Of Reid, Angle, Reid and . . . Vince Neil?!?

Today would happen to be the day that a bunch of pieces I've been working on crash-land simultaneously:

* 50/50 America: Tired of the senseless discourse and worried that the nation is impossibly polarized? Take heart by checking out the debate I engineered for Politics Daily between two middle-class neighbors who share a wall but very, very different philosophies and perfectly reflect the broader national divide. Dave Alexander is a hard-core Tea Party activist -- he's actually caravaning right now with the Tea Party Express tour -- and Jodi Warman is a lifelong Democrat. And yet he's pro-choice and pro-gay equality, she wishes the health care reform bill had taken on trial lawyers. This piece has been on the Welcome Screen of AOL for the day and heavily blogged. (BONUS: I'm visible in the reflection of the window in the photo.) It's something that the poll-obsessed political pundits really never do -- talk to actual voters. Or encourage them to talk to one another.

* The Son Also Falls: Over at The Daily Beast, I take a look today at the inner workings of the Harry Reid-Rory Reid dynamic at this stage of the two-Reids-on-the-ticket political year. Rory Reid's mother-in-law provided an amazing opening anecdote and U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley wistfully wished she had dissuaded Rory from running.

* Remember This? Last spring, Portfolio.Com asked me to profile Motley Crue rocker Vince Neil for part of a series called Eponymous, about brands that are also people's names. I did the interview, filed the piece, got paid for it, posted the podcast of the interview and watched all summer as Neil had repeated scandals. Well, the site is finally up to publishing the series, so I updated the thing and it's up. I've got another part of that series waiting to go, too, about Steve Wynn.

Portfolio (aka me) Analysis of Weird Analysis

Gaming analyst Bill Lerner of Union Gaming believes the soon-to-open Cosmo adding 2,000 rooms to the city could cause room rates to RISE. Uh, what? So I did a Portfolio.Com blog looking at that weird idea a little closer:

A Las Vegas Analyst's Odd Prediction

It has become incontrovertible conventional wisdom that Las Vegas is overbuilt and that several large projects came to fruition at exactly the wrong time. The city boasts nearly 149,000 hotel rooms, of which 11,000 were added since the recession really took hold in fall 2008 thanks mainly to the openings of Wynn Resorts’ Encore tower, MGM Resorts’ CityCenter and two expansions at the Hard Rock Hotel.

Yet late 2010 brings another debut, the $3.5 billion Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, a hotel and casino project owned by Deutsche Bank. In mid-December, Cosmo plans to dump another 2,000 of its eventual stock of 2,995 rooms onto the flailing, bargain-basement Strip immediately north of the struggling CityCenter.

Which is why Union Gaming analyst Bill Lerner’s July 1 email blast made eyes fall out of their sockets. “Cosmopolitan, we’re not so concerned about Las Vegas Impact.”

Huh?

Could it be that he figures things are just so bad that they can’t really get any worse? How could yet another wad of rooms, especially those squeezed between the Bellagio and Aria (CityCenter's main hotel), not have a negative impact?

It’s very, very difficult to decipher Lerner’s logic, and after saying he’d try to call Portfolio back, he did not. But Lerner's note is yet another example of him crossing swords publicly with another analyst, this time Shaun Kelley of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Kelley issued a June 30 report calling Cosmo “the largest negative for CityCenter and MGM as the market is clearly struggling to absorb” the 6,000 rooms added by the six-month-old $8.5 billion project.

Lerner refers in his missive to his comments being a reaction to “a competitor” and acknowledged to Portfolio that Kelley is his unnamed spar partner. And Lerner does, in his note, acknowledge there’s an oversupply in the market and even parenthetically notes that “one additional room is too much.”

Yet Lerner writes that room rates at the Cosmopolitan—the resort’s website is asking for $275 for opening weekend, well above the current average luxury Vegas room of about $200—could “have an odd, unintended impact on the market as it could pull rates UP (not DOWN as we think was implied in this competitor’s research report.)”

Lerner never actually explains how or why that would happen. His best bet is a fantasy, that “if operators theoretically colluded and took rates higher, we’re not sure demand would be negatively impacted of note.” Right, because Steve Wynn, Jim Murren and Sheldon Adelson, none of whom even like one another all that much, are seriously going to make such a pact. The SEC would just love that.

Read the rest at Portfolio.Com

Elaine Wynn on MGM Change, China & Sarah Palin

As you saw in my Portfolio piece on Tuesday, many people took umbrage to MGM Mirage's announcement that they'll be asking shareholders to change their name to MGM Resorts International. Some were defensive on the Wynns' behalf, noting that expunging "Mirage" from the corporate title is a way of distancing themselves from the portion of the part of the company that Steve Wynn built. MGM Mirage, of course, came into being after MGM Grand Inc bought Mirage Resorts in 2000.

MGM brass insisted the sole purpose for the switch was to refocus the company as a worldwide hospitality brand with properties that both do and don't offer gaming. Commenters at RateVegas.Com's blog, among others, weren't buying it, but you know who could care less?

The Wynns. At least not publicly.

Steve Wynn is in Macau opening the new 414-room Encore and stirring up trouble with a suggestion he might move the company's HQ to China. We'll get back to that in a moment. But I happened to have Elaine, his ex-wife and a board member and equal shareholder for Wynn Resorts to him, on the line for two unrelated stories I'm working on.

