I grew up middle class but my parents were a “mixed” marriage, class wise, so I’ve always been kind of unsure which were my real roots. My mother was the child of European working class immigrants who had settled in the North, and my father's family were professionals and landowners in the South.  They were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who thought they were a good match because both were devout Catholics (my father was a convert).

Actually they didn't have much in common beyond their religion, but both wanted to marry and have a family. That, they did quickly; I came along 10 months after the wedding, and was the first of 5. My mother was a smart woman, but she thought she was dumb, due to contrast with my Dad who was closer to brilliant. Mom loved old country peasant food; Dad liked steak and wine.  Mom liked polka, Dad liked classical music. Mom was outgoing and had lots of friends, Dad was introverted and a nerd, with few friends but the ones he had were close. (I take after him in that respect.)

So I grew up sensing what turned out to be a permanent tension between the backgrounds of these two people. Visiting mom’s relatives was always like a party, with much joking and belly laughs and free flowing beer. This small immigrant community formed a club, which was basically just a bar with an upstairs community room, and it was on a barstool at the age of five, I had my first taste of beer given to me by my grandfather.

Visiting my father’s relatives on the other hand, had the air of formality at all times. They were all college educated, stoic Protestants, with impeccable manners. They were just as loving as my mother's family, but it was under the surface, hidden below their reserved sophistication.

So I was a half-breed in these settings, never quite fitting in with either one.  What I see now is that both these sets of people were good, honest people, and hard workers. And despite my parents’ emotional distance from each other, they too had that work ethic in common, and dedicated themselves to providing the best life they could for their children.

But my father was a bit of a black sheep, having forsaken his family’s Protestantism to become a Papist, and then being a “mere” university professor earning an adequate but not more, salary for his family of seven. Likewise my mother, upon graduating high school and seeking to escape a lower working class future, had finagled a ride to Washington DC, took the Civil Service Exam, and ended up working for the Federal Government, a job she quit when they married. So they both had sort of rebelled against their backgrounds, and were regarded as somewhat outsiders by their respective families, although those families still accepted and loved them and were very accepting of us kids. Like I said, they were all good people.

But Mom never got over the fear of being on the edge of poverty.  The Great Depression, during her childhood, had hit her community hard, and I was influenced by this chronic sense of insecurity, like financial catastrophe was always just around the corner, not to mention the threat of nuclear war hanging over us Duck and Cover children.  Ironically, these fears are again coming to the forefront of my mind - gee, I wonder why?

I was, like Mom, just a “dumb” girl.  I was a weirdo at school, and didn’t fit in there either. There were some years I had not a single friend in my class.  I had two obsessions: 1.) Science, especially space travel, and 2.) Babies.  All I wanted was to get married and have babies.  And I wanted to be an astronaut or maybe a mad scientist in a laboratory.  I guess I was an amalgam of my parents' backgrounds.  All the women in mom's family just had babies, and focused on the home.  From Dad I got the brains and drive for some sort of nerdy career.  My whole life ended up being a tense standoff between these two halves of myself.

As a young adult I realized that astronaut was never going to happen. I was very nearsighted for one thing, and by that time I knew I didn’t have “the right stuff” anyway, so I settled for flying a little Cessna 152 instead. However, I ran out of money before I could complete my training.

Being just a dumb girl, I majored in worthless shit until a guy made fun of me for carrying around a calculator (one of the first portable scientific ones).  “Haha! She thinks she’s an engineer!” he said.  That pissed me off, but I’m grateful to him, because that smacked me upside the head and woke me up. Why can’t I be an engineer? I realized maybe I wasn’t actually stupid after all.  I went back for a BS in physics, but changed to engineering after discovering it had better starting salaries.

I was almost 27 before I got my first real engineering job and there I met my husband, also an engineer and also had taken flying lessons but couldn't finish because of being a poor college student.  He also claimed he wanted babies, except he phrased it differently: "Progeny to carry on the family name", or some such.  Yeah I'll help you with that.  It was a match made in heaven. Still is.

So our married life was a sequencing of me working full time, staying home with babies, working again, staying home again and homeschooling one of the kids, and finally now working part time as an independent contractor.  We both went back for flying lessons. Hubby got certified, got IR, ME, and we ended up owning three planes in succession of ever greater range. I had to quit flying shortly before the check ride because of medical problems and ended up not bothering with the medical certification after it got too complicated, as I could always fly with hubby anyway. We integrated GA into everything we did as a family.

Unfortunately we had to sell our last plane with a job change and mandatory move across the country, which resulted in a loss of mission, but we are both nearing 70 and had a long and happy flying life, so are refocusing on other things now.  Hubby is big in the RC community now, and restoring antique cars, and I'm just doing my contract business.

In early adolescence I hung around kids that we now call "hippies", or "freaks", but it was not their leftist ideology I embraced, just social and cultural trappings.  I had read Alexander Solzhenitsyn and I was already firmly innoculated against communism or any kind of economic collectivism.  Later, I met a man who introduced me to libertarianism. He became my best friend for life, he happened to be gay, so it was not in any way a romantic relationship. His libertarianism made complete sense with what I'd already started to figure out on my own, for one thing, like Jim, I was reading Heinlein. Then Ayn Rand. I'm now a right-leaning libertarian, not an absolute anarcho-libertarian. I believe in border control for example, and I disagree with the LA Libertarians that recently showed support for allowing illegals to own guns.  That's a hard NO.  On the practical front I support MAGA populism for the most part.

