Author: Ed Weathers

JACK BINION SELLS HORSESHOE

This is what Jack Binion, who sold Horseshoe Gaming to Harrah’s Entertainment last week for $1.45 billion, taught the competition:

First, notwithstanding Horseshoe’s corporate name, it’s gambling, not gaming. Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders are games. What goes on inside a casino is gambling.

Second, Tunica, Bossier City, and Hammond can be just as profitable as Las Vegas, New Orleans, or Atlantic City for a smart casino operator.

Third, gambling is sport, and a poker tournament can be presented to a mass audience and sponsors as televised entertainment just like boxing, football, or horseracing. Poker and dice games are good marketing and support the perception that gamblers control their own fate even if all most of them ever do is feed coins into slot machines.

Finally, a casino owner need not look like a movie star or have a full head of black, slicked-back hair. Instead, he can be unabashedly bald, look like your favorite good-natured uncle, make fun of himself in commercials, and customers will love him.

The commercial says, “You don’t know Jack,” but thousands of customers think they do. Memphian G.A. “Bert” Robinson III sold Binion his Tunica site and has been his friend and partner for 10 years.

“He walks into that casino and everyone speaks to him and he talks to everyone,” said Robinson. “One time we were going to dinner, and it took us an hour just to go a hundred yards. You can’t put a name with a face at any other casino. On opening night, I saw Jack on several occasions just helping people having problems. A security guard came up and said somebody had spilled red wine on a customer’s dress. He said, well, get it cleaned. She said, `That is not what I want. I want a hug from Jack Binion.'”

Robinson played a small part in acquiring the classic red Cadillac limousine with a set of longhorns on the hood that sits outside the main entrance to the Horseshoe. Nine years ago, a friend in Memphis told Robinson he had something Horseshoe needed. A couple of weeks later, pictures of the Cadillac, which was in Dallas, arrived in the mail. Robinson took them to the casino manager.

“He went crazy and said we’ve gotta have it,” Robinson said. “So we called Jack, and he said go buy it. They put the longhorns on it later. Jack paid about $50,000 for it.”

Binion opened the Horseshoe in Robinsonville in February 1995, nearly two and a half years after Splash Casino opened the Tunica market in October 1992 at Mhoon Landing 20 miles south. At the time, Harrah’s Entertainment was still headquartered in Memphis and generally considered the most knowledgeable casino operator in the market. In 1993, Harrah’s opened, by today’s standards, a very modest casino with a restaurant that was little more than a cafeteria. A few years later, Harrah’s moved to its current location, formerly the home of the now-defunct Southern Belle.

With a favorable ruling from the Mississippi Gaming Commission on how far casinos could be from the river, Binion raised the stakes.

“At first, it was like they gave a party and nobody came,” he told Memphis magazine in 1996.

But the competition took notice when Horseshoe began earning more than $200 million a year while many of them were barely clearing $100 million. Circus Circus, one of Horseshoe’s two neighbors, took down the pink big-top and morphed into Gold Strike, with a 30-story golden glass tower. Treasure Bay, frozen out of a deal with Horseshoe, Circus Circus, and Sheraton, found itself on the wrong side of the parking-lot fence one day, and pretty soon its pirate ship set sail for the Gulf Coast.

Anyone who has ever been in a casino knows that most of the differences between them are a matter of perception. Tethered to a slot machine with a frequent-player card, a customer stands about the same chance of winning regardless of whether the prevailing theme is Egypt, the jungle, or NASCAR. In a conference call last week, even Horseshoe executives admitted that the percentage of profit that comes from slots versus table games is “higher than you might think.” He revealed no number, but industrywide the standard is about 80 percent.

Binion, however, made sure that Horseshoe, unlike Harrah’s, wasn’t known as a slot house. He nurtured the legend of the no-limit bet, the biggest employee tips, and the best leveraged odds for players at the craps table. He put the poker tables near the front of the casino. While Harrah’s’ annual contribution to the industry is a number-crunching survey of players and their habits, Horseshoe’s is the World Series of Poker.

Benny Binion, Jack’s father, started that with a cult following in 1970. Thirty-three years later, it’s a fixture on ESPN. Benny Binion left Texas in 1946 with a rough reputation and celebrated his 83rd birthday at the University of Las Vegas. When he died in 1989, the city put up a statue of him in a prominent square. Someday Jack may get his in Tunica.

