• A Japanese American community activist wants part of S. Dearboarn Street rechristened “Mikado Street,” the name of one of Dearborn’s 1890s predecessors. The question not raised in the linked news story: Can ethnic pride be boosted by the use of a name associated with British comic stereotyping? Or, conversely, could this move help “reclaim” the word?
• Tacoma’s biggest private employers these days? Hospital chains.
• Is Microsoft trying to build its own social networking site? Heck if I know.
• State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown sez Wash. state just might be ready to approve gay marriage.
• Simon Reynolds finds a lot of retro classic rock n’ soul tributes on today’s pop music charts. And he’s sick and tired of it.

vintage 1940 trolley bus from seattletransitblog.com

• Today is the day. Speak now or forever lose your ability to get anywhere in King County, with or without a car. That’s how big this is. Get thee to the King County Council Chambers, 516 Third Ave., 6-8 p.m. Speak out to save transit.
• Is local weather really getting “wetter and warmer”? Cliff Mass says not necessarily.
• After the state failed earlier this year, the city may strike out on its own to license and regulate medical marijuana establishments. The first regulations I’d want: no pot-leaf neon signs, no tie dyed scrubs, and no public display of the phrase “da kine.”
• City Councilmember Tim Burgess wants the big public todo about child prostitution to become a little less about the rival grandstandings of celebs, politicians, and publishers, and a little more about the children themselves. At least that’s what I hope Burgess wants.
• The Thunderbird Motel that became the Fremont Inn, one of the notorious drug-dealer-infused motels on Aurora shut down a year or two back? It could become Catholic-run low income housing.
• The state’s sending up helicopters to test local radiation levels. But don’t panic, officials insist.
• The old idea to put up a surplus 60 foot Lava Lamp in the tiny Eastern Wash. burg of Soap Lake? It’s on again.
• You might not have heard of it yet, but there’s a longshoremen’s protest at a new grain terminal in Longview, where management has hired nonunion workers. A recent protest got 100 union dock workers and supporters arrested.
• A Daily Kos diarist compares the continuing nonsense over the federal deficit to “worrying about the water bill when the house is on fire.”
• Time claims Americans “distinguish toiler paper brands better than banks.” Insert snarky comments here.
• What are the chances that l’affaire Murdoch could cause the decline and fall of the Fox “News” Channel? Not much, I believe; at least not directly or right away. Murdoch’s UK papers used grody methods to amass information about politicians, celebrities, the royal family, and even violent-crime victims. Fox “News” doesn’t give a damn about information; it just makes crap up.

• Gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee made a bold move when he suggested that the state’s Investments Board could put more pension fund money into Washington businesses. Now, Inslee’s backed off that a little.
• Remember suburban sprawl? Now, at least in apartment construction, almost all the region’s new development is in Seattle.
• Meanwhile in the suburbs, local small businesses are among the enterprises learning what they can do with abandoned big-box retail spaces.
• The now-shuttered Columbia City Cinema is a mess. The building, and the finances behind it.
• Nationally, Mark Sumner insists there is no federal fiscal crisis, only a trumped-up right wing power play.
• The group United for a Fair Economy has a chart of 11 different “Things the Wealthiest Americans Can Buy for the U.S. (that most families can’t afford for themselves!).” For instance, the nation’s richest 400 households could pay off the whole country’s credit card debts.
• The Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal continues to obsess pundits everywhere. At The Observer (the Sunday-only sister paper to The Guardian, the left-leaning U.K. daily that broke much of the scandal’s details), Henry Porter claims that, at least in Brit domestic politics, “the door has shut on Murdoch.”
• And an unsigned piece in The Times of India sums up the standard operating procedure at Murdoch’s UK tabloids, even without their ickiest invasions of privacy, as “exploiting the pornography of sorrow.” A lot of U.S. media could be similarly accused.
• We close for today with Roger Ebert righteously snarking against rewritten “easy reading” versions of The Great Gatsby (possibly created for adult ESL classes):

There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process.

Back to the old grind. The lovely old grind.

