I have a confession to make.

Through the 80s and 90s I voted Republican.

I've been trying to figure out why I did that.

In the 80s I was a software entrepreneur. It was very hard and demanding work. I was doing two full-time jobs as the CEO of a company during the day and a programmer at night. The company I wanted to create needed me to do that. I wanted to make exceptional software. So I pulled out all the stops and went for it. That's near as I can explain why the Republican story appealed to me. It's why I was sympathetic to Microsoft until I saw what they tried to do to the Internet. I believed that good engineering practices can lead to good government practices. I've since changed my thinking on that. It's more subtle than that. Countries have different goals from startups. And necessarily so! I see some of the current generation of tech entrepreneurs struggling with this.

I switched to voting for the Demos in the election of 2004. I had seen enough with Bush II. The country was careening in a corrupt way. The Repubs, conservatives, always making a huge issue of deficits, was spending lavishly on two wars. Totally out of control. Without any debate. Being an outspoken critic of the President at that time got you a lot of hate. I did write about the mistake of the war here on my blog, as we were starting it. But I was just an individual blogger with an academic job where I was supposed to have public and personal opinions. I remember seeing MSNBC claiming the President was a "Visionary" when the bombs were falling on Baghdad. I thought "we are lost." It was in this time that they fired Donohuhe because he was too critical of the President. It's important to remember how we reacted to 9/11. It made us pretty crazy.

So I did everything I could to support Kerry. And then Obama twice. And now Clinton. Anything but let the Repubs have control of the whole government. This time they won't leave us anything to pick up the pieces from. We must remember what kind of country and world economy they left us with. All so they could funnel a few more dollars to their friends in the defense industry.

There is a divide in this country, but not the one the Repubs keep trying to create. The divide is between people who try to learn from our experience, and those who blindly chase more dollars for themselves. I think being a business person comes with very high ethical standards. The dollar chasers who have taken over the Repub Party are a different kind. They think as long as they get more dollars anything is justified.