Newshoggers.com

Gambling matures and declines

By Fester:

Nothing is recession proof if a recession is harsh enough.  The gambling industry has long contended that it is close to recession proof, but the Wall Street Journal is reporting on some of its problems (h/t to Johny G in Null Space comments)

Rising gasoline prices, the housing crisis and other economic troubles are prompting consumers not just to gamble less, but to spend less at the luxury boutiques and restaurants where casinos draw most of their profits. Struggling airlines are cutting service to Las Vegas. And pressures are building on casinos that cater to local residents, who have been hard hit by economic troubles.

"This is the toughest environment we've faced," says Gary Loveman, chief executive of global gambling giant Harrah's Entertainment Inc., referring to the economic challenges roiling the entire industry....

The public-debt market, spooked by four casino bankruptcies this year, reflects the concerns. Bond prices for a half-dozen casino companies, from Harrah's to small, Las Vegas-based Herbst Gaming, are trading at distressed levels, frequently below 60 cents on the dollar, on debt totaling about $5.3 billion....Credit-rating agencies have been hitting casinos hard. Moody's Investors Service, which rates $79 billion in debt at casino companies, has downgraded 17 casino companies this year. Eleven more are on review for possible downgrade,...

These debt market issues are having significant impact in Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh as the PITG group, which owns the slots parlor license for Pittsburgh, has not paid its construction crews for two months and has yet to present a final financing plan to the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board.  PITG has taken on a new partner and is stopping construction on its casino for a short time period. 

A representative from PITG Gaming says the group has a new major investor in the Majestic Star Casino, and construction at the site will temporarily stop in the coming weeks.

Bob Oltmanns, of PITG Gaming, announced that the group had secured Walton Capitol out of Chicago as a major investor.

State and local governments, including Pennsylvania, have long counted on gambling revenues to be acyclical.  They 'never' go down as people will gamble in good times with their bonus money and in bad times with their core budget money.  Even as times worsen, the hope of a $50,000 jackpot to bail out troubles is a tangible and real dream for most people, and it could be worth the twenty bucks into the one arm bandit. 

However if gambling as a mature industry  turns out to be cyclical in that its revenues increase when the economy grows and revenues decrease when the economy stagnates or shrinks, then state and local budgets are in more trouble than previously thought. State and local governments are cycle matching financial entities.  Primary sources of government income are various income and sales/use taxes that track income and employment changes and property taxes.  Property taxes are counted to provide a slowly changing and increasing base while the more variable income and sales tax revenues are counted on to provide the marginal cash flow that determine whether a taxing body is seeing income gains or declines. 

With the real estate bubble bursting, property tax collections are stagnant or declining in most locales.  The decline in jobs, and stagnation in wages combined with higher fixed cost expenditures on fuel, energy, medical care and education, all of which have some tax advantages in most locales means that sales tax revenues are not growing.  Gambling revenues were expected to provide another source of stable to growing revenue but as the industry has matured, it is responding to the business cycle as most mature industries will.  It is declining when everything else is declining, and it is stagnant when everything else is stagnant. 

 

Vatican Bans Filming Of "Da Vinci Code" Sequel

By Cernig

The Vatican has banned moviemakers working on "Angels and Demons" from filming in the Holy See or any church in Rome - and they didn't even read the script first.

Father Marco Fibbi, a spokesman, said: "Usually we read the script but in this case it wasn't necessary. Just the name Dan Brown was enough. "

He added that most films are given permission, as long as they respect the "traditions of the Church". Father Fibbi said: "Angels and Demons peddles a type of fantasy that damages our common religious beliefs, just like The Da Vinci Code did."

The Catholic Church is still angry over The Da Vinci Code, which suggested that Jesus may have been secretly married to Mary Magdalene. When the movie came out, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, said: "Boycotting this film is the least we can do. The book and the film are a pot pourri of nonsense, a phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions."

The scenes in Rome churches will now be shot in mock-ups on a soundstage. At which point filming will be interupted by Bobby Jindal and four others looking to exorcise Dan Brown and Tom Hanks while yelling something about no-one expecting them...

On Being Spineless

Sam Harris has an essay over at The Huffington Post about how we in the West have turned into a bunch of cowardly, spineless jellyfish because we don’t offer more and greater platforms to those who attack Islam, generally don't go out of our way to attack Islam ourselves, and even occasionally go to the great lengths of actually criticizing people who do attack Islam.

I’ll leave aside the debate over whether or not it’s truly necessary to distribute and promote material you disagree with in order to defend “Free Speech”, but Harris does offer a comparison in his essay that to me encapsulates the reason I dislike so much of what he talks about in the rest of it.

