New look, same owner. Many amusing, which is to say outrageous, examples of fancy-pants spending are highlighted in the Review-Journal’s big weekend dive into the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. No mention of hookers & blow though! Well, maybe that’s kept in a black budget. In any case, who among us doubts that the LVCVA is an over-privileged and overrated quasi-governmental problem child long overdue for rigorous scrutiny? None of us, that’s who. And yet who among us assumes that anything that R-J writes about the LVCVA is done on orders from and in coordination with the paper’s owner, who hates the LVCVA because it has a convention center? As long as Adelson owns the paper, nobody is going to take it seriously, no matter how many times it changes the masthead’s font.- Speaking of journalism pioneers… in a story that is mostly about how everybody in the White House is super jealous of broadly incompetent Jared Kushner, Politico reports that Kushner and Adelson speak on the phone a lot, because Israel. But they must have also bonded while discussing the heavy burdens and enormous civic responsibility of owning a newspaper.
- Business is so optimistic! Ralston declared Adam Laxalt the winner of the 2017 legislative session so far, because business is a-scared of having a Democratic governor who might actually sign Democratic legislation so ipso facto let Laxalt’s anointment begin, or words to that effect. It is far too easy to believe that Nevada’s most powerful industries would willingly prefer to hand the state over to a screeching right-wing extremist than pay a higher minimum wage. That said, if true, I envy the business community’s faith in an empowered Democratic legislature and governor to put the public interest ahead of industry’s.
- So Harry Reid, John Boehner and MGM walk into a university… Desert Companion asked me to write a thing about the new think tank chaired by Reid and Boehner, which will be bankrolled by MGM and housed at UNLV. So I started to do that, but the piece ended up taking a turn toward the growing role, and risks, of corporate partnerships in university revenue models. So, here’s that, in case you think that’s the sort of thing you’d like to read.