• The former Wash. state prison boss admitted he’d quit because he’d been caught in a Tumwater motel with a female subordinate. Insert your own “subordinate” (or “Tumwater”) jokes here.
• The advocacy group Transportation for Washington explains just why public transit financing in this state is in such a mess. (Hint: It’s the dependence on sales taxes.) The group’s also got a handy list of public hearings in King County where you can support a one-time car tab surtax, so Metro can avoid draconian service cuts.
• Ex-NYT columnist Frank Rich debuts in New York mag bemoaning “Obama’s Original Sin,” which, in Rich’s eyes, was to accept big campaign bucks from the Wall St. fat cats.
• Meanwhile, some Columbia U. politics-as-horse-race wonk wonders “What If the Republicans Lose in 2012?” I suspect they will lose, and resume shrinking into regional status, with the “centrist” Democrats becoming the new Party of Business (and perhaps the only party capable of fielding an Electoral College-winnable Presidential campaign for some time).
• A Daily Kos diarist sends along word of a breakthrough in fuel cell technology for motor vehicles. Fuel cells, as you recall from the hype two or three oil crises ago, turn simple hydrogen gas (refineable from many cheap sources)  and oxygen into energy. But they need “catalysts” to undertake this transformation. Up ’til now, those had to be made from costly platinum. But earlier this year, researchers at the (more recently fire-threatened) Los Alamos labs said they’d figured out a system using a far cheaper combo of carbon, iron, and cobalt. Of course, cheaper-running, zero-emissions cars would still be cars, promoting land-killing sprawl and long lonely commutes.

• Washington state has cut all tourism marketing from the state govt. budget. Mind you, the “SAY WA” campaign raised more jeers than cheers, but this is an important industry. In the next legislative session this should be brought back, perhaps paid by a tiny addition onto hotel and rental-car taxes. (Now if we can figure out how to bring back film-industry incentives and restore Basic Health….)
• Georgetown’s Hat n’ Boots: now officially Seattle’s funnest historic landmark.
• Was Seattle ethnic/folk/punk ensemble Kurtur Shock ripped off by Turkish recording artists?
• A UW mental-illness researcher has come out with her own harrowing account of teenage psych-ward imprisonment. Her message, and her Rx for today’s borderline patients: “acceptance of life as it is, not as it is supposed to be; and the need to change, despite that reality and because of it.”
• Michael Lind at Salon only half facetiously suggests a kind of reverse “going Galt”: All the Americans who are no longer of use to the super rich (i.e., most of us) could move en masse to countries that still make things.
• South Lake Union: New hot spot for restaurants, boutiques, and hookers. (The linked story’s headline misleadingly talks about “prostitution near Seattle Center.”)

A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual 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 big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.

I know a LOT of people who are spending this day and upcoming night wishing a good riddance to this epic fail of a year we’ve had.

The economy in much of the world (for non-zillionaires) just continued to sluggishly sputter and cough. Thousands more lost jobs, homes, 401Ks, etc.

The implosion of the national Republican Party organization cleared the way (though not in this state) for a wave of pseudo-populist demagogue candidates who only appeared in right-wing media, because those were the only places where their nonsensical worldviews made pseudo-sense. Enough of these candidates made enough of a stir to take control of the US House of Reps., which they have already turned back over to their mega-corporate masters.

And we had the BP spill, continuing mideast/Afghan turmoils, violent drug-turf wars in several countries, floods in Pakistan, a bad quake in Haiti, the deaths of a lot of good people, and a hundred channels of stupid “reality” shows.

Locally, a number of ballot measures were introduced to at least stem the state’s horrid tax unfairness, while staving off the worst public-service budget cuts. They all failed.

And the South Park bridge was removed without a clear replacement schedule, the Deeply Boring Tunnel project continued apace, the Seattle Times got ever crankier (though it stopped getting thinner), and our major men’s sports teams were mediocre as ever. Seattle Center bosses chose to replace a populist for-profit concession (the Fun Forest) with an upscale-kitsch for-profit concession (Chihuly).

Alleviating factors: (Most) American troops are out of Iraq. Something approximating health care reform, and something approximating the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, both passed. Conan O’Brien resurfaced; Jon and Stephen worked to restore sanity and/or fear. The Storm won another title. The football Huskies had a triumphant last hurrah; the Seahawks might get the same. Cool thingamajigs like the iPad and Kinect showed up. Seattle has emerged as the fulcrum of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre. The Boeing 787’s continued hangups have proven some technologies just can’t be outsourced.

My personal resolution in 1/1/11 and days beyond: To find myself a post-freelance, post-journalism career.

As it is darned near every year, the proposed ’11 WA state budget contains a plan to completely eliminate the Basic Health program for the working poor.

This must not stand. Even if it takes bipartisan supermajorities in the Legislature.

We need a society where we give a damn about one another–and not just when it’s convenient or when it’s “good for business.”

Confused about all the initiatives on this year’s Wash. state ballot?

You’re not alone.

Fortunately, there’s a handy dandy “Living Voters Guide” now online, to help you match the number to the proposal.

