All posts by metadadablog

Blog posts by Pat Strosahl. I'm a retired, married, 71 year old curmudgeon who lives in Yakima, Washington. I identify with progressive causes but live by a more conservative set of personal principles. I'm a former business owner, artist, consultant, author, and (losing) candidate for Seattle City Council. Hope you enjoy my thoughts and hopes.

The Trump Show… and What It Means for the Rest of Us

Photo above: Donald Trump and his Laughing White Men's Supreme Chorus back when they thought they were celebrating the removal of you and your children from affordable health care in the U.S. It's been a bit comforting to hear more and more conservatives and liberals speak out on the threat the Trump administration poses to ...

Has the Time Come to Mandate Universal Service?

Photo above: John F Kennedy meeting with early participants in the Peace Corps, a program of people to people outreach in foreign countries. Radical Centrism: Remaking Citizenship Part IIIn my last post I promised a more detailed follow up on a key idea about rebuilding citizenship in the U.S. — mandatory universal service to country. ...

What Can We Do — What SHOULD We Do — for Our Country?

Radical Centrism Papers: Remaking Citizenship I "Ask not what your country can do for you... Ask what YOU can do for your country!" So John F Kennedy inspired us almost 60 years ago in his electrifying inaugural address.  But since the idealism he unleashed with that statement, it seems we've been just been doing a lot ...

WWIII May Have Already Started… Here’s What It Looks Like on the Ground

I made a bit of a mistake in my Thank You Comrade Putin post — a very American mistake — of believing that what happens in the U.S. is some kind of special history, when in fact, these days, everything must be taken in a global context. So here's a well-researched article by Michael Carpenter that ...

Bol’shoy Spasibo, Comrade Putin…

Friends, Romans, Countrymen! I come not to trash Vladimir Putin but to thank him! It appears that his main purpose in interfering with our 2016 elections (and activities since), was not primarily to create policy, or even to elect a sympathetic President, but to expose and exacerbate the fault lines in our democracy, in order ...

OMG! Run for Your Lives! It’s… SOCIALISM!

Before they succeed in making "socialism" into a dirty word again let's pause for a minute and do the American thing: let's call bullsh*t... Boy, do we need an education in how governments work. Stuart Varney's viral segment on (shudder) democratic socialism and the recent Facebook meme-storm demonizing socialism is a great example of how propaganda ...

Calling Things by Their Real Names

I love a good debate. I've have many of them with friends on every side of the political spectrum. Radical Centrism — my prescription for recovering a dynamic center to US political life — is based on the notion that we should not eliminate the wildest ideas from any side of the discussion about solutions: ...

July 4, 2018 Update … Fierce Patriotism Still Needed to Defend Our Democracy

Radical Centrism Policy Papers: It's War, Nothing Less - Part 1 Republicans and Democrats to the barricades!! Our republic is under attack by hyper-partisans who would destroy our democracy to win their cause, and a narcissistic President who would use the awesome power of our democratic republic to destroy, or jail his opponents and willingly ...

Can We Talk?

“Can we talk?” was originally propounded by Joan Rivers as humorous/confidential alert, with the certainty that the answer would be “Yes.” In the context of the first age of the internet the question becomes more urgent and admits the answer might well be “No.”

Can We Just Calm Down for a Minute, and Discuss Sensible Immigration?

Radical Centrism Papers: Immigration IImmigration is a hot-wired topic. Both Democrats and Republicans  — understanding how frequently and baldly the issue has been demagogued — "play to the gallery,"  because, well, immigrants are a powerless constituency, so who gets hurt??? The not-surprising answer is that a few individuals and families get badly hurt, and that ...