anyone who calls Sen. James Lankford a "right winger" is either badly misinformed or deliberately distorting the facts. When Lankford ran for an open Senate seat in 2014, he was the establishment candidate in that primary. I well remember it because his conservative challenger, T.W. Shannon was one of the candidates I contributed to that election cycle.

T.W. Shannon was Speaker of the Oklahoma State House, an African-American with enough Cherokee blood to be an enrolled member of the tribe, and a staunch conservative. His endorsements ranged from national conservative PAC's like the Senate Conservatives Fund to prominent conservative leaders like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, and Mike Lee to local Oklahoma Tea Party organizations.

Lankford, on the other hand, was the candidate of the Mitch McConnell wing of the party. He had been elected to the US House as a Baptist minister who talked conservatve but quickly disappointed conservatives with his voting record, his votes on some key tax and spend bills being the ones that drew the most ire.

That was a very clear choice in the primary, with Shannon being the conservative and Lankford the moderate establishment type. If that continuing disappointment Lankford runs again, I wonder who the conservative will be who brings him home. After his stupid Open Borders bill, I will be motivated to again contribute in an Oklanhoma US Senate primary. I think the dumbest thing Lankford said in trying to defend his open borders bill was trying to equate illegal aliens with legal immigrants.

Commented: Monday, September 2nd, 2024 @ 1:57 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Van Zant - The seating arrangement of the BC School Board has also always struck me as very odd. It is not only totally different from other local government bodies, but also from the state boards and commissions I used to work with. When I served as a departmental General Counsel in the Jim Martin administration, one of my responsibilities was to monitor the rulemaking boards and commissions housed under our department such as the NC Social Services Commission, NC Child Daycare Commission, and NC Mental Health Commission for the cabinet secretary who administered the department. Those sommissions were staffed by top officials of the division or section handling the appropriate policy area. Staff, including division directors or section chiefs were not seated with the commission itself, but down the side, much like many of our local governments. Seating paid staff among board or commission members is just strange.

Commented: Wednesday, August 28th, 2024 @ 6:05 pm By: Steven P. Rader

The woke agenda involves lots of things and using things like the 1619 project instead of real history is indeed part of it, but so are things like radical gender theory. Actually, I am a big fan of British public education law that requires teachers to present both sides of any politically contested theory or issue. Students should be presented with both sides. I have never heard of one of the woke fairy tales that does tnat. Indeed the inventor of the 1619 Project admits that it is not history. That also applies to science, where I doubt many teachers are teaching both sides of the science on climate issues.

Commented: Tuesday, August 27th, 2024 @ 5:52 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There are two lawsuits pending in North Carolina against the state Board of Elections failures to do their duty. One involves failure to enforce the federal HAVA election integrity requirements that have been in force for over twenty years. All voter registrations are supposed to have either a drivers license number or if no license, then the last four of the SS number. The failure to enforce this over the years has mushroomed to the point that over 500,000 NC voter registrations do not have this federally required information, and our state Board of Elections refuses to do anything about it. The other has to do with a law passed by the General Assembly on removing foreign citizens from the voter rolls that the state Board of Elections has been deliberately dragging its feet on to get past this election.

There have also been rumblings from NC larger counties that the Democrats may be doing the same thing as in Detroit in denying Republicans a fair representation in poll watchers.

Commented: Tuesday, August 27th, 2024 @ 5:09 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Buzz, the NC statute that is directly on point says that the elected local school board is the final authority on approving a curriculum. No entity at the state level has the authority to tell them what they can and cannot approve. That is the position of the legal staff at the NC General Assembly when they advised Rep. Kidwell, and it is IMHO an accurate statement of the law.

Entities in Raleigh try to claim control of curriculum based on testing provisions, but that is a real stretch. There is a decades long history of education entities in Raleigh attempting to assert controls over local school boards that they simply do not have and this is one example.

Commented: Wednesday, August 21st, 2024 @ 6:00 pm By: Steven P. Rader

That is a despicable smear and a lie, Bob. The Voter Integrity Project works entirely on election integrity and has not a damn thing to do with "white nationalism". The facts they uncovered on foreign citizens registered to vote and actualy voting in Wake County speak for themselves and are well documented. The Democrats could have done their own investigation but would get the same results so they swept it under the rug.