I’m relisting the measures here, with my own endorsements (which are based around the concept that we do need public services, and we need ways to pay for them in-this-economic-blah-blah-blah):

• Referendum 52: The Legislature should have simply passed this instead of referring it to voters. Schools need energy efficiency retrofitting. Bottled water might was well have the same taxation as pop. YEP.
• Initiative 1053: Tim Eyman’s latest sounds-good-on-talk-radio, is-disastrous-in-real-life measure. No, we’re not stupid. No, we don’t want Calif.-style legislative gridlock. Yes, the state needs to plug budget holes, even with spit and hairpins and bailing wire if need be, and without regard to arbitrary “caps.” NOPE.
• Initiative 1082: The Building Industry Association of Washington’s attempt to gut worker’s compensation by turning it over to the private insurance industry (not exactly my favorite group O’ guys these days). NOPE.
• Initiative 1098: The new state income tax, only on the rich. Endorsed by Bill Gates Sr. (who used to call himself Bill Gates Jr., but that’s beside the point). By itself, it won’t cure Washington’s status as the most regressive tax system (or at least close to the most regressive) in the nation. But it’s a start. YEP.
• Initiative 1100: Two very different schemes to privatize liquor sales made the ballot. This is the one that has TV spots with bar owners Linda Dershang and Tom Douglas endorsing it. It’s also the Costco-funded initiative. It’s the one that would get the state out of both the wholesale and the retail liquor biz, and would allow outfits like Costco to buy beer and wine as well as spirits direct from their makers, instead of through wholesale intermediaries. It would lower liquor prices but at a too-high cost to state coffers. NOPE.
• Initiative 1105: The less radical liquor privatization scheme. This is the one promoted by alcohol wholesalers, whose existence is threatened by the rival I-1100. If you really insist on putting hard booze into the supermarkets, pick this one instead. Otherwise, NOPE.
• Initiative 1107: The Coca-Cola initiative, to end the temporary sales tax on pop and junk food. The tax itself is a cumbersome mess of inclusions and exclusions, but this would just gut the whole thing. NOPE.

Once again, we celebrate the anniversary of colonial business bosses’ forcible  secession from the government that had made their success possible.

And once again, the American ideology of bottom-line-above-all has us in a mess. Several messes, in fact, and huge ones at that.

We now have a national economy based on, as Intel cofounder Andy Grove puts it, “highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed.”

We have wars for oil, or more precisely for geopolitical alliances based on oil.

We have massive amounts of this self-same gunk polluting a seabed of incalculable value. We now know that it’s not one company’s fault. The entire industry was spending as little money or effort as legally possible on safety and cleanup (expenses which don’t immediately contribute to profits). The particular two or three companies behind Deepwater Horizon were simply the ones that happened to lose at this very American version of Russian roulette.

And around the country, state and local governments spar over how many social safety nets they can get away with letting rot—because, after all, asking anything from Sacred Business just isn’t done. Especially not here in the state By the Upscale, Of the Upscale, and For the Upscale.

But still, there is hope.

There is always hope, so long as America’s primal contradiction continues to hold.

I speak of the contradiction between America’s ugly realities (a nation built by financiers, conquerors, slavers, and merchant middlemen) and its lofty ideals (a nation professing devotion to freedom, justice, and democracy).

We came dangerously close in the Bush era toward resolving this contradiction in the worst way possible, by junking the ideals and becoming unabashed, unshameable mega-hustlers.

It didn’t work.

Even the furthest reaches of the Far Right found they could not win even core base support for their assorted schemes without making at least nominal appeals to citizens’ more noble natures.

That’s what the professional organizers and corporate lobbyists behind the faux-populist “tea party” nonsense understand. That’s why they disguise their ultra-corporate agenda in images of patriotic kitsch.

Even the money-grubbers’ and power-grabbers’ last remaining loyal followers believe in (at least the symbols 0f) America’s higher ideals.

This is an opportunity for those of us who wish to promote a more progressive agenda.

It’s why I still believe in what this land can become.

Ah, I remember it well.

The months and weeks and days of slow buildup. The steam plumes. The bulge.

Then the eruption of Mount St. Helens. The biggest thing that had happened in my part of the world during my short life.

It was all encompassing. It was thrilling.

There were many deaths, but not as many as if it had happened on a weekday with 300 loggers on duty nearby.

There was infrastructure destruction, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.

There was eco destruction, but even that has brought forth new life.

No, the real devastation to this area, and to this country, began much later in 1980.

That hoped-for big south-O-the-border business boost from the Vancouver Olympics? Not gonna happen, probably.

Of all the millions in Twilight tourism and merch sales to young vampire fans, the real-life native tribe depicted in the books essentially gets nothing.

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.

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