Tuesday, October 31, 2006 This just in! By Steve Sebelius
A reliable source tells us at Various Things & Stuff that — despite two weeks of almost unceasing bad publicity — the Review-Journal will report in Wednesday's editions that U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons still leads his Democratic rival, state Sen. Dina Titus, by 4 percentage points in a statewide survey.
That's a remarkable number for [...]
Tuesday, October 31, 2006 Case bets By David McKee
A smattering of news items to send you off for the weekend …
• Small wonder that Harrah's Entertainment is sufficiently interested in the British market to up the price it's paying for London Clubs International. According to The Guardian, smart casino operators have been able to circumvent government-imposed caps on slot capacity by installing copious [...]
Release the tapes.
That’s our view of what should happen at 11 a.m. today in the courtroom of District Court Judge Douglas Herndon, who is being asked to release the parking garage video that allegedly doesn’t show U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons assaulting cocktail waitress Chrissy Mazzeo.
Gibbons and his attorney, Don Campbell, want the tapes released because [...]
Personal income rose by 0.5 percent in September but there was barely an increase in spending as consumers tried