Commented: Sunday, August 11th, 2024 @ 11:52 am By: Steven P. Rader

It is a real travesty that the Biden-Harris regime is attempting to turn Title IX on its head by executive rulemaking, and without consulting Congress. As passed by Congress in 1972, Title IX protects girls and women in education, but that is thrown out the window by Biden-Harris in their administrative rules that change it into a protection of "gender identity" and "sexual orientation".

Twenty six states are suing Biden-Harris to block this travesty, but not North Carolina. Our far left Attorney General Josh Stein, who is running for governor is fine with this far left assault on our girls and women, and is the only AG in the southeast NOT to challenge Biden-Harris on their illegal and unConstitutional rules.

But someone in North Carolina is fighting. State Rep. Keith Kidwell spoke at the Beaufort County School Board meeting this past Tuesday and is organizing a challenge. Republican candidate for State School Superintendant Michele Morrow appeared with him in support of a challenge. They got positive response from the school board.

One thing that local parents can do to protect the schools their children attend is to take advantage of the restraining order obtained by a group of states led be Kansas which got a court order to block the Biden-Harris rules. One of the co-plaintffs in that lawsuit was a conservative organization Moms for Liberty, and the restraining order issued by the federal judge in that case prohibits these Biden-Harris rules from being imposed on any school which children of members of Moms for Liberty attend anywhere in the country. Membership in Moms for Liberty is free and can be done online, and then there is a form to fill out about what schools their children attend. Joining and filling out that form will block these rules in those schools.

Commented: Friday, August 9th, 2024 @ 12:07 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Not today's NC Democrats, Bob. The three running statewide I mentioned earlier are as far left as any Democrat in America. Yes, it was different when we had NC Democrats like Senator B. Everett Jordan, Senator Sam Ervin, Governor Dan Moore, Lt. Govenor Jimmy Green, Congressman L. H. Fountain, State Senator Vernon White, State Senator Julian Allsbrook, and others like them, but all of them are gone and there are no longer others like them in today's leftwing NC Democrat Party. That was then, but his is now. The old conservative Democrats and business Democrats voted with their feet years ago, the latter now often becoming Chamber of Commerce Republicans.

Commented: Monday, August 5th, 2024 @ 7:27 pm By: Steven P. Rader

A liberal political agenda of "woke" from the ultra liberal mostly Roy Cooper appointed state board of educaiton and from DPI is a big factor driving parents to take their children out of public schools and place them in private schools or home school. A poll last year by the Locke Foundation found that 71% of North Carolina parents are concerned about political indoctrination of their children in the public schools. Local school systems best approach to retain students is to take firm control of curriculum, tell the wokesters in Raleigh to get stuffed, eliminate the woke while bringing back quality. That, in addition to being firm on discipline, would create public schools that parents want to send their children to.

Commented: Sunday, August 4th, 2024 @ 12:03 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Biden and Harris are trying to castrate one of the three co-equal branches of government, the Supreme Court and court system. That is a dictatorial move, just as it was in Venezuela.

The recent decision that has really sent the big government politicians into a tantrum was the Supreme Court's reversing the Chevron doctrine. A previous court decision had given way to much power to the executive branch when it constrained the checks and balances in our Constitutional system by adopting the Chevron doctrine that gave a one-sided deference to the executive branch in rulemaking. That the court has now restored Constitutional checks and balances as they were intended by our founding fathers is widely opposed by those who want a powerful, dictatorial executive branch.

The Supreme Court did the right think for our country and for democracy, and now the anti-democratic politicians like Biden and Harris are trying to gut the Supreme Court. What they are doing is an attack on democracy and on our Constitutional Republic.

Commented: Wednesday, July 31st, 2024 @ 9:07 am By: Steven P. Rader

Policy is what is important, not personality, in the 2024 race. The Democrats and their media allies have generated a lot of personal political hate against Trump, and that atmosphere they created led to the assassination attempt.

Anyone looking at this race logically will look at the records and compare them. Trump had a great record of success while for Biden-Harris it has been failure on top of failure. Trump is also a lot more mainstream, while Harris is far out loony left.

