Gaming’s big election night; Coming attractions

This just in: Fuming over a 5,000-vote-plus margin of defeat, opponents of a casino in western Maine are demanding a recount. Casino developer Black Bear Entertainment calls this “a needlessly divisive exercise.” Do I sense the subtle touch of Penn National Gaming at work here?

Gaming-law expert I. Nelson Rose has been thoroughly policing up the aftermath of the 2010 election for the casino industry. For instance, in Iowa, all 17 counties with existing casinos reafffirmed the status quo, although Wapello County voters opted to prohibit casino expansion into their corner of the Hawkeye State. A PAC called Racino Now is taking credit for the election of a slate of pro-racino candidates in Minnesota.

And, in a very tight Midwest gubernatorial contest, GOP candidate Bill Brady (left) may well have sunk his chances with the last-minute broadside, “Video poker is the scourge of Illinois.” Way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, dude. State legislators are itching to expand legalized gambling yet again — economically futile as that may seem (the Land of Lincoln’s casino revenues are still declining). Even a Gov. Pat Quinn victory hasn’t prevented them from going into hurry-up mode.

I’d like to know more vis-a-vis Rose’s assertion that “tea-party wacko Sharron Angle was backed by anti-gambling activists.” If such was the case, Nevada voters should have been alerted prior to the election, and it’d be a reproof to both the mainstream media and the blogosphere if we blew off a story of that magnitude. Talk about letting the cat in amongst the pigeons!

Coming soon in online-only form, book reviews by yours truly of Jack Sheehan’s Bill Bennett bio, Forgotten Man, the life of a figure once so influential he was called “the Sam Walton of Las Vegas” (yes, it was in a complimentary sense), and The Man Who Bet on Everything, the saga of gambler “Titanic” Thompson. And if you scroll toward the bottom of “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” it contains new, Web-only featurettes about the Sin City boxing arena that became Faciliteq Architectural Interiors and a 1944 Downtown house restored to its original appearance by realtor Jack LeVine … in addition to coverage of the Tropicana Las Vegas and (from the pen of Al  Mancini) the Gold Spike. It was an election-season meme to diss “green energy” as a economic vehicle for Southern Nevada. However, given the number of buildings that could — and need to be — retrofitted to make them financially viable, there’s no shortage of opportunity around these parts. Our own (rental) house would be a lot more affordable if we could stanch its tendency to bleed energy like a hemophiliac.