Sheldon the Barbarian & other news

Amid reports of vastly improved attendance at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show comes news of a typical overreaction by Las Vegas Sands. I know of one company that was doing off-site demos and fortunately wasn’t among the vendors turfed out by Venelazzo management. The company’s rationale for doing demonstrations away from the show floor was that its extremely high-end audio equipment was difficult to display to advantage among all the competing noises that a convention floor entails.

For all of Sheldon Adelson‘s crowing about the return of convention business, his people really stepped in it by evicting 30 or so companies from the Venelazzo premises. (“And packing up was not enough to satisfy the CES staff and hotel security — they were not allowed to hold business meetings in their suite either.”) Some of the blame obviously accrues to CES itself. But after Sands’ pogrom against small exhibitors, perhaps the evicted parties should take their business to competing hotels in 2011 … ones that will be more grateful for the traffic and less persnickety toward their guests.

The question in Singapore, on which Adelson has placed a huge bet, is not whether casinos will stimulate the economy. It’s whether they will do so in significant fashion. Official projections of a “sluggish” 2010 do not augur well for the city-state’s $10 billion in aggregate casino-resort projects.

Serving two masters. Its two-year stint as a ward of the State of New Jersey has brought about an odd pickle for the Tropicana Atlantic City. Specifically, New Jersey Casino Control Commission Chairwoman Linda Kassekert has been wearing the chapeaux of both Trop audit committee and NJCCC boss. This schizoid situation has, not surprisingly, led to situations such as Kassekert having to preside over the licensing of someone she hired while wearing her Trop hat.

Now, Kassekert is 100% more of an audit committee than the Trop possessed during the farcical Bill Yung regime. However, both Frank Catania and former NJCCC member Brad Smith have it exactly right. Kassekert should have retained an independent auditor. For that matter, even though he’s a creature of Yung, Trop President Mark Giannantonio could have been allowed the discretion to appoint his own audit committee. Since he’s working under a microscope, the prospect of more Yungian hanky-panky should have been nil. Given the ethical morass that the Trop has become, one can only say that the new Carl Icahn regime could not arrive a day too soon.

Hurrah for Loveman. The CEO of Harrah’s Entertainment penned a well-phrased blast (in unmistakably Lovemanian language) at the New York Times for reflexively slamming tribal casinos and gambling per se. Gary Loveman didn’t have to come to the tribe’s defense but good on him for so doing. We’d urge him and fellow Democrats to think twice before writing campaign checks to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, leading candidate to replace Sen. Christopher Dodd (D). Blumenthal’s attitudes in re tribal sovereignty are a throwback to the dark days of Bush II or, worse yet, the benighted regime of Pete Wilson in California. That “plantation mentality” needs to be retired permanently.

The wages of greed. “What do you get when you mix a protracted recession with a series of overly optimistic projections and a credit guarantee from a borderline insolvent bond insurer?”

While that question might seem to apply to any number of stalled resort projects or bankrupt casino developers, in fact it refers to the insolvent Las Vegas Monorail. Too-high ridership projections plus rapacious ticket prices have combined to cancel one another out and render the Monorail an unequivocal failure. The only way to rescue this misconceived project would be to extend it, as planned, to McCarran International Airport (which, in turn, might serve as a useful brake on the avarice of the taxicab companies). However, given the cost that this would entail, is the price of saving the monorail one that could ever be recouped or are we just throwing good (public) money after bad?

(Full disclosure: If pushed out to McCarran on the currently planned route, which would include a whistle stop at the Thomas & Mack Arena, the Monorail would pass a block from my house and ruin its Strip view. Thinking positively, we could add trainspotting to the planespotting among our spectator sports.)

Good ideas come and go but bad ideas have a half-life of forever. Indiana is prepared to follow the intrusive footsteps of Colorado and use casinos as collectors of delinquent child-support payments. Guvmint is forever trying to get the gambling bidness to do its dirty work, and this particular bad idea was floated — and rapidly shot down — during both the Clinton and Bush II administrations. With no state-level equivalent of Frank J. Fahrenkopf, however, the industry is in present danger of winning the battle in Washington, D.C., only to lose it over and over again on its home turf.

CityCenter’s problems are as nothing compared to those of Foxwoods Resort Casino. Its seemingly propitious alliance with MGM Mirage may have added to the latter’s coffers but acquisition of the MGM brand has become a millstone around Foxwoods’ neck.