Commented: Sunday, July 28th, 2024 @ 11:04 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Having been involved in Republican politics in North Carolina for over half a century, I have seen some nasty personality fights, but few as ugly as the current one in Beaufort County. We had one here back in the late 70s and early 80s between the Wilkinson and Ratcliff factions, but in those days, while we might have a knock down battle over party officers at the county comvention, once that was over with, both sides got back to the business of beating Democrats. Now, we have a few people on both sides of the divide who let personality conflicts obscure the need to achieve our policy goals.

In politics, policy should always trump personality. Accomplishing our policy goals, not battering those we may not personally like, is what is important. This year, when our country faces an existential threat from the far left, that is particularly crucial.

When it comes to the relationship between the policy makers put in place by the voters, and the careerists in government, I had five years of experience with that during my time as a policy-level political appointee in the Jim Martin administration. I found that each careerist I dealt with had to be evaluated individually. You could not put them all in one box. Some were straightforward, objective, and understood they were not the policymakers. They were easy to work with and their opinions carried a lot more weight with those of us who were engaged at the policy level. Others were full of their own importance and wanted to engage in policy making even if it was not their role. These were the ones that those of us at the policy level had to keep a close eye on and could not turn our backs to. Some were somewhere in between.

Unlike state government, where the governor could not be everywhere and had to rely on policy level political appointees, in local government, there is a much clearer distinction, with the elected policymakers in direct contact with the careerists hired to carry out that policy.

In the public education context, I well remember a comment at a local political meeting I attended during my first year in law school from State Senator Dick Deeb (R-Pinellas) when a local education issue was being discussed. senator Deeb observed that "there are too many school board members who seem to think that the superintendant is their boss instead of their employee." As I have heard of school controversies here in North Carolina, I have concluded that is a problem in many school systems.

Concern about the "woke" agenda in our schools has been massive all over the country, with a huge wave of voters defeating school board members aligned with the liberal education establishment and replacing them with conservative education reformers. This wave has reached into higher office and is largely responsible for carrying Virginia Governor Youngkin into office.

Here in North Carolina, our Lt. Governr Mark Robinson, now our nominee for governor, has been heavily and publicly engaged in fighting the liberal education establishment, and he will undoubtedly continue that battle as governor. Our runner up in the primary, State Treasurer Dale Folwell, has also been engaged on that issue, standing with Robinson. It is up to all Republicans to understand where the battlelines are drawn and on which side our party stands.

Personality conflicts do not mean doodly squat. It is the policy issues that are vital. In a poll last year, 71% of North Carolinians expressed concern about the political indoctrination of their children in the public schools. We must stand with those parents against the "woke" agenda.

Commented: Thursday, July 25th, 2024 @ 11:52 am By: Steven P. Rader

Our system has been based on two parties that respect democratic values. When one refuses to operate by democratic norms within its own organization, it is a danger to the country because it is likely to run the country the very same way.

I an a conservative Reagan Republican who supported Ted Cruz as long as he was running in 2016, and leaned to deSantis in the beginning in 2024, although also comfortable with Trump and Scott.

Commented: Monday, July 22nd, 2024 @ 5:55 pm By: Steven P. Rader

I was hoping for a more traditional Reagan style conservative, and Dr. Ben Carson was my first choice from the shortlist. Trump avoided the pick from that list that would have caused heartburn in the base, Coug Bergum.

I understand the political logic of J. D. Vance. He appeals to the swing states of the rust belt like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, where the election will be won or lost. His connections in the world of finance offer great fundraising opportunities. Finally, after last Saturday, of all the shortlist, Vance probably best offers assassination insurance, list Kamala Harris has for Biden.

Thinking logically from a political perspective, he is probably who trump should have picked.

Commented: Thursday, July 18th, 2024 @ 11:31 am By: Steven P. Rader

One of the elected Democrats who made a comment about killing Trump was a Congresswoman. I would look up the article, Bob, and give you the link to it. but I note you don't like links to articles that refute your narrative.

Commented: Tuesday, July 16th, 2024 @ 8:35 pm By: Steven P. Rader