The local rumor mills, online and on AM radio and in person, have been all a-flutter this past week over the mere hint of possibility, that men’s pro basketball could again be played in Seattle.

The facts: The league took over running the New Orleans Hornets from the team’s fiscally embattled owner. The team’s arena lease could legally be broken after this season.

All else is speculation.

Could MS mogul Steve Ballmer buy the team, move it here, and along the way pickup rights to the SuperSonics logos and trademarks (now held by NBA Properties)?

Maybe.

Also maybe, the league could fold the Hornets. Or sell them to a New Orleans group. Or move ’em to some other town.

Or the whole league could be shut down in a labor dispute next season, for who knows how long.

So there I was Tuesday evening as I am many Tuesday evenings, at Drinking Liberally. People in whose opinion and progressive zeal I had long trusted were whining and moping. One or two of them even declared the Obama era to have died, and any hope for this troubled land along with it.

“He could have been another FDR,” one sighed. But now, this critic inveighed, Obama was bound to go down in history “worse than Carter.”

All on the basis of one particular, poorly timed and poorly justified, cave to Republican intransigence on bonuses for billionaires, as part of a big give n’ take in which the GOPpers actually did a little bit of givin’.

Look: This guy’s been counted out before. He’ll come back.

And as for progressivism in general, it’s just getting started.

There is, and will continue to be, a lot of work to be done, on both the macro and the micro levels, on getting this country’s course corrected.

It would help if we had a federal government that was with us on this.

But it needs doing anyway, with or without their participation.

Why I haven’t been bloggin’ a lot lately:

• Entered National Novel Writing Month again. Made the 50,000 words in 30 days quota, that entity’s standard of “winning.” Unlike the last time I did NaNoWriMo, I haven’t posted the rough draft of my story here. The reason: It’s still only two-thirds done; when I do finish it, I plan to rigorously edit and cut some of the extraneous verbiage I’d inserted in order to pad my daily word counts for NaNoWriMo purposes. (The subject, you ask? It’s the saddest town in America. No, it’s not Seattle.)
• Started another, nonfiction, commercial book project. All I can say right now is Vanishing Seattle readers might like it.
• Redoubled my efforts to get what I really want. That’s a job. A regular job, where I’d go somewhere, do something (and do it well), and receive a living wage in return. All suggestions welcome. (Note: By “job,” I do not mean unpaid or on-spec writing “opportunities.” I’m not looking for something fun. I’m looking for something that pays.)

• A bunch of preppy white people, some pushing 50, lip syncing to the Black Eyed Peas, or
• The nation’s oldest and most established mass media conglomerate stealing shticks from Shoreline and Shorecrest high school video classes?

I love snow in Seattle. Always have. Always will.

Yet I know many of you have had an ordeal these past two days. Remote power outages; all-night commutes home; lost retail traffic, etc.

So I will forego my annual essay about why I love city snow so much.

I will give only a little verbal image.

I overlook a shorter building next door. This morning its roof was covered with just a remaining dusting of snow. Etched into this were dozens of pigeon footprints, in random curving paths reminiscent of a dotted Sunday Family Circus townscape. Cute beyond cute.

So I will leave you with Seattle’s official song of winter.

Stan Boreson \”Winter Underwear\” on \”The Lawrence Welk Show,\” 1957

“The Funky Monkey 104.9,” one of the last commercial stations still playing new hard rock in the region, has flipped to “Gen X,”  a 1990s nostalgia format. I’m not ready for this, let’s put it at that.

This day began for me by reading about the 90th anniversary of commercial radio.

It ends for me with thoughts about possibly this city’s greatest radio personality, Dave Niehaus, whose death was announced this evening.

He was the Mariners’ chief announcer for all of the team’s 34 seasons. He was heard on every game the team played with only 101 exceptions.