INSTANT RECALL

I think California has it about right: Every election should be treated like a first date. After all, when you ask somebody out to dinner for the first time, you don’t know if it’ll work out. You’re shooting in the dark. You drive to the restaurant full of high hopes–at least your date looks good, you think, and you’ve got a few things in common. But then, after you’re seated at a well-placed table away from the kitchen, she starts to chatter about gardening, or he starts to jabber about baseball, and your heart sinks.

Then she chooses some ridiculously expensive wine or he decides to go with some weird Australian beer, and what’s left of your heart plummets. There’s a good chance that before the salad course is over, you know that this relationship is headed for a cliff. Two hours later, somebody drops somebody off at home, you say you had a good time, you promise to call, and that’s the end of it. They’re out of your life forever.

That’s politics in California.

But I don’t think California has taken the idea of political recalls far enough. The technology now exists to speed up the process. It’s called the Internet. Thanks to the Internet, we can make the whole elect-and-eject enterprise as quick as a bad first date. Quicker, even.

Here’s what I propose: Henceforth, Californians get to vote every day. Each morning, between coffee and commute, they will be able to go on the Internet and vote, not just for governor, but for their congressmen, their state legislators, their mayor, their school board, and as many Propositions as they can propose. While nibbling on their toast, they will simply log on to www.detoqueville.gov, type in their password, and vote. Tuesday’s winners, for example, will then take office on Wednesday.

We shall call this “Instant Democracy”–ID, for short. If ID is successful in California–as I have no doubt it will be–it will then be brought to the rest of the states and the nation.

Instant Democracy has many virtues:

It will free our political leaders from the burden of actually leading. Instead, it will force elected officials to pay constant attention to their constituents’ desires, knowing that if they don’t, they will be replaced tomorrow. For most politicians, this will change nothing. Besides, who needs leadership when you can have true representative democracy?

It will give nearly everyone the opportunity to hold public office. In fact, when you wake up in the morning, there’s a chance that you yourself will have been elected mayor or governor or State Supreme Court Justice that day. This will take participatory democracy to its natural next level and spur citizens to keep up with current events, so they don’t embarrass themselves in office.

It will mean that politics will at last be free of Big Money. Without long run-up campaigns before elections, there will be no time for extended media blitzes and hence no need for huge campaign war chests. The Average American will finally gain political leverage over the money-spewing corporations, PACs, and Fat Cats.

It will reinvigorate the media. With fresh election news coming in by 10 a.m. every morning, the news channels will never lack for real news, and the talking-heads will never lack for something meaningful to talk about. The stale air that now fills most air time on the news channels will be fresh and fragrant once again.

It will end the inconvenience and uncertainty of voting booths and punch cards. You may ask: Is the Internet safe enough to handle the solemn act of voting? Of course it is. Any technology sophisticated enough to handle an eBay transaction can certainly handle something as simple as an election. (I don’t know why no one’s thought of this before.)

It will end the need for political polls. Every day’s election will be a poll–one that actually means something.

It will satisfy the American demand for instant gratification: Elect today, eject tomorrow.

For all the above reasons and more, Instant Democracy will double or triple voter participation. Instead of only 30% of eligible voters trudging hopelessly to the polls once every couple of years, knowing they’re about to make a decision they’ll have to live with for a long time, now 90% of voters will head eagerly to their laptops every morning to exercise their precious electoral privilege, knowing they can undo tomorrow what they’re about to do today. Imagine: 90% of eligible voters actually voting. America will finally be as fully engaged a democracy as, say, Latvia.

Instant Democracy will soon apply to all elections–local, state and national. Think of it: You will be able to vote for President every day, so the president had better behave, doggone it.

Of course, some may carp that ID would lead to political chaos. No legislation would be passed, they say, because politicians would be afraid that anything they did Friday might offend the voters and thereby leave the politicians unemployed Saturday. And it would be inconvenient, they say, for foreign nations to negotiate treaties with a president who might be back, say, tending bar by next Monday.

