…and the whole greed/corruption/warmongerin’ Bush era dept.: Saturday’s Sunday-preview Seattle Times will have its editors’ choices for the top local news stories of the year. Here’s mine:

1. Washington Mutual goes pffft.

2. The Sonics go blort.

3. Safeco goes doink.

4. General economic and real-estate kerplunk-ness.

5. Obamamania a huge hit locally; Democrats win just about everything except the 8th Congressional District.

6. December’s Snowtopia brings beauty, wonder, photogenic bus wipeouts, and the sudden discovery that not everyone loves the Nickels administration.

7. Seattle music rules again (Fleet Foxes, Grand Archives, Saturday Knights, the Dutchess and the Duke, Team Gina, Mono in VCF).

8. The incredible shrinking newspapers.

9. We learn just how corrupt the Port of Seattle’s been.

10. Northwest Afternoon goes twok.

Some runner-up stories, in no particular order: Whooped-up nonsense over an atheist billboard at the state capitol; all major local sports teams have pathetic seasons at once; the local news media discover gang violence when it strikes in white neighborhoods; Twilight mania; Amazon Kindle a hit; Alaskan Way Viaduct and SR 520 replacement choices drag on; another round of school-closure threats.

We’ll miss ‘em: Edward “Tuba Man” McMichael; politicians Ruby Chow, Jeanette Williams, and Ellen Craswell; sculptor/video artist Doris Chase; sports promoter Dick Vertlieb; Ellensburg installation artist Richard Elliott; DJ/jazz promoter Norm Bobrow; Blue Moon Tavern co-owner Bob Morrison.

And Su Job. The fiber artist, arts promoter-advocate, and 619 Western studio landlady passed peacefully at 7 p.m. Christmas night.

…of Snowtopia ’08’s final flourish of flurries, we must say goodbye to Eartha Kitt, Ms. “Santa Baby” herself. I had the privilege of seeing her at Jazz Alley sometime in the mid-1990s. She was still as sultry and saucy as ever. I knew I was in the presence of a living goddess; and so did everyone else in the room.

…to see the snow-melting rains appear, even though we all knew they had to appear one day.

Snowtopia ‘08 does leave me with one question: If Seattle refuses to put salt on its roads, how about Mrs. Dash instead?

…that snow in the city should be seen as an adventure rather than an ordeal, Eli Sanders chimes in with thoughts on how to embrace and extend isolated incidents of a “culture of street joy.”

So we’ve finally had it. The Big One. The Perfect Storm (Western Washington version). The utter catastrophe the TV stations breathlessly threatened/promised every fall and winter since at least 1991.

I won’t disparge the impact this has had on the homeless (who deserve a better lot in life year round).

And the big snow’s timing has left thousands unable to leave or enter the area for holiday reunions; not to mention leaving already-troubled retailers bereft of holiday shoppers.

And, no matter what week it occurs, a snow like this will be tough for car commuters and truck shippers. This time, it also hit bus and train travelers hard.

But damn if it isn’t the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

And the most joyous.

The first non-sticky flakes of Saturday the 13th were all the “white Christmas” miracle I’d come to expect here in the ol’ Puget Sound convergence zone. It was lite; it was white; it went away.

The local newscasts (which, like their counterparts on stations across the country, are built and budgeted exactly for these huge visual-crisis moments) promised/threatened an even huger blast the following Wednesday.

It didn’t happen.

Those of us who’d been through this in the past figured, “Ah, of course. They’ll always threaten but not deliver.”

Then, in the predawn hours of Thursday, the big snow came.

And came.

And came some more.

For four days.

Without getting into crude sexual puns, let me simply state how much I’ve loved it.

As I’ve written here in the past, snow in Seattle is a rare treat. It turns us all into children. Most of us can’t do our normal daily dreary work lives. All we can do is play, and coccoon, and enjoy the company of whoever’s closest to us, and reconnect with those in our most immediate vicinity.

And enjoy the blanket of pure precipitory wonder.

But by this point, even a Snow Miser like me feels a little melancholy while walking through the winter wonderland.

Can there be such a thing as too much beauty, too much joy?

When does it turn into, as the cliche goes, a “great and terrible beauty”?

Sooner for many other people than for me, that’s for sure.

But now, I’m starting to feel the ten-day itch.

At some point, any holiday from the ordinary must conclude.

Lovers who’ve ignored the world beyond one another’s arms must resume doing whatever they do to stay fed. Children must return to school. Trucks must be able to get stuff to and from us. The wheels of commerce must turn again.