Most of those rare days off occurred in recent years. While his voice never lost its timbre, he’d become visibly shaky while seen holding his mic on FSN’s pregame telecasts. His quick wit and command of the game had begun to occasionally falter. Longtime listeners (including charter listeners like me) could tell he was in the twilight of his career.

Yet he held on to the very end, to the last regular season game of 2010.

Niehaus was the one thru-line from the Kingdome days to today, from the early years of Al Cowens and Funny Nose Glasses Night to this year’s half season of pitching ace Cliff Lee.

His voice, even when narrating tales of diamond futility, always held the promise of summer. And now it always will.

Not only does next Monday bring the televised return of Conan O’Brien, but it brings an end to Seattle’s original all sleaze-talk station. Fisher Broadcasting is switching KVI-AM from conservatalk to oldies music.

Insert your joke about but-they’ve-been-mired-in-the-past-all-this-time here.

We’ve got our part to do to keep the right wing sleaze machine from controlling the Senate. That part is the re-defeat of Dino Rossi.

Want another reason? Rossi’s been holding seminars on how to profit from the foreclosure crisis. Call it financial schadenfreude, or just call it cynical hustling. Whatever you call it, it ain’t what I call the sort of character we need in DC right now.

So David Stern apparently doesn’t know how to run a sports league during a recession. He’s talking openly about letting the NBA’s weaker franchises die. Anything, I suppose, to keep Seattle from getting its rightful due.

At AlterNet, Clarisse Thorn asks the musical question, “Why do we demonize men who are honest about their sexual needs?”

Her answer: Because many women see men, particularly straight men, particularly unfamiliar men, as potential threats. It’s one thing to disdain a woman as a “slut.” It’s vastly more dehumanizing to dismiss a man as a “creep.”

ARI UP OF THE SLITS: Some of the first-generation punk rock women copied, mocked, or expanded on the then-traditional bad-boy rocker tropes. Ari Up, with her bandmates, did something different. They created a sound that was neither “fuck me” nor “fuck you.” It was totally rocking, totally strong, and totally feminine. And it’s seldom been matched.

BOB GUCCIONE: His masterwork, the first two decades of Penthouse magazine, was not merely a “more explicit” imitation of Playboy, as some commentators have described it. It had its own aesthetic, its own fully formed identity.

And so did its originator. If Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was more like William Randolph Hearst (a hermit philosopher secluded on his private estate), Guccione was more like Charles Foster Kane (living with gusto, building and losing a fortune). A Rolling Stone profile, published just before Guccione reluctantly gave up control of what was left of the Penthouse empire, depicts the open-shirted, gold-chain-bearing mogul as a man who poured millions into “life extension” research, even while he smoked the five packs of cigarettes a day that took much of his mouth in 1999 and his life last week.

TOM BOSLEY: Now we may never know what happened to Richie’s older brother.

If you love political snark and the vilifying of easy big-boy targets as much as I do, you’ll love “Stop Spewman.” It’s a series of Web ads starring Jack Black as your ultimate astroturfy corporate shill (not that he has to exaggerate very much to make the shtick look ludicrous).

You’ve one more evening tonight, and one more afternoon tomorrow, to catch The Novel: Live! at Richard Hugo House. Don’t worry about tuning in late; you can read all the previously written texts at the hereby linked website.

The event involves 36 writers (one of whom has a cartoonist collaborator) creating a single piece of fictive goodness. The final edited work will be put out as an ebook next year.

If this sounds absurd, well it is. But it’s not unprecedented. In the 1980s I was involved with “The Novel Of Seattle By Seattle,” an entire book-length yarn created in four days at Bumbershoot, complete with an accompanying art installation.

Many in Belltown are pleased to see the state’s shut down V Bar, site of one fatal shooting and several other violent closing-time confrontations this past year.

But many of us are saddened that Kelly’s Tavern, the neighborhood’s last true “sleazy dive bar,” has apparently closed for good. Its longtime owner has died, and her heirs reportedly don’t want to carry on.