Murren disses Adelson; Caesars bows out of Macao; Clerical choler

“Maybe because he’s rich he thinks people care about what he has to say. It’s obvious we know Las Vegas better than he does.” With those wordsMGM Resorts International CEO Jim Murren laid a surprisingly blunt smackdown on Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson. The latter, in a recent hissy fit, had accused of MGM and Caesars Entertainment of buying “the [tourist] business by reducing the price” on their hotel rooms. Adelson, whose rhetoric often flirts with paranoia, might as well have dusted off an old line and groused that, “It’s a conspiracy to steal money from me!”

Suffice it to say that Murren has thousands upon thousands of rooms of his own to fill, and probably doesn’t lie awake nights worry about how to improve the ADRs charged by the Sultan of Sands. “We know the market here … We provide the most jobs, the most tax revenues and the most community support,” zinged Murren. If he didn’t come right out and call Adelson an out-of-touch old geezer, he came close enough. Coming off a surprisingly strong quarter, Murren has bragging rights, while Adelson is sulking about disappointing results in 2Q13, hence his titanic sulk.

Forget about Macao. That’s the implicit message from Caesars, which unloaded its overseas albatross, its $578 million golf course in Macao. In doing so, CEO Gary Loveman is taking a bath, since the resale price was $438 million. And, in a truly shocking move, he’s going to use the assets to retire debt. Caesars? Pay down debt? Unheard of! Normally you’d expect him to pledge the money against some harebrained scheme, like building a multi-billion-dollar racino in Florida. (Loveman probably should have lost his job for passing on Steve Wynn‘s subconcession — which went to James Packer and Lawrence Ho — back in ’06, but that’s another discussion. Nobody in casino history ever left so much money on the table.) We can no longer look forward to such incongruities as Horseshoe Cotai, Showboat Macao, Bally’s Wild Wild East or Margaritaville Macau, alas. The Caesars brand, of course, is reserved for truly important markets — like Windsor.

This news should make Wall Street happy. Caesars doesn’t have the capitalization to compete in Macao anyway. The best it could hope would to be build a hotel and lease out a small casino to somebody like Stanley Ho and his minions. Caesars is a company with an international presence but not an international strategy. If it can ever find somebody to relieve it of London Clubs International, it can refocus on what it does best, marketing its product to the Good Old U.S. of A.

With no fewer than eight casino projects on the drawing board within his Massachusetts diocese, Episcopal Bishop Douglas J. Fisher is making his feelings known. Suffice it to say, they’re not warm fuzzies. He’s particularly irked about MGM’s West Springfield site (pictured) being virtually on the church steps. “Real, vibrant cities are built on more solid footing,” he says, sounding an awful lot like Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. “It’s really a tax on the poor,” he adds, although if regressive taxation is one’s causus belli, I’d suggest taking on sales taxes instead.