Things are tough all over, or "Happy Birthday to Me"

The Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe (in an article by an LA Times reporter) are saying much the same thing. In a contracting economy, all that glitters is not necessarily casino gold. We need to understand that achieving the same compensation as a "commercial casino" may no longer be good enough, given how casinos across the board -- reservation and commercial alike-- are currently performing.

And in local news...there are apparently no local investors willing to help Mr. Strather with giving the friendly, small-town resort bingo hall the financial shot in the arm it needs to move from fevered CRAC-pipe-dream to reality.

To top it all off, Mr. Bond has decided to voice, very publicly, his concerns as a private citizen, about the IGA and the implications of the past misbehavior on the same.

It's time to WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE (looking at you, Selectman Spataro, Selectman Duphily, and Selectman Brunelle)

The casino industry is in trouble, not only in California (where the market is saturated), but also in its historic strongholds, Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Both the licensed commercial and the reservation model are faltering, and the dollar-sign scales are falling from local and state level politicians' eyes around the country. To top it all off, our own most vocal proponent of the deal is certainly having second, and third, and fourth, and fifth thoughts about the current terms of the IGA, given what we NOW KNOW about the past and current behavior of the leadership of the tribe.

Today is my 47th birthday, and I could not have had a better present than some of the articles and blog posts I have read today.

Happy Birthday to me indeed.