I suppose the biggest reason I could never be a leftist parasite is my original bifurcated roots: both of which believed in hard work. The immigrants started with nothing and had no choice but to work. They never expected free handouts and didn't get them, unlike the illegals pouring over our border right now. My father's family were successful because they too worked, and instilled responsibility and self sufficiency in their children. And I myself have been working since I was 12 years old when I started babysitting for the neighbors, I worked all through college mostly paying my way, and except for the times in my marriage that I was "just a housewife", continue working to this day.  I'm not going to stop until I'm forced to by old age inability.

No money or power to gain from the chaos.

Except BILLIONS and BILLIONS in 'redirected' foreign aide...

I hate to get my hopes up, but dare I say things are looking up?

My opposition to Trump was only that I thought someone else would have a better shot at winning in November.  But that is irrelevant now.

Now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of their country, and support Trump.

Jews are leaving Biden because he is not helping Israel enough.
Arabs are leaving Biden because he IS help Israel too much.
Trump is picking up substantial support from blacks and Hispanics.

Also,
Rona Romney is stepping down.
Mitch is stepping down.
Nikki is now saying she will stay in the hunt until Super Tuesday, instead of till the end.
Koch's are moving support from Nikki to the Congressional races. 
If we can just get one or two Senate seats we keep get the Senate
Hopefully we can hang onto the house.

With all of this, Trump not only looks to win, but he will be going in with his eyes open and hopefully fewer Rs seeking to undermine him, like last time.

Sans cheating, I am feeling optimistic. (uh oh. I probably shouldn't have said that).

Look, when you hire someone as the CEO, do you want a guy that will just give nice talks, make promises, then work behind the scenes to steal from the company and put it in further debt?

  Or do you hire a guy that talks a tough line, vows to take action against those stealing from the company, and vows to work diligently to make the company stronger and make the company number 1?

  We're electing a president, not appointing a Pope.   I want a guy that can do the job.

Actually no, I use that phrase to mean that the belief is non-falsifiable for that person. In the this case, by Rush’s own admission. That means it is pointless to discuss further with that person because here is no evidence that exists which would ever falsify the belief. And I think it is a good thing when a person who has such beliefs is up front about it. It reduces waste of time and keeps the discussion more polite.

Let me ask Becky if you can name any evidence, which could exist in principle, which would persuade you that the amount of fraud which existed in the 2020 presidential election did not affect the outcome?

Yes. A complete redo of the 2020 election as soon as possible, at the time, using only paper ballots, requiring ID, and one-day counting would have been ideal but of course doesn’t exist. It could still be done, but has not been and here we are facing another election with most of the cheat mechanisms still in place.

Don’t forget that the bulk of the cheat was made through controlling voting machine data in real time, in selected states and selected precincts where people were put in place to carry out the cheat in real time. However, they could not outsmart real time. President Trump’s lead was so great that the jumps in counts in those precincts were seen by the world. Literally, the world knows President Trump won. The frantic rush to produce paper ballots to back up the millions of fake votes was seen by the world. Testimonies were given, hundreds of them, by election workers from those selected precincts where the cheat happened, including by representatives of Dominion who testified they were told on election night to sit away from the counting activity and were not allowed to observe or monitor the activity of the machines in any way.

The passage of time has made it harder to find or even access these testimonies because there is a constant scrubbing of them from the internet.

I could be convinced the 2020 election was not stolen if every deposition, testimonial, video, election official statement, voting machine data and ballot were unearthed and examined with extreme focus and with bipartisan observers documenting each finding.

As well, let analysis and concrete backup explain the dozen or more statistics, such as Biden losing the bellwether counties and the differentials in registered voters vs. ballots counted, that prove the outcome was not merely statistically improbable, but impossible.

Well Rush, at least you are open about your non-falsifiable belief!

Biden is not the legitimate president. Even if there was ZERO technical cheating, there was an admitted organized plan carried out months ahead of time by a group of “racketeers” to change election methods to ensure a Dem win (sometimes against state constitutional law) by, allowing universal mail in ballots, targeting specific swing states for voter registration and ballot harvesting but only among Dems.  Mark Zuckerberg funded that with hundreds of millions of dollars going to blue but not red districts. 

It was the mail in ballots that pushed Biden over Trump in the middle of the night and there are plenty of questions about the legitimacy of all those mail ins, such as multiple ballots that had identical marks (having been copied). 

When I moved to Texas I received a ballot from NC and had to call the county and have them remove me from the voter rolls. That does NOT happen automatically.  I could have filled it out and mailed it in and also voted in Texas. My sister received two ballots, one for her and one for our mother. Our mother was completely demented and didn’t vote. My sister could easily have filled out both ballots for whoever she wanted.  When my mother died I had to notify the election board of the death and they required a copy of the death certificate. How many people do that?  There are countless dead people still on voter rolls everywhere, and, beginning in 2020, many were mailed ballots. Convince me their family members never fill them out and “vote” for them.

You will never convince me there aren’t many people who did just that and were never found out or moved and voted in two places. I don’t care if that’s “falsifiable” or not, it is common sense. Mail in ballots are not secure and should be outlawed except for very limited situations. You’re overseas in the military or on extended business, you’re literally housebound from disability. That’s about it, and you should be required to show proof.

Automatic voter registration when you get a drivers license should be banned. Automatic voter machines should be banned. Early voting should be banned. Extended early voting causes a skewed result because people vote before learning critical last minute information about the candidates.

Poll workers need to be bipartisan. If partisan workers ban observers from the room or restrict them to a far corner, as happened in 2020, the election result in that district should be thrown out and those responsible criminally prosecuted for election interference.

Elections in the U.S are a joke.

It is understandable on account of the caffeine. I’m a mess before my coffee. Nothing makes any sense at all. The simplest concept flies over my head like a SR-71.

Hey, anytime I can be on a list with you and username is a good day. Esteemed company for me.