The Wash. state legislature’s in session, trying to somehow resolve the perfect storm of fiscal bad news. With fewer beat reporters covering state politics in Olympia (KIRO-TV’s “South Sound bureau” mostly covers crime-and-mayhem stories from that subregion), two online resources have emerged.

Let’s give a warm MISCmedia welcome to the independent nonprofit Olympia Newswire, and to the state-owned cable channel TVW’s cutely named blog, The Capitol Record.

The owner of Salty’s on Alki (and former owner of Red Robin and a string of fern bars) is a big right wing political talker and fundraiser.

My ol’ acquaintance Tom Frank warns about the new version of “right wing populists,” who invoke popular rage against the current corporate system to encourage the strengthening of that very system.

You don’t have to open Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest sociocultural rant book, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America to know what it’ll say.

From the title alone, it’s obvious Ehrenreich can’t stand the positivity movement/industry, a very American institution that’s boomed and blossomed of late.

She blames positive thinking (and its assorted tendrils in religion, business, and pop psychology) for infantilizing its followers, for leading a passive-aggressive nation into all those now-popped economic bubbles, and even for the Bush gang’s gung-ho drives into war and ultra-graft.

The book is a minor work of hers, which is odd considering it starts out with a very personal crisis in her own life. (She got breast cancer. She wound up hating the teddy bears and boxes of crayons foisted upon her more than she hated the disease itself.)

And like so many left-wing essay books, it comprises a long sequence of complaints, with only the briefest hint of possible solutions stuck in at the very end. She loathes uncritical, unquestioning “positivity,” but she doesn’t want people to be hooked on depression or stress either.

So what’s left in between? Social and political activism, she suggests.

But I’ve seen plenty of “activists” who get stuck in their own emotional trips (self-aggrandizing protests, feel-good “lifestyle choices,” sneering against the “sheeple,” et al.). They get to feel powerful, or righteous, or smug, or genetically superior to the sap masses. And nothing changes.

World-changing and personal therapy, I believe, are two different thangs.

Still, there is a psychological benefit to working with other people, helping other people, becoming an involved part of our interdependent existence.

That was one of the messages in This Emotional Life, the recent Paul Allen-produced PBS miniseries. Another message was when an interviewee said, “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness. The opposite of depression is vitality.”

That meets obliquely with something I wrote around the time of the Obama inauguration. The “hope” Obama talked about wasn’t pie-in-the-sky positive thinking. It was acknowledging that work needed to be done, and then doing it, doing it with a clear and open mind and with full confidence in one’s abilities.

This has everything to do with Ehrenreich’s usual main topics, progressive politics and the plight of working families.

Mayor Mike McGinn takes office today. He’s released the results of his online call for citizens’ ideas for Seattle. In this highly unscientific poll, more people want a legal nude beach than want another NBA team. (The top request: more transit.)

It’s the madcap return of the MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got a great house for sale at its 2007 price.

or,

I Survived the Bush Junta and All I Got Was This Lousy iPod

WE’LL WONDER HOW WE EVER DID WITHOUT:

The whole WWW thang, social networking, smart phones, Netflix, Adobe Flash, Netroots organizing, Jon & Stephen, Keith & Rachel, HBO-style serial drama, digital video, Pixar, the gay-marriage movement.

WE’LL LOOK BACK AND LAUGH AT:

‘Sexting,’ Twitter, Auto Tune, tea parties, Jon & Kate Plus Eight, Glenn Beck, CGI-enhanced superhero movies, Sarah Palin, American Idol, Botox, the first dot-com frenzy, the second dot-com (“Web 2.0”) frenzy, the real-estate frenzy, the stock-market frenzy, the war frenzy.

ALTERNATE-HISTORY FANTASISTS WILL DREAM ABOUT WHAT IF:

Gore won, 9/11 was prevented, the print-media and music industries got their heads out of their asses, the New Orleans levees had been properly built.

ALREADY FORGOTTEN:

Y2K, Napster, $4 gas, Enron, Octomom, Balloon Boy.