But on the contrary, I think Instant Democracy would improve legislation and give the president immense flexibility. Without the safety net of 2- or 6-year terms, our congressmen and senators will no longer spend years doing nothing but raising money for their next elections.

Instead, knowing that they could be ousted tomorrow and that everything they do could be overturned by the weekend, they will be free to pass truly daring and innovative legislation that might actually tackle some of the nation’s problems.

As for the president, he can deal with foreign nations in the full knowledge that, as of this very morning, he had the full support of a plurality of American voters. That’s a powerful weapon to bring to any negotiating table.

Besides, candidates who please the voters can potentially stay in office for years, maybe forever, dead or alive. This will be known as the Strom Thurmond Phenomenon (STP).

To keep it running smoothly, we will of course have to put ID under the control of information technology experts. This should be no problem for them; they are accustomed already to controlling our lives. We shall call this group of rational computer engineers the “Everyday Government Organization” (EGO).

Instant Democracy is a wonderful idea, if I do say so myself. In fact, when I mentioned it to my lady friend the other night over dinner, she lifted her glass of very expensive wine and toasted my wisdom. I looked down and sipped my Fosters humbly.

THE ONLY-CASE SCENARIO

I have a friend who is betting money that George W. Bush will not be the Republican nominee for president in 2004. He believes that the American electorate will finally recognize that Bush has deceived them about Iraq and led the nation into a hopeless guerilla war that we cannot “win” in any meaningful sense, leaving young American soldiers to be picked off one by one in a desert far away.

My friend also believes that the American electorate will finally start blaming Bush for the sluggish economy, for joblessness, and for a deficit that is preemptively bankrupting our children and grandchildren. My friend believes that Bush will soon plummet in the polls and that the behind-the-scenes Republicans who really choose the party’s presidential candidate will be forced to nominate someone who actually possesses both brains and integrity. My friend at one point declared that the 2004 election will be between Republican Colin Powell and Democrat Wesley Clark.

I envy my friend his childlike ability to believe that his wishes can come true. And I can only smile at his confidence in the American voter.

I, on the other hand, lack both hope and confidence. I foresee a different scenario–one that ends with Bush getting another four years in the White House and the United States being saddled with 1) a generation of federal judges who care nothing about defending our civil rights, 2) a Congress that cares nothing about protecting the poor from the rapaciousness of the rich, and 3) a White House that cares nothing about engaging the rest of the world effectively in our foreign policy.

Here’s what I think will happen over the next 14 months:

First, the American economy will rebound, as it always does after a downturn, regardless of who is president. Presidents have almost no effect on the economy. I don’t blame Bush for the current recession or for current unemployment. Nor will I credit him for the next upturn in the economy. But his timing is just right. We’re about to burst out of the slump we’ve been in–if only because companies have laid off about all the employees they can and have depleted their inventories are far as they need to, so it’s time things picked up. Bush, of course, will take credit for the economic rebound. The American people aren’t stupid enough to buy it, I don’t think, but the rebound will remove the economy as the strongest issue for the Democrats next year. Advantage Bush.

Second, there will be another terrorist attack somewhere in the United States. There is bound to be. There have always been terrorist attacks, and there will be more. But 9/11 created a kind of triphammer paranoia among Americans, so the next attack–whether a downed airliner or a bombed building or a madman with a machine gun in Grand Central Station–will trigger a national shudder and screech, and the Republicans, as they always do, will fuel the fear in order to exploit it, because Republicans can talk tougher than Democrats. Republicans talk missiles, police, and revenge; Democrats talk negotiations, United Nations, and detente. The American electorate understands missiles, police, and revenge better. Advantage Bush.

Third, Iraq will slowly recede into the inside pages of our newspapers and into the final twelve minutes of our newscasts, much as Afghanistan has already. This will happen because the American media, as has often been noted, cannot stay with a subject for more than a few months without needing to move on, lest they appear to be in reruns. If there is a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Iraq will retreat even faster into oblivion. At some point, Bush may even declare victory there, pull out our troops, and let the faux government council we’ve installed there deal with the terrorists who are streaming over the borders toward Baghdad. Our special ops people in Iraq will probably even find Saddam himself (and almost certainly will find a dump of unconventional weapons, even if they have to plant them there themselves), giving Bush the excuse he needs to say, “We won! I was right! Now we can get out!” If Bush can get Colin Powell to talk the U.N. into sending other nations’ troops to Iraq in our place, the cut-and-run scheme will go even smoother.

