THE LONG ORDEAL of the coup attempt is over at last. MISC., your thank-God-it’s-after-Valentine’s-Day online column, wishes it had something intelligent to say about it, but doesn’t. All that can be said now is Clinton won what may have been a calculated risk, putting his own career and the institution of the Presidency on the line in an attempt to break the Religious Right’s popularity base. After he spent his first term trying to woo big business away from the GOP, he’s spent his second term engaged in bringing the Right’s pious hypocrisies to a kind of public referendum. I’m not saying he tried to get caught cheatin’ on his wife. I am saying he and his team artfully managed the crisis, to turn it away from being a judgement on him and into a judgement on his accusers. Speaking of smut and its purveyors…

CLIMACTIC MOMENT?: A few weeks before Dan Rather tried to shock America’s TV news viewers with the “rise and rise” tale of Seattle cyberporn tycoon Seth Warshavsky, Business 2.0 magazine claimed his empire’s probably peaked. The cover story alleges Netporn (and specifically Warshavsky’s IEG group of paid-access sites) has hit the wall, can no longer commercially expand at its accustomed-to growth rates. The mag claims we oughta see pay-per-view skin sites consolidate and thin out this year. Warshavsky, as we’ve noted in previous weeks, has already planned for such contingencies by attempting to branch out into other Web-programming genres (gambling, stock quotes, even online surgery videos). Still, having come of age in a Seattle that thought itself to be just another sex-repressed northern city, there’s a kind of almost-kinky delight in knowing the world now thinks of our too-fair city as the cutting edge of sleaze spectacle. Speaking of entertainment dollars at work…

THE ART OF THE DEAL: So highbrow arts are worth the corporate/government investment, according to a highly publicized Corporate Council for the Arts report. It claims 200 King and Pierce County arts groups (specifically the bigger, more “professional” ones) generate $373 million in “economic impact,” hiring 16,000 people (mostly part-timers and contract workers) and selling 5.9 million tickets a year (almost 20 percent more admissions than major pro sports generate here). That’s all nice to know, but will the positive fiscal PR generated by the report be used to help promote more funding support for the arts, or just for more arts-related construction projects?

STRIKING: It’s spring training time, and the sports pages are once again spouting questions of Whither baseball? (Not again?) This time, the athletico-pundits claim that despite the recent NBA player lockout, pro basketball (and pro football) are in much better fiscal shape than baseball. With no salary cap to keep a few well-heeled team owners from grabbing all the top stars, the sport could become as uncompetitive as it had been in its alleged golden age, when the Yankees and the old New York Giants were always at or near the top. This time, the commentators warn, the deck’s so stacked against the less-rich teams that some might go under.

How about a better question: Whither major-league sports as we know them? Player-salary inflation can no longer be supported by TV contracts, now that the explosion of channels has decimated network sports ratings. Sneaker endorsements and team-logo merchandise may also be nearly tapped out as revenue sources. Almost every team in each sport either has a new luxury-box-beholden arena or is working to get one, so that particular money well’s just about maxed out as well. And with each of the big sports suiting up 30 teams or more, there aren’t many cities left to threaten to move a team to. The salary-cap sports have a few more years to deal with this trap than baseball, but they’ll have to deal with it eventually.

Here’s how I’d save major-league pro sports: All new teams, teams that get sold, and teams that move into publicly-funded stadia should be controlled on the league-franchise-contract level by regional, quasi-public corporations, similar to the organizations running many of the stadia. In turn, they’d contract out team operations to management companies, essentially turning team GMs and presidents from owners into contractors. Teams can only build new arenas or pay hyper-inflated salaries if the management companies can financially justify such moves. If a management company can’t make a team pay, it could let its contract to run it expire. Teams could move only if the regional authorities couldn’t land a feasible operator. Speaking of home teams worth saving…

THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL: On the day after Stroh Brewing (current owners of Seattle’s Rainier Brewing and Portland’s Blitz-Weinhard Brewing) announced it was getting out of the beer business and selling off its brewing plants and beer brands separately, the sidewalk sandwich sign at 2nd Avenue Pizza read: “Keep Rainier in Seattle.” The loss of the Rainier Brewery (at 121, perhaps Seattle’s oldest manufacturing enterprise) would mean more than just the loss of some 200 jobs. It would mean the real end of one of our proudest local institutions, even if a beer continues to be sold under that name.

In the days before microbrews and Bud Light dogs, most of the beer drunk in the Northwest came from five places: Rainier in Seattle, Carling-Heidelberg in Tacoma, Olympia in Tumwater, General Brewing-Lucky Lager in Vancouver U.S.A., and Blitz-Weinhard in Portland. Rainier pretty much owned the Seattle market (and had a nice sideline with its drunkard’s-favorite Rainier Ale, whose dark green label inspired the nickname “The Green Death”); and Blitz-Weinhard (and its later flagship brand, Henry’s) likewise in Portland. But Oly was by far the biggest of the quintet, shipping enough product in 13 western states to qualify in some years as America’s #6 beer vendor (after Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Miller, Pabst, and Coors, which was also a western-only brand back then).

But industry-wide sales stagnations and the onward marketing pushes of Bud, Miller and Coors saw all these Northwest favorites tumble in the marketplace. The Lucky and Heidelberg plants closed down; the other three breweries changed owners several times. Now, perhaps only the Oly plant will be left. Oly’s facility is now owned by Pabst but is to be sold to Miller as an aspect of the complex Stroh asset sale (though it may still engage in “contract brewing” on behalf of Pabst, which would keep the Olympia trademarks and would buy the Rainier’s and Weinhard’s brands and distribution networks from Stroh). Because Oly used to sell so much more beer than Rainier and Blitz combined, that brewery has far more underused capacity; it could easily produce what all three now make, plus Miller’s brands.

The problem in this scenario is that Rainier’s and Henry Weinhard’s brand identities are closely tied to their sources of production. A Rainier beer not brewed in Seattle, or a Henry Weinhard’s not brewed in Portland, would not carry even a fraction of the decades-developed goodwill built into their names. For the Stroh people (who’d already collected the trademarks and a few branch plants of such prior fallen giants as Heilman and Schlitz) to sell the brands without the plants will only doom them to permanent secondary or tertiary status, like Pabst’s ownership has instilled upon such once-proud brands as Lone Star, Hamm’s, Lucky, and Olympia itself.

A better scenario would be for locals to make a counteroffer to Stroh to buy Rainier and Henry’s (the brand names AND the facilities). Could it happen? The Stroh folks would probably want a higher bid than it’s getting from Pabst for just the brands, and Pabst might also want some dough to walk away from an already-done deal. Could that kind of investment work out for a local buyer, given the stagnant state of both mainstream and upmarket “micro” beer sales? Just maybe. Could such a local buyer sell more Rainier and Henry’s than a Pabst-Miller-Olympia contract venture? Undoubtedly.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, join the drive to keep the soon-to-be AT&T/TCI combine from monopolizing high-speed Internet access, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building for our current survey via email or at the bubblicious Misc. Talk discussion boards, and heed these words from one Peter Wastholm: “All humans are hypocrites; the biggest hypocrite of all is the one who claims to detest hypocrisy.”