By george, the folks at MGM Mirage sure made a monkey out of me. There I was, believing the company had learned a lesson from the toxic PR it engendered back in the fall of '01. In a panicked overreaction to 9/11, the company savagely downsized its workforce, supposedly earning its then-CEO the in-house nickname "Osama bin Lanni." Since then, MGM has generally been more circumspect in its economy measures, leading one (well, me anyway) to believe it wouldn't make the same mistake twice.

Until now.

While MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren and colleagues may be saying the right things for public consumption, their actions sometimes sound a jarring dissonance. For instance, at a time when the company is scraping from payment to payment on CityCenter, it suggests congenital tone-deafness to award Murren a $500,000 raise and $7 million severance package (just in case he has to take the fall for CityCenter, for instance) at this particular juncture.

In the abstract, MGM could justifiably ask, Why pay Jim Murren less than the $1.9 million with which Harrah's Entertainment is remunerating its CEO, Gary Loveman ... never mind the $2 Million Man, new Las Vegas Sands President Michael Leven, who's on pace to be the most over-compensated gaming executive of 2009. All things being equal, Murren and Loveman are grossly underpaid on the Leven Scale.

But there's the small matter of context ... as in, giving your CEO a 25% pay boost at the same time your rank-and-file employees are getting hit with a triple whammy: revoked COLA raises, an increase in health-care premiums and no 401(k) matches for 2009. It's like the Grinch stole Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving for good measure. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, it was informed by an MGM spokesman that employees "will be allowed to keep the extra money earned in the quarter." Isn't that sweet?

Dubai World's big offer, at least as reported in the Wall Street Journal, appears to be less than meets the eye. It's premised on the project's lenders waiving a requirement that Dubai World and MGM chip in a required $730 million-$800 million en route to unlocking a $1.8 billion credit facility. In return, Dubai World will presumably quit sulking and resume its financial participation. It's a pretty audacious gambit but with CityCenter circling the Chapter 11 drain, bankers could well deem it the lesser of two evils.

Update: The YouTube video, posted earlier today, has been fixed and is now available for your viewing please. I apologize for the temporary inconvenience.