Open Blogging: 10/24/2025

Robert F says:

Private donors paying the military during government shutdown. Private donors paying for demolition of East Wing, and construction of a new vanity Ballroom in its place. The federal government executive leader paying himself from the governmental coffers as reparation for past investigations he falsely claims were illegitimate. This is what oligarchy looks like. We are now Russia 2.0. Not “We the People” but “We the Powerful.”America chose this.

I’m looking forward to the trolls accusing me of hating, when I’m in fact just beginning to understand how much I love of America that is being lost at this very moment. So it goes.

Robert F says:

Terry,
Back during the hanging-chad election of 2000, when the Supreme Court interceded to prevent recounts of the pivotal FL presidential results in the Bush Jr. vs Gore election, I was almost literally screaming at the radio in support of that conservative activist court as I listened in real time to announcements of its actions. I had been voting Republican since the 1980s, after Reagan, thinking that they were really in support of smaller and noninvasive government and against government overreach, yet I found myself blinded by the political passions of the moment into believing that what the Court did in the 2000 election should not count as overreach. What fool I was.
I gradually came out from under the spell over the next 15 years, mixing up my voting card between Republicans and Democrats. But when Trump was nominated in 2016, it was a bridge too far. I grew up in NJ among people who had worked for Trump and experienced his cheating of contractors; he was legend for it in the New York-New Jersey area. That with his by then very public profile as a conscienceless world-class bully made it impossible for me to vote for him. Since his first term ended, I have voted for nothing but Democrats, not because I have much faith in them, but for the same reason that firefighters set up backfires to prevent the spread of the worse conflagration. I’m convinced that this man and his movement is the worst conflagration to hit the U.S in its history, with the exception of the Civil War, with which it is on par. My core values have not changed since 2000, but I embrace them with much more nuance, understanding how wrong I was in the way I held them back then.