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. [emp. added]

The problem with his little comparison is that he's comparing a tree to a leaf. He isn't comparing Mormonism to Islam, but taking the FLDS, "depraved cult" and comparing it to Islam “in the aggregate”, so that he can say that all Muslims are worse than the most extremist Mormons.

The difference is stark and shows the double-standard that Harris and others like him hold for Muslims. No one ever asks that every Mormon of every stripe publicly condemn and reject and disavow the FLDS sect. The FLDS are portrayed as a “depraved cult”, and the mere fact that other Mormons aren’t members of said cult is generally enough for most everyone to give them a pass. Just for a moment, do a quick bit of research and see how far off the FLDS sect is from “traditional” Mormonism in many of those abhorrent practices.

Polygamy is certainly still a tenet with some strength in the more “mainstream” Mormon flock, enough for HBO to do a comedy series on it. How much discussion is there over how close other Mormons may be in their beliefs to those in the compound? Why not a discussion about Mormons “in the aggregate”? How about some calls for a Mormon "Reformation"?

When the FLDS branch, or abortion clinic bombers, or some other deranged Christians do something nasty, regardless whether or not they can find all sorts of justifications for their acts in their holy books, they are treated as deranged individuals or groups, rather than as representative of their faith. Muslims aren’t so lucky.

Whenever a Muslim does something, even if they don’t use any religious justification for their actions, it is treated as an example of the entire faith and everybody who follows it. Occasionally it is more subtle, but it is the difference between saying someone of religion X did some nasty thing, and saying someone did some nasty thing because of religion X. Muslims always seem to fall into the latter category.

Go back, if you really want to, to all those stories about the FLDS compound, and wonder for a moment if the media didn’t bother using the acronym, but instead always referred to the group solely as Mormons, or at most, fundamentalist Mormons? Talked about how their Mormon beliefs justified such practices? How “traditional” Mormon belief allowed such things? How everything they did was because they were Mormons?

How long do you think it would be before the rest of the Mormon community got a little upset over the coverage?

No faith, no group, does terribly well if it gets painted as though its most extreme members are representative of the whole. Hell, as an atheist I don’t like being lumped in with guys like Harris or a cretin like Chris Hitchens, even if by definition I happen to share at least some of their views to varying degrees. They don’t answer to me and their views are their own.

The Mormons at the compound in Texas are responsible for their own acts, regardless of what the Mormon community as a whole believes or supports, and the same goes for any other people belonging to any other overall grouping.

Harris, though, doesn’t see it that way. The only people he seems willing to criticize as individuals are those who don’t feel it’s right to demonize an entire faith because some of those who purportedly follow it are really, really bad, (particularly Muslims who seem oddly unwilling to demonize their own faith).

The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it

Islam. Not Islamists, not jihadists, not Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, not particular practices or certain activities, no qualifiers or quibbling. Go out and bash Islam, plain and simple.

But really, as Harris tells us, he’s not the bigot here.

if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse.

Note to Harris: Denouncing the entire Islamic faith is not a form of responsible civil discourse. When you figure that out, I’m sure you’ll find that there are plenty of Arabs and Muslims capable and willing to partake in such discussions.

Cross-posted from Northman's Fury

Pastor Gate

by Stacie

Look, without wading into the intraparty and apparently intrablogospheric war that's happening right now, I just want to tell you how bizarre I find the whole Jeremiah Wright flap. I live in the south where, let's face it, the pastors make their living by demonizing me for being gay. Black and white. There are certainly liberal churches and liberal churchgoers, but there's an incredibly ugly strain of Christianity that lives alongside me, and I don't think you can be a queer southerner without learning to tune the jackasses out.

So I have to wonder what would happen if some of these white, conservative preachers got their sermons from before Georgia's anti-gay marriage amendment passed up on YouTube. Would it shock America to learn how much hatred of gays flows out of Christian pulpits?

Probably not, but as long as it's a white person saying it we can marginalize him as a religious wacko and go about our business. Only when it's a black pastor is the issue one of "hatred of America." A lot of these people want the Constitution replaced with some Biblical document.

By definition, a lot of these people, black and white, hate America because they hate the freedoms that let people live lives of which they don't approve. That's the simple fact of the matter, black and white, and as a freedom loving American, I think they're entitled to their opinion, but don't make this something it isn't. Preachers say all kinds of screwed up things in their pulpits, just like the rest of us do in our day to day lives. Black and white, there's a lot of animosity toward what most of us think of as living. Black and white, there's a lot of hatred pouring from the church doors.