Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn, building on his campaign branding as a “Netroots” candidate, has a Web page where citizens can suggest their own “Ideas for Seattle.”

I trust and hope McGinn knew what he was doing when he let his transition team set this up.

This has always been a city of dreamers and schemers, of utopian fantasies at greater or lesser war with one another.

You could make a whole book (and a few people have) of different people’s ways of closing Seattle’s most popular all-time conversational starting phrase, “What this town really needs is…”

I’ve heard, and spoken, that phrase all my adult life. The least imaginative versions invariably go that Seattle’s a total nowhere until it gets a _____ exactly like the _____s of San Francisco. But there have always also been more Seattle-appropriate (in civic-planning jargon, “site specific”) visions.

I like some of the ideas on the site, like replacing (instead of just scrapping) the Fun Forest, reducing Seattle’s stormwater pollution into Puget Sound, and micro P-patches in parking strips.

Of course, you know I’ve got my own ideas. Some of them I’ve shared here over the years.

So in the spirit of McGinn’s invite, here are a few of my own dreams and schemes for a brighter, shinier, sweller Seattle (admittedly, not all of these can or should be city government endeavors):

• Non-car (mostly street-level or elevated rail) transport between all in-town neighborhoods, regardless of what suburban voters vote for or against.
• An outdoor, all-ages concert venue running throughout the “dry season.”
• A real daily newspaper.
• A preserved and fixed-up Viaduct (or, if we really need a seawall project that a highway tunnel wouldn’t add much more cost to, repurposing part of the Viaduct as a park).
• Lidding more of I-5 and some of I-90 too.
• Legalized gambling, escorting, and public nudity. (Oh, and I suppose legalized toking as well, since so many seem to want it.)
• Year round sidewalk and street parties rotating around town.
• A municipal philosopher.
• A one-year trial ban on official use of the phrase “world class” within the city limits.
• Some men’s pro basketball games; those always used to be fun attractions.

As the already much-punditized ten-year anniversary of the WTO protests approaches, my pal Lynn Allen’s got a fine essay about Worldchanging.org cofounder and local urban-planning doyen Alex Steffen.

Allen calls Steffen’s message…

…both sobering and, strangely, optimistic—an analysis of the state of the physical, cultural and political earth right now, the slippery slope we are headed down and the “bright green” options that we can choose to pull ourselves out of what would otherwise be total collapse.

Allen particularly likes that Steffen’s two recent Town Hall speeches were introduced by Seattle municipal bigwigs, City Councilperson Richard Conlin and Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn. She hopes Conlin and McGinn will heed Steffen’s plea to turn Seattle into the dense, forward-minded eco-city it already thinks it is.

Kudos to Seattle PostGlobe founder Kery Murakami. He’s taken a PR job with the Washington State Budget & Policy Center. (Publicola calls it “a liberal economic and fiscal policy think tank.”)

PostGlobe will continue.

Mount Holyoke College prof Douglas J. Amy insists that “Government is Good,” and has a whole detailed site all about why.

Cenk Uygur, meanwhile, explores the other side of this ideological divide, and decides today’s big business power-grabbers aren’t interested in democracy or even capitalism; but that’s only to be expected from “corporatists.”

Political PR maven Jonah Sachs insists progressives have gotta stop being so damned rational. He argues that public opinion in this country isn’t swayed by analytical arguments but by emotional appeals.

Guess who uses social-media sites the most? That long-neglected demographic caste, the stay-home moms.

Paul Krugman wrote it weeks ago, but I’m still trying to get to the end of his long essay asking the musical question, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? The answer to his query’s easy, really. Economics is either the most or second-most fraudulant “science” out there (competing with sociology). Economic theory has less to do with the world most of us live in and more in common with the virtual worlds created by or for role-playing gamers

Henry Gibson, who passed away Monday, had a long and solid acting career ranging from Nashville to Magnolia and Boston Legal. But he’ll always be known as “the Poet” on the original Laugh-In. Gibson was a prime example of that show’s basic premise. Laugh-In was suit-and-tie guys (what we’d now call the Mad Men generation) looking gently askew at Those Darned Hippies. Saturday Night Live, by contrast, WAS Those Darned Hippies.

At least Gibson died without the tragic career footnote faced by Peter, Paul and Mary co-singer Mary Travers. She faced her cancer-ridden final months with the indignity of having one of her group’s hit songs reworked into the unauthorized political hatched-job “Barack the Magic Negro.”

…sees the mess that big money (or big potential money) has made out of health care, news, and other essential services, and declares that “Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.”

Maher cites a past time when the network news was a loss-leader division, medicine was small and personal, and “war profiteer” was an insult.