So I asked and she answered.

"I accept [MGM's] explanation [of the name change]. They don’t need to have their name be a mouthful. They’re entitled to call it the XYZ Co., if they want to."

Doesn't she still have an emotional attachment to the Mirage hotel and name as the entity that sent the Wynn reputation into orbit?

"I will always and forever have an emotional attachment to Mirage and Mirage Resorts. Whoever owns it or sells it doesn’t change that. ... I think most people recognize who built that brand. The brand served a very real purpose in establishing Wynn credibility. That’s what allowed us to use the name Wynn. It allowed us to show that it meant something."

I tried to get Mrs. Wynn to discuss Mr. Wynn's statements to CNBC that the company could become more of a Chinese company than American one. She avoided that bit except that she noted that with Wynn now trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it is, indeed, factual to say that it's Chinese company.

Finally, we wandered onto the topic of Sarah Palin. I can't provide the full context without disclosing what the stories are I'm working on, but on the same day as Mr. Wynn is all over the news claiming that Obama's policies could run him out of the country, Elaine said this of the former Alaska governor and potential 2012 opponent to Obama:

"If anybody thinks that Sarah Palin is a paragon of virtue and a moral compass for this country, they’re not speaking for me."

Mrs. Wynn was a huge and early supporter of Obama and had tempestuous public rows with her McCain-supporting now-ex-husband in 2008. Mr. Wynn said last month that had nothing to do with the divorce but that the two have "agreed not to discuss" politics because "it never ends well."

Still, on the merit of Sarah Palin, they seem to be of similar minds. Steve Wynn was more cautious in response his view of her, perhaps because he'll end up supporting her if she's the GOP nominee in 2012. But he said he was more a Mitt Romney fan and said of Palin:

"It is very difficult to ascertain who she was. ... The problems that face America are not given well to sound bite treatment."

Oh, Crap: Enemas In the News

It's not every day, dear readers, that an editor lets me get away with the phrase "anally douche." Which is surprising, actually, given that I usually cover Vegas. Yet the other day I received a product sample and press kit I couldn't ignore. It came from the respected marketing firm Witeck Combs in DC, known for its ability to do outreach to gay and lesbian consumers.

The product is pictured above, a new Fleet enema for, essentially, recreational use. To which I first went, "Wow. Ew." And then I went, "Huh. Story." And so, here it is, my post for Portfolio.Com on the ins and outs of the decision by Fleet to pursue this new market of people who, as their phrase goes, "electively rectally clease." Get used to that. And brace yourself for some of the data in here about gay/bi men if you're bold enough to read it. Maybe wait until after lunch?

Here are the three ads Fleet starts using next month at a gay or general-interest health-related website near you. Portfolio only posted one or two of them, so here are all of them.




I'm debating putting my interview with brand manager Emily Klopp into the podcast feed. It's, uh, unique. She's a perfect professional and I am, indeed, every bit the 10-year-old you might expect. I'm also debating whether Fleet Naturals belongs on my desk alongside all the other goofy story-related tchotchkes that make up my haphazard career. Obviously, yes, but what will my cleaning lady think?

My Grades For All 7 Cirque Shows

Remember how I blazed through all the Cirque shows in December and January and many of you wondered, WTF? Well, I did it so that I could review them all in this nifty primer I did for Portfolio.Com, posted today in time for the Viva Elvis premiere. This is a companion piece to a longer, in-depth Portfolio piece I wrote about Cirque. It's different than the Las Vegas Weekly cover inasmuch as the focus is more national and international and the LVW piece was specifically largely about the Strip.

Anyhow, if you care, you can go through the slide show and see my Cirque reviews. And here's the short version:

Mystere: A
O: B
Zumanity: B
Ka: A+
Love: A+
Criss Angel Believe: D
Viva Elvis: B-

CityCenter Three Ways, So Far

Consistent blogging has been curtailed for the past few weeks by mammoth amount of coverage I've had to prepare in a relatively short period of time about, of course, CityCenter. As I told CEO Jim Murren during our interview last month, I don't know if this thing will save Vegas but it's sure as sugar saved my fourth quarter.

So far, three of my pieces are already up and available. They include two for the newly constituted Portfolio.Com, a 1,300-word profile of CityCenter president Bobby Baldwin and a 900-word piece on the financial woes that preceded these openings. Both are full of fun, new information, such as when Steve Wynn talks about why Baldwin, not Lanni or Murren, ought to have become MGM Mirage CEO. Scour the Web and you're unlikely to find any real profiles of Baldwin, so I'm honored to bring to you a look at one of those figures whose career from WSOP champ to Wynn lieutenant to CityCenter guru threads modern Vegas history in a unique way.

The other is a standard-issue piece overviewing the project and reporting that it's opening for Agence France-Presse. It's fine, nothing special, typical wire-service stuff.

Coming soon: My 4,100-word L.A. Weekly cover story, my LV Weekly column and at least one Sphere.Com story. Don't know if the New York Times is going to want anything or not; they don't seem to have a freelance budget anymore. Hope that changes early next year, but in the meantime I'm thrilled to be making headway in all of these new markets as I'd never written for the LA Weekly or Portfolio before.

Meanwhile, I offer up this sensational dusk view of CityCenter from the 22nd floor of my now-vacant Panorama condo. (Looking to rent? Email me!)

I love this view so much, it's now my phone wallpaper.