That’s what litigants allege about the premiere convention at Las Vegas Sands‘ $5.5 billion Singapore behemoth. In its countersuit to Sands’ opening broadside, the Inter-Pacific Bar Association essentially accuses Station of promising a five-star experience and delivering a Walmart one (imagine having to huddle under an umbrella at the check-in desk), then extracting payment by coercive means.
Sands President Michael A. Leven responded with his usual cloud of pomposity, saying the lawyers were suing because they’re lawyers and that’s what lawyers do. (As he put it, “we did have a convention of lawyers to start out with, so we knew we were going to have some kind of conversation.”) Perhaps he could work this into new Marina Bay Sands marketing pitch: “Enjoy your stay or else!”
Seeking a level playing field, creditors of Station Casinos are taking their beef with Station’s reorganization plan to U.S. District Court. (Bankruptcy court Judge Gregg Zive has ruled for Station right down the line.) I can’t say as I blame them as Zive’s priority, articulated in basically choosing Station as its own “stalking horse” bidder, is to minimize projected/imagined job losses and economic harm. Those consequences, he clearly fears, would inevitably follow subdivision of the Station empire. If things keep going this way, unsecured creditors haven’t got a prayer.
Woman has sex with slot machine. I hope they inoculated the one-armed bandit post-coitus. Given today’s Vegas party scene, you don’t know where that woman’s been.
If, as I’ve heard suggested, the R-J‘s fatuous fatwa against the Internet is another publicity stunt for its “increasingly excitable publisher,” it seems to be working. (The anti-kitty-blog jihad seems to have backfired, though.) More importantly, the Los Angeles Times follows the money all the way back to Stephens Media HQ in Little Rock.
As I suspected, Righthaven LLC is a Stephens-funded front to which Stephens is selling its own content and then vacuuming up a portion of whatever proceeds are netted. That explains why Sherman Frederick was practically begging for other papers to hire Righthaven in a posting on his blog (which isn’t worth linking to even if Righthaven weren’t likely to go all Salman Rushdie on your ass.)
One anonymous LAT reader puts it in perspective:
Upon reading this story I leapt over to the Cat Blog (allegrawong.com) to take a look. It seems that this Cat Blog is written, ostensibly, by cats (perhaps with some human assistance). So, in a metaphorical sense the Las Vegas Review-Journal is using its vast legal resources to sue a bunch of indigent house cats. What’s worse, the Review-Journal is suing them for doing the modern equivalent of school-children cutting up the morning newspaper and making a civics class news-of-the-day collage (or in this case kitty litter).