Of course, those were also the days before any TV channels charged subscription fees, but that’s beside the point.

The point being: Wall Street’s been vampirizing the nation’s lifeblood. And not just during the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble.

Earlier this year, I met an IT consultant whose clients have included a huge HMO provider. She insisted the health insurance companies aren’t to blame for America’s health-care cost crisis; it’s just the system that’s gone haywire.

I think it’s a little more personal than that. I believe the insurance companies (some avidly, some more reluctantly) sold out to the profiteers over the past three decades, as the ultimate American financial icon ceased to be the Almighty Dollar and instead became the Almighty Stock Price. Whole industries that weren’t intrinsically set up to reap windfall profits were retooled for just that purpose, just so they’d be considered great investments.

This year’s financial meltdown is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to realign not just health care but the whole unstable superstructure of the economy.

…which I’m not, might claim MSNBC keeps Pat Buchanan on precisely because he makes conservatives look soooooo archaic, bigoted, and just plain dumb.

…an African American cultural activist gets in a Twitter exchange with a white actress who says Af-Ams are “more free and fun and light hearted”? A lot more than 140 characters, that’s what happens.

Then you’ll like Anitra L. Freeman’s “Homeless Declaration of Independence.”

…national role model?

…got to pout n’ protest against California’s supreme court when it upheld that state’s anti-gay-marriage initiative.

As I wrote here last fall, it’s always fun to snipe about the state that thinks it’s so superior to the rest of us.

(Of course, longtime readers know that when I snipe at Calif., I also snipe at people here whose only idea how to improve Wash. is to blindly copy everything that’s been done there.

As if everything done there would always work here.

As if everything done there even worked there.)

But, as speakers at Tuesday’s Westlake Park rally asked, why don’t all these local protesters do more to get legal gay marriage in this state?

Well, some are.

We’ve now got the great compromise that is “civil unions.”

(And as one Daily Kos diarist put it, Tuesday’s Calif. ruling seems to pave the way for a similar compromise there.)

But plenty of activists insist that “the legal equivalent of marriage under another name” just ain’t the same thing as marriage.

And they’re right.

…his own personal bogeyman to blame for all the warmongering waste and fiscal foolishness of the Bush era. It’s the nation’s top universities, with their “culture of selfish, cutthroat behavior.”

I’m not so sure myself. Yeah, rich-kid campuses have lots of maturity-challenged spoiled brats running around, imagining that they can do any damned thing they want to and to hell with the consequences. But the whole of our civic culture’s been like that lately. There’s no one real place where it started. And it can only end with individuals demanding, and living, a better way.

As the “Republican Talking Points Generator” says, “Anything Obama does/will tear a giant hole in/our children’s children.”

…“Architecture and Resistance,” but Leebus Woods offers advice suited to all. Examples:

Resist whatever seems inevitable.Resist people who seem invincible.

Resist the embrace of those who have lost.

Resist the flattery of those who have won.

Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.

Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.

Resist getting big jobs.

Resist the suggestion that you can only read Derrida in French.

Resist taking the path of least resistance.

Resist the growing conviction that They are right.

Resist the nagging feeling that They will win.

By 2016, the Democrats, more or less exactly as they are now ideologically, will become thought of as the “conservative party.” There’ll be a rump GOP running local races in the south and the inland west. There’ll be a new leftish party, probably called the Green Party but with little or no organizational link to the group calling itself that now. These other two parties will field Presidential candidates, and even pick up Electoral College votes for them. But for a while, only the Dems will be national enough to control the Presidency.

…for the Seattle Times, that local bastion of patrician conservatism, to reprint an essay from The Nation, that national bastion of defiant liberalism?

It takes a long screed in favor of government assistance to newspapers, direct or indirect.

Its co-author, Robert McChesney, is a scholar of media history and a longtime advocate against corporate consolidation in news and entertainment. What nobody except me seems to remember is he was a co-founder of The Rocket, the local rag that proclaimed the hotness of Seattle rock bands back when Seattle Weekly still ignored anyone born after 1950. It can be hard for younger or more recently-arrived folks to imagine a Seattle where the leading “alternative” paper was more culturally conservative than the local dailies. The rise of Seattle rock in the late 1980s was as much about DIY media as it was about DIY music.

After McChesney went off to Wisconsin for his Ph.D, he expanded his beliefs in indie media into a scholarly history, in books and essays, of U.S. corporate media and its discontents.

So it’s strange to see his words interpreted, by their placement in the Seattle Times, as a plea to bail out organizations like the Seattle Times.

Anyone familiar with McChesney’s larger body of work knows that’s not his real goal.