Whatever happens, the American public’s inability to focus on a single news story for very long unless it involves O.J. Simpson or Jennifer Lopez will take the troubles in Iraq off the table during the next election, as long as no more than one or two American boys dies there each day. Already, one dead American soldier a day is relegated to the inside pages of our newspapers, and it is certain that Rumsfeld and the field commanders will keep our boys behind the sandbags as the election approaches so that the death toll does not reach critical mass. Even if things are still awful in Iraq in the fall of 2004, the Republicans will generate another crisis somewhere else, to take attention away from Baghdad. (Look to Indonesia, the next source of real Islamic terrorism, or the ever-ready North Korea. A trumped-up little war we can win in the Philippines or Bali would serve Bush well.) In any case, Iraq will no longer be the big issue come November 2004. Advantage Bush.

Fourth, the Republicans will use their convention in New York City on the anniversary of 9/11 to leverage their perceived strength in the tough-on-terror game.

Fifth, the Democrats will nominate somebody so boring or so shrill that he will seem even less presidential than the Shrub himself.

Sixth, the American electorate–especially the thoughtful Left–will be so tired and disgusted with it all that they will simply stay home on election day, leaving the field to the neoconservative fanatics, who, bless their hearts, do go out and vote.

Advantage Bush. Advantage Bush. Advantage Bush.

Finally, it’s clear that the neocons behind the throne will never nominate a person with brains and integrity, because such a person–a Colin Powell, a John McCain, an Olympia Snowe–would be beyond their control. For the invisible Republican power structure, it’s not about being in ostensible power themselves so much as having control over those who seem to be in power. We all know that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and the moneyed men behind them pull George W. Bush’s strings. Does anybody really think Arnold Schwarzenegger has a single policy to call his own? He’s simply Ronald Reagan with an accent–someone to speak the lines written for him. George W. is perfect in that role, even if he can’t pronounce “nuclear.”

So I’m sorry, my friend, Bush will be the nominee, and he will win. The only consolation is that sooner or later–probably by 2008–the American public will see the moral bankruptcy, not to mention the literal fiscal bankruptcy, that the W generation in the White House has led us to, and they will elect a good and decent Democrat along the lines of Jimmy Carter.

But by then, given what will be left of our reputation in the world and our liberties in the courts, it may be too late.

The Memphis City Schools administration and board agreed Friday to put nine “minor” sports such as soccer and tennis back in the $735 million budget.

All eight board members approved the decision at a Budget Committee meeting where Supt. Johnnie Watson made the proposal, reversing a controversial plan that attracted widespread media attention earlier this week. The board also agreed to put back funds for a literacy initiative, research and testing, and the planetarium. The total cost of the items given a second life is $1,244,000. Watson said the money would come out of a two-percent savings in healthcare costs for the school system from Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Approval won’t be final until a board meeting Monday night. There are still likely to be several comments from parents, students, teachers, and interested citizens about other cuts. Some board members indicated they are not happy with the remaining cuts in areas such as foreign languages and music. At least 30 citizens have signed up to speak at the meeting but the about-face on minor sports could defuse much of the controversy.

Watson was responding to a $32 million deficit in the school system budget which he blamed on the Shelby County Commission. Board member Hubon Sandridge singled out commissioners Bruce Thompson and Marilyn LoeFfel for an angry lecture in front of television cameras.

“I will deal with both of them individually,” he vowed.

Sandridge said he resented suggestions that the school administration was using “scare tactics” by suggesting the cuts in sports. The commissioners said the schools could save a lot more money by closing underused school buildings than by making small cuts in things that directly impact students.

OUT ON A LIMB WITH LYNN LANG

For a deposition last week, University of Tennessee booster Roy “Tennstud” Adams put on his orange UT blazer and a coonskin cap made from a fox that looked like a blond fright wig. He sipped whiskey. He posed for pictures. He underwent four hours of questioning, which is like four minutes for the loquacious Adams. Then he gave recaps on radio sports programs.

Normally, such behavior in the course of legal proceedings might be considered strange, but there isn’t much normal about the four-year saga of the recruiting of college football player Albert Means and the federal investigation of charges made by his high school coach Lynn Lang.

