"Pinnacle tells store owner to lower his price" reads the headline in the Press of Atlantic City, and it's no exaggeration. Although the owner of the Atlantic City News Agency (a bookstore) has dropped the asking price for his property by 29%, that's just not good enough for Pinnacle Entertainment, which balks at paying more than $2.3 million. The store's owner wants $3.9 million.

"I think we have to be more realistic on price. They have a written offer. That's the way it is," huffed Pinnacle's viceroy for Atlantic City, Kim Townsend. Yup, Massa Pinnacle's giving the orders here and those pesky locals better fall in line, pronto. Although Pinnacle CEO Dan Lee has slammed the News Agency as "tawdry" because it sells adult magazines, the real tawdriness is Pinnacle's attempt to dictate market values and its picking a fight over $1.6 million in the larger context of a project on which it will spend at least $1.5 billion.

Pinnacle execs would undoubtedly reply that they're simply being fiscally responsible, and I'm sympathetic to that. But projects like Pinnacle's Atlantic City megaresort tend to be advanced with the argument that they will improve property values. Well, property values have improved -- and Pinnacle should have expected this scenario when it pushed past the boundaries of the old Sands site.

Strong language: Never have I seen a journalist who regularly covers the casino industry unload on it in the terms employed by Jeff Haney in a recent excoriation of a Boyd Gaming parlay-card promotion. While the latter's "best parlay cards on the planet" verbiage is obvious hyperbole, Haney ran the numbers and found Boyd's cards not even to be remotely the best in downtown Vegas. Haney called the claim "a blatant lie that goes beyond the usual bluster and hype and reflects poorly on legal gambling in Nevada" and "an out-and-out falsehood."

He said it was even worse than the "sleazy and demeaning to customers and visitors" promos that audaciously touted 6-5 blackjack as a "whopping" advantage. (To the casino, maybe. To the player ... not so much. You should hear the suppressed anger in former dealer Dennis Conrad's voice when 6-5 blackjack is the topic.)

Haney also opened a can of verbal whup-ass on "the bizarro realm of corporate doublespeak, where gambling is 'gaming,' the Super Bowl is the 'professional football championship contest,' and rank suckers (such as those who think Boyd has the best parlay cards) are 'valued guests.'"

His thesis boils down to a central paragraph that reads as follows: "Touting parlay cards as the best on the planet while offering average or below-average odds serves to lower the discourse on the business of state-regulated legal gambling toward the level of a big con."

Players have few advocates more outspoken than Jeff Haney. Bettors are fortunate to have such one-man truth squads on their side.