Take 2007, please. What was it, The Year of Driving Dangerously? Doing 50 down Market Street? Needing two lanes to cross the 520 floating bridge? Plowing into a ditch? What were Venus Velazquez, Miss Jane Springman and Karl Solid thinking? (Answers, in order: How could I lose a City Council campaign, how could I lose to Richard Pope, and how could I lose that cop behind me?) Velazquez ended up blowing a mere 40 percent on the Vote-Alyzer, County Council member Jane Hague Springman wound up celebrating her near-defeat with ?one glass” of ?Fucking Ridiculous” wine, and Solid, of Bothell, with his 9th DUI arrest, became one of the first to be charged under the new 5-DUI-Convictions-In-10-Years-Is-A-Felony law. A less-than-Solid performance, Karl.But onward! What was it the mayor?s office called a Seattle Weekly reporter who spoke out of turn about Green Greg?s gas gulping? Nitwit, that?s it, a fine, fine 2007 rubric. The reporter was nitwitted for revealing that, in the year after the mayor told Seattleites to find alternative transportation and save the Earth, his fleet of mayoral limos consumed more than 1,130 gallons of gas. (On the plus side, so to speak, Big Greg got out of his car more frequently — at the airport!) Nit-calling seemed more in order around the mayor?s house after his son got three months in the federal lockup for bribery and casino cheating. What were you thinking, Jacob? ?Of getting away with it, dad.” No, no — first you have to run for office! (Beware, Jacob, the siren call of fellow inmates such as Randy ?Duke” Cunningham, newly elected to the packed Republican federal cellhouse. Rehabilitation is one thing, but don?t come out thinking Iran is the answer). Moving right along: Even if our prisons were overflowing, the nation seemed to think there was room for one more in 2007: Jail to the chief! Still, impeachment isn?t what it used to be. Maybe Bush screwed us, but he did not have sex with that dictator – though Dick may have excessively fondled his shotgun. (There was Jon Stewart, as Darth Vader, imaginarily talking to the veep: ?Dick, if I pulled the shit you pulled?”). Better, there was Stewart, as computer idiot, talking to a real Bill Gates: ?What does the F-12 button do?anything?” Bill: ?Start with F-1 and work your way up.” The erstwhile richest man was working his own way up from No. 2, his filthy net worth of $59 billion having been topped by Mexican Carlos Slim?s $69 billion. OK, but, question of the year: Does he have his Green Card? Like abortion, gun control, religion and sex with horses, immigration was a 2007 hot-button topic. ?If you want to get into the United States you have to have legal documentation or a 95-mile-an-hour fastball,” said Letterman. ?The good news,” said Leno, ?is that Congress is cracking down on illegal immigration. The bad news: a head of lettuce will now cost $300.” We took gas at the pumps, too, $3 a gallon. But weren?t we doing it wrong? It?s only $99 if you buy it by the barrel!Now, the sports: Mariners blow, Supes suck, Hawks good enough to lose when it matters. The UW taught us how to reward failure: Keep Husky coach Ty Willingham (3.5 yearly win average) but fire the guy who hired him. Sonics owner Clay Bennett achieved the impossible — making Howard Schultz look benevolent. Surprised he couldn?t get the same arena deal Schultz could never get, the poor guy says he?s forced to move the team in with him in Oklahoma City. No one?s saying he?s a nitwit. Liar, cheat, Satan, yes, but no dummy. And don?t let anyone tell you that sports doesn?t matter in all walks of life, including the final one. As Arizona death row inmate Robert Comer said moments before they pulled the switch: ?Go Raiders.”In news news, the P-I was saved from the scrap heap (or profitable transformation as a paper home-delivered byte by byte) when the Times blinked. The Daily Blethen came that close to revealing its secret and systemic JOA effort to sabotage P-I circulation and skirt anti-trust laws — all just to commandeer the NY Times Crossword! (Or was it Frank?s way of telling the P-I, as he once told the Eastside Journal, ?fuck you to death”? Of course, with the late Journal, it worked). Let?s go to the men?s room, a toe-tapping year there. You gotta love Idaho?s Larry Craig, the self-declared married Republican senator who is not gay. In perfect 2007 nitwit tradition, he called a press conference to explain why he was innocent after pleading guilty to trying to pick up a cop at the Minneapolis airport, opening with: ?Thank