ALREADY MISSED:

The P-I, the Sonics, Washington Mutual (pre-“WaMu”), “big book” catalogs, Tower Records, the Bon Marché (and all the other Macyfied stores), New Yorker Films, The Rocket, Sunset and Leilani Lanes, the Ballard Mannings/Denny’s, the International Channel, Olds/Pontiac/Saturn/Plymouth, Chubby & Tubby, the Twin Teepees, McLeod Residence, Northwest Afternoon, inauguration morning, Ted Kennedy, Pluto.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO:

Bush/Cheney, all the corrupt cronies of Bush/Cheney, all the graft-happy funders of Bush/Cheney, all the apologists and hucksters for Bush/Cheney (even the ones currently still on air and in print).

Sixties antiwar organizer Mark Rudd insists in his essay “Beyond Magical Thinking” that…

Successful political movements do not spring fully formed. They require long-term, nuts-and-bolts organizing.

In other words, protesting, no matter how big and splashy, isn’t enough.

I will admit to having uttered statements #4 and #5 on Troubletown cartoonist Lloyd Dangle’s list of “Blind and Unquestioning Ways to Love Obama.” Only I don’t think they’re so blind or unquestioning:

#4: “In case you weren’t paying attention—Obama ran as a centrist—which is exactly what he’s being.”

He certainly was never as far to the left as I am, which is still not as far to the left as many people I know are. And he’s filled his administration with Carter/Clinton vets, Beltway insiders, and lite-right “new Democrats.” I knew he’d do this and still supported him.

#5: “He’s so smart he’s using a secret fake-out strategy. We can’t see it yet.”

Well, I can see what I think his strategy is. It’s to render the Republicans utterly irrelevant, leaving centrist Dems such as himself as the natural “party of business.” This would leave the “conservadems” as America’s conservative party, and allow room for a real liberal party or parties, at least in non-Presidential races.

From the lesser Washington, the Wash. Post opinion section lists the “Worst Ideas of the Decade.” Among them: The battle of Bora Bora (you know, where Bin Laden escaped), TV dancing competitions, anti-vaccination conspiracy scares, Bush’s crony capitalism disguised as “compassionate conservatism,” and “world-is-flat movies” (Crash, Babel).

Newsweek’s end-of-the-Oughts package includes a bizarre little fantasy piece by David Rakoff. Rakoff imagines that had Gore gotten into the White House in ’00, he’d have done many of the same dumb things Bush did.

I’m currently watching The Whole World was Watching, the way-too-short KCTS doc about the WTO protests that began 10 years ago today. The videomakers are doing a good job of getting in the underlying political/economic issues behind the big protests and the bigger law-enforcement crackdown.

Despite the police overreaction, I’m proud of what happened in Seattle back then.

In retrospect, though, the World Trade Organization was and is merely one manifestation of the Big-Big Money usurping control of the world from sovereign governments. That process continued with the wars-for-oil, the assault on workers’ rights, the massive concentration of wealth here and in other countries, and, yes, the funny-money shenanigans whose fallout continues to affect us all.

Turning all that around will take a helluva lot more than some turtle costumes and Subcommendante Marcos face masks.

Former WTO protestor Trevor Griffey argues that the biggest legacy of the big protests in Seattle 10 years ago may be routine, pre-emptive crackdowns on civil liberties at big official confabs worldwide. Locally, Griffey (no relation) claims, the protests’ biggest consequence could be a massive dilution of police accountability enforcement.

A DC think tank declares WashState’s got the nation’s most regressive tax system.

Paste counts down what it claims are the top 25 “live moments” on TV this past decade (other than 9/11). The list includes live-to-tape stuff from talk shows, but let’s not be picky here.

Some are obviously worthy of inclusion: Jon Stewart righteously punking Tucker Carlson on CNN, Election Night ’00, Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. I might have replaced some of the list’s sports highlights to fit in Janet Jackson’s “Nipplegate” and Rachel Maddow’s polite demolition of Pat Buchanan.