Adams was deposed by attorneys and University of Alabama fans Philip Shanks and Tommy Gallion in Shanks’ Memphis office in connection with their lawsuit on behalf of former ‘Bama assistant coach Ronnie Cottrell against university officials and the NCAA.

The root question in all of this: Did Alabama booster Logan Young pay Lang $150,000 cash to get Means to enroll at Alabama, as Lang said he did in making his guilty plea last November?

After the deposition, Adams said Gallion repeatedly asked him if he really believed Young or anyone would pay $150,000 for a high school defensive lineman.

“I absolutely do,” Adams replied, noting that he and Young used to have lunch together a couple times a week for nearly 10 years.

Young says he didn’t do it. No matter, say his doubters — he’s a country clubber and a slave-trader through and through. Alabama disassociated from Young. The NCAA punished Alabama. And when Lang changed his story and pleaded guilty last November, it seemed to be the beginning of the end of the story.

“Anyone not believe it now?” wrote Commercial Appeal columnist Geoff Calkins.

Well, gosh no. Who needs an indictment and trial?

Except that Young has proven to be a hard man to bring down. He remains unindicted. He can afford a first-class defense, including Nashville lawyer Jim Neal and former Shelby County district attorney John Pierotti.

Lang’s sentencing has twice been postponed. Some of his story hasn’t checked out. He said somebody was supposed to arrange for a ringer to take the college entrance exam for Means, but Means is suiting up for the University of Memphis this fall with impunity. Milton Kirk, Lang’s former assistant coach, says Lang screwed him out of his part of the alleged payoff. Lisa Means, Albert’s mother, disputes Lang’s claim that she got money from him. And Richard Ernsberger, the author who first wrote about the story in his book Bragging Rights, says Lang told him two different stories about whether or not he had children.

There are a lot of people out on the limb with Lang — Kirk, the NCAA, the University of Alabama, United States attorneys Fred Godwin and Terry Harris (who used to work for Pierotti), the CA, Adams, and fellow UT booster Karl Schledwitz.

Gallion and Shanks, working on a contingency fee, think they can saw that limb off. Last week, Gallion and Schledwitz had a testy exchange at Ronnie Grisanti’s restaurant, before Cottrell intervened, and they wound up shaking hands. Schledwitz well knows the awesome power of the federal government, having been acquitted 10 years ago as a co-defendant in the Harold Ford trial. He says he wouldn’t wish an indictment on anyone.

Gallion and Shanks, however, see Adams and Schledwitz as instigators of the Means investigation. Neither is named as a defendant in Cottrell’s lawsuit. Whether that lawsuit has merit or is just UT vs. ‘Bama radio and Internet fodder should be clear by the end of the year.

There are three dates to watch:

On October 2nd, a state court judge in Tuscaloosa will hear motions to dismiss the case. Shanks says if he prevails, then the NCAA and the University of Alabama will have to give up documents he thinks will help Cottrell make his case. “Look for a flurry of activity after that motion is ruled on,” he said.

On October 25th, the universities of Tennessee and Alabama once again square off in Tuscaloosa. Oh, never mind, that’s just a football game.

On December 2nd, Lang is scheduled to be sentenced.

Cottrell’s lawsuit says the NCAA and Alabama officials, aided by the UT partisans and federal prosecutors, tried to ruin careers and a storied football program. They’re seeking $60 million. Never mind that both the universities of Alabama and Tennessee, so long as they employ the likes of Mike Price and John Shumaker, seem perfectly capable of destroying themselves.

Somebody’s sensational claims should be borne out or discredited by the time we have a new national champion.

THE UN BOMBING IN IRAQ

If you have a high-speed connection, and you have a strong stomach, you might want — note, I say, might — to view this unedited CBS News “as it happened” footage of the UN bombing today [Tuesday] in Baghdad:

CBSNews.com or try:

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/videoplayer/newVid/framesource2.html?clip=/media/2003/08/19/video569057

Yes, while watching this, I felt anger and disgust at the demons who do such things to innocent men and women. Anyone (else) who was around the aftermath of an IRA bombing in the Seventies would feel the same outrage, whether the innocent lives lost were taken in Belfast or Jerusalem, Beirut or New York City.