you all very much for coming out today.” Boing! Also badged up in the men?s room was the would-be date of Florida state Rep. Bob Allen, John McCain?s state campaign chair. Allen said he offered an undercover cop $20, to allow Allen to blow him, as an act of self defense. The cop was a ?burly black man” and Allen ?didn?t want to become a statistic.” (Just another notch on the cop?s enticing nightstick?) Washington state Rep. Richard Curtis (R-Non Gay), skirted the men?s room and went straight to the Hollywood Erotic Botique in that hotbed of sex, downtown Spokane. Attired in his best lingerie, Dick hired a male prostitute and retired to the wonderfully named Davenport Hotel — and then turned himself into the cops! The prostitute was trying to blackmail him, he said as he alternately filled out a police report and his Olympia resignation. (He didn?t see it coming? Well, apparently neither did Andrew Meyer when he said ?Don?t taze me, bro!”)In campaign news — another 11 months of this? Let?s just declare Hill-Bill prez (and Barry — his high school name — Obama veep) so we can get back to American Idol. (I don?t really watch it. Ohno.) The Clintons would be a package deal, the missus even said so: ?I’m not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president.” OK, out of context and confusing — which is short for: politics. Obama slightly overstated that tornado death toll in Kansas — 12, not 10,000. And Rudy Giuliani said of his fellow Republicans: ?We don’t all agree on everything. I don’t agree with myself on everything,” (later adding: ?Freedom is about authority.”) Joe Biden said he was ?not joking” when he explained ?You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,” but John McCain was kidding, right, when he actually asked out loud, ?Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” He then broke into that old Beach Boys song, ?Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” John Edwards was just ?a fag” to Ann Coulter, but ?I?m more of a man than any liberal,” she explained, scratching her balls. Justice Clarence Thomas likewise announced it wasn?t those pointy-hatted KKK lynch mobs he was scared of all his life, it was the ?left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.” On the flip side, Bill O?Reilly flowed sanctimoniously into a Harlem restaurant only to discover ?There wasn?t one person in Sylvia?s who was screaming ?M-fer, I want more ice tea!'” What a falafel thing to say.Now, back to reality, and gridlock. In stop-dead Seattle, how did that super-sized transportation measure Prop 1 ever fail? It was only going to cost us $47 billion, give or take $100 billion. The ferry fleet, led by the MV Cracked Hull, needs another $100 million to stay afloat, while the downtown bus tunnel, revamped for $82 million, was reopening and reclosing as fast as a computer could glitch. At least the viaduct is safe again — we seemed to have repaired it with a fresh coat of neglect — and a born-again trolleytown is turned on by its SLUT (is it true those new city patrols at Freeway Park will be called the Park ImproveMent Police?). Meanwhile, if you tried to keep things moving by zipping past the new red-light cameras, you got one of almost 14,000 tickets issued in 11 months, raising $900,000 — which the city will use to buy more cameras and stop more cars. They obviously didn?t hear about Kou Wei Chiu, caught in traffic and arriving too late to board his plane to Nashville. It worked out though. He phoned in a bomb threat to SeaTac and, presto, caught a ride with the cops. Speaking of crime news, justice is swiftest at the Seattle Justice Center when someone?s making microwave popcorn — the May smoke evacuation that sent 400 people running was the eighth in three years. And stealing all that money from a mentally ill man was exceptionally poor customer service by those West Seattle car salesmen — but they did have a reputation to uphold. And not to state the obvious but crime is all about money –Bonita Money and Cash Money. The B-movie actress and her cousin were found guilty of trying to kidnap Bonita Money?s broken-leg honey Zeljko Misic from Bosnia via Lake Forest Park and take him to Las Vegas (exhale). They got off easy with prison time and will not be sentenced to watch Bonita?s ?Terror in Beverly Hills.” That naked couple arrested for humping in an SUV on I-5 got off easy too, cough. Nitwits, maybe, but probably more satisfied than most of us in 2007. Happy 2008 anyway, and please, this time really don?t taze me, bro.