I'll skip the "year in review" staple this year. You remember it well enough, if you don't have amnesia. If you do have amnesia, the past year has been neatly archived over here.

Instead, here are a few predictions about the headlines (and some stories that will fly mostly below the radar) for 2011:

What to Do About the Seattle Police: It doesn’t matter what discipline is imposed—or not imposed—in several high-profile cases of alleged police misconduct this last year; the rash of incidents beg further scrutiny of the department. If, for instance, an inquest finds Seattle Police Department Officer Ian Birk in the wrong for killing for Native American woodcarver John T. Williams, it demonstrates that officers need more training, more restraint (so cops don’t willy-nilly cap disheveled old guys shuffling across the street). If he’s exonerated, well holy shit. Let’s just give Ted Kaczynski a Nobel Peace Prize. Likewise, if SPD’s internal accountability investigation of Detective Shandy “Beat the fucking Mexican piss out of you” Cobane and knee-stomping colleague Officer Mary Woollum are found guilty of wrongdoing, that further demonstrates a problem. But since this is an internal investigation, an administrative remedy—simply suspended for three days?—will seem out of scale with the racially charged threat of assault. If they're absolved of wrongdoing like the vast majority of misconduct cases, Seattle could rightfully riot. Regardless, the whole ordeal will likely to leave more unrest than closure.

The Tunnel Fracas Continues: Not sick of the tunnel yet? You will be. Despite tunnel proponents' chant that “the debate is over” and claims that the decision is made, this sucker will simmer on front burner before nearly a year—and it still may never boil...

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Paul Krugman on today's GOP—it's required reading.

In 2010, Washington State voters did two things they're going to regret all through the next year (and beyond).

1. By a 64-36 margin they passed Tim Eyman's Initiative 1053, which puts the state legislature in a fiscal vise by imposing an impossible two-thirds majority requirement for raising new revenue at a time when the state is facing a $4.6 billion budget shortfall. The result will be extreme cuts to basic state services, and a wide ripple effect that will be felt by many of the same people who, in voting for Eyman's 1053, thought they were protecting themselves from more Great Recession hurt. They weren't, and here's the problem with the idea that state government can simply cut its way out of a $4.6 billion hole: Our state's budget has already been slashed by more than $5 billion over the last five years, leaving few extraneous services to be cut. Which means that the same people who are channeling their financial hurt into demands that the government cease collecting any new revenue—full stop, without even allowing legislators to easily close tax loopholes for, say, big out of state banks—well, those same people, as already mentioned, will be among the first to be hurt by an all cuts budget that shreds the social safety net.

2. By the same margin, 64-36, those same Washington State voters defeated Bill Gates Sr.'s effort to begin fixing our state's dysfunctional and regressive tax structure through Initiative 1098, which would have imposed an income tax on Washington's wealthiest citizens—people making over $200,000 per year as individuals or over $400,000 per year as couples—in order to raise about $2 billion per year to help fund education and health care. Misled by income tax opponents, many voters who earn far less than $200,000 per year came to believe that this new income tax would apply to them, too. So they voted against it, doing nothing to change a tax structure that benefits the rich far more than themselves and assuring deep cuts to the very education and health care programs that make their lives easier.

As a result of these two votes, in 2011 Washington State will continue to look like this:

• With Initiative 1098's defeat, Washington will continue tax its poorest citizens at a higher rate than any other state in the nation.

And the brains behind our tax system will look a lot less like this and a lot more like this.

Sometimes it seems like conservatives are afraid of everything. But don't blame them—they're born that way, poor things:

A study to be published next year at University College London suggests that conservative brains are structured differently than the brains of other people.... Specifically, the research shows that people with conservative tendencies have a larger amygdala and a smaller anterior cingulate than other people. The amygdala—typically thought of as the "primitive brain"—is responsible for reflexive impulses, like fear. The anterior cingulate is thought to be responsible for courage and optimism. This one-two punch could be responsible for many of the anecdotal claims that conservatives "think differently" from others.