But the visceral memories remain—of street sledding on flattened cardboard boxes, of mugs of cocoa or Irish coffee thawing frozen fingers, of strangers becoming instant allies inthe great adventure, of our normal wintery dim grey turned blinding white.

A final thought: It just so happened that this snowapalooza occurred around and on the solstice, the day after which everything becomes just a little brighter. This has been the last winter solstice of the Bush era; the economy’s in the undisputed dumps, the nation’s civic fabric is in tatters, but the hope of better times already beckons.

…a wonderful, wonderful day in Seattle. Work is kaput today, for grownups and schoolchildren alike. It’s a day for frolicking, for bundling up, for keeping warm with cocoa and rum and loved ones, for staying off those damned highways and getting to know your own neighborhood for perhaps the first time. Now if you’ll excuse me, a snowflake just knocked on my window inviting me out.

Longtime readers of this feature know I simply adore snow in the city. It makes everything beautiful. It makes everyone a wide-eyed child (except for those grumps who can only curse the driving conditions). This is a glorious day in Seatown.

I’ve known Thomas Frank’s work since his cultural-commentary zine The Baffler and his first book The Conquest of Cool. As the Clinton era and the tech bubble gave way to Bush’s Reign of Error, Frank’s focus morphed from “hip” youth-marketing shticks to the early-oughts’ financial speculation mania, to the deepest darkest heart of conservative malevolence. This is the setting of his latest treatise, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

Frank’s premise in a nutshell: Many of your worst conspiracy theories about the right-wing sleaze machine are true, and he’s got the voluminous research to prove it. Legislation is sold to lobbyists for big money at golf courses and expensive restaurants. This lobbying industry’s made DC’s Virginia suburbs one of America’s wealthiest enclaves.

Among the results: tax and regulatory breaks for the rich and connected, the outsourcing and even offshoring of many government functions, the hiring of well-connected incompetents at business-unfriendly agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Labor, official support for overseas sweatshops and oil drilling in national parks, the decimation of consumer protection and endangered species listings, etc. etc.

Frank particularly enjoys tracking all this through the career of uber-influence peddler Jack Abramoff, who seems to have been everywhere graft and sanctioned bullying have been within our time. Abramoff’s depicted as helping turn the College Republicans into a gaggle of liberal-bashing shock troops, as coordinating apartheid South Africa’s US PR drives, and of turning the post-1994 Republican Congress into a highly organized machine for legal and quasi-legal bribery.

Like Naomi Klein (whom Frank qoutes and name-drops at one point), Frank’s current work covers a few sectors of the VRWC (vast right wing conspiracy) in excruciating, mind-numbing detail, but is silent almost to the point of nihilism about what progressives might do to reverse these plutocratic trends.

This is particularly ironic considering one of Frank’s chief argument points, that Republican corruption and mismanagement increase public cynicism toward government—an opinion Republicans actively want to promote. (Frank calls this situation “Win-Win Corruption.”)

At the opening of the Obama era, this everything-sucks attitude on the part of the left has simply got to give way to more practical (and, yes, hopeful) strategems.

The legendary pinup model was the most reluctant of icons. She modeled for five years, mostly for small niche-market publishers (including the then-new Playboy).

She then utterly and completely retired from what faint spotlight she had.

Everything since, the whole Bettie phenom, was completely the work of avid fans (and a few ambitious publishers of her public-domain photos). It was several years into the revival that she even heard about it, and several more before she successfully gained legal control over her name and likeness rights.

(Rocketeer comic-book creator Dave Stevens was a key figure in both in promoting the Page revival and in getting her some financial renumeration from it. Stevens died this past March from leukemia at age 52.)

(Apologies to Lynda Barry): A coalition of local government and nonprofit groups has issued its fourth triannual Communities Count report, documenting how King County residents live and/or survive. The full report’s online; a highly condensed version was issued as a tabloid circular in Thursday’s local dailies.

A lot of it’s not pretty, as seen in these headlines from the report’s newsprint version:

“The gap between rich and poor continues to grow.”

“Almost half of all jobs available in King County do not pay a living wage.”

“The richest fifth earn nearly half of the county’s income.”

“Public transportation doesn’t work for working parents.”

“Too many lack health insurance.”

“Domestic violence continues to be a major problem.”

These research-backed statements are based on long-term trends that far predate the current crap in the “larger” economy. The material lives of non-zillionaires have sputtered, stuttered, and slowly sank WHILE the urban condo towers and the suburban McMansions sprouted, while the financial markets boomed, while countless purveyors of “luxury” products and services emerged, while upscale slick local magazines came into print hawking fabulous leisure lifestyles.