But the same kind of anger and disgust, I believe, must be directed at the man ultimately responsible for the madness in Baghdad these days. And yes, the buck stops there.

No one put a gun to George W. Bush’s head and made him decide that a preemptive war in Iraq was in America’s — and the world’s — best interests. No one but the Bush cabal (ok, yes, Tony Blair went along for the ride, as did our cowardly Congress) believed that war was inevitable in Iraq. No one but the Bushies believed that, as Lt. Calley might say, we had to destroy Iraq in order to save it. The buck stops there. Period.

The Pentagon today was quick to blame today’s horrific crime on Al Quaeda “infiltrators.” Perhaps the military is correct. But I can’t help but wonder just how many “terrorists” we ourselves created with our now-famous “shock and awe” bombing campaign last March.

Unfortunately, there were no CBS News cameras around Baghdad during those dark early days of war. Americans then had no access to remarkable “as it happens” video footage like today’s. There were no action shots of bombs ripping apart homes and shops, of people trapped in rubble, of screaming mothers desperately looking for their children. No, this was, as we were told daily by Donald Rumsfeld, a surgical war, the cleanest war ever fought in human history. And so most Americans went about their business, convinced that he was correct, convinced that this indeed was a “good” war, a surgically precise campaign in which casualty figures were unimportant.

Few among us here in the States, for example, got to see what really happened to the folks at that Baghdad restaurant on the night of March 24th, where, we were told (at first), we’d nailed Saddam Hussein. We hadn’t, of course, but the news reports diligently added that a dozen civilians were killed. Remember?

Just a dozen. Just a number. There was no blood, no carnage, no gore on the television screen. Just a comment from Wolf Blitzer or whomever. Just a few unfortunately dead Iraqis. How unfortunate.

Pity we couldn’t see what was really happening to those real live human beings back then, just like we can see what happened Tuesday in that CBS News video. Pity we couldn’t have heard the wounded moan; pity we couldn’t have seen, yes, the blood and the gore…

Had we been able to do so, maybe, just maybe, we’d understand why American forces haven’t exactly received the hero’s welcome they expected once they “liberated” Iraq. Maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t be so quick to blame everything that’s gone wrong since our May 1st declaration of victory upon “Saddam loyalists” or “foreign infiltrators.” And maybe we’d finally stop swallowing the mainstream media pablum that continues, remarkably, blaming all our problems on Al Queda and/or Hussein loyalists.

Maybe, just maybe, we’d wake up and smell the coffee. Maybe we’d understand that there’s many a father and son — and daughter and mother — walking the streets of Baghdad with a serious axe to grind against the American military…

Perhaps today’s murderous culprit wasn’t actually a Taliban fanatic or a disguntled Republican Guard. Perhaps the bomber was just one of those thousands of grieving Iraqis, himself just one of millions of fellow citizens who were just trying to get through life as best they could in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, trying to make ends meet, trying to stay out of trouble. Just like most folks, well, just about everywhere.

This, of course, before a bunch of abstract poltical theorists in Arlington, Virginia, had a better idea. They decided that they knew what was in his country’s best interest. And decided that “shock and awe” was just the ticket.

Perhaps today’s murderous culprit was just as angry at the terror that came lashing out of the sky into his or her personal life last March, as the families in New York City were who suffered parallel catastrophes on September 11th, 2001. Perhaps he too will never forgive those who so changed his life, those who did so much to destroy his world.

How ironic that today’s dose of human suffering was delivered to neither Iraqis nor Americans, but to citizens of the entire world, people whose only crime was to work for the one organization that most sentient beings realize is the only real hope for our planet’s long-term future. How tragic that today’s victims were the very people who have sought, through their own courageous actions, to demonstrate that the kind of unilateral sabre-rattling practiced by the Rumsfelds and Cheneys of this world is hopelessly outdated, and has no place in twenty-first century civilization, if indeed that civilization is to survive another century.

None of us should be surprised at the disastrous consequences that have come from Gulf War Two. This, after all, was a war launched by “leaders” who were at best misguided and ill-informed, and at worst, liars and scoundrels. You reap what you sow, as the Bible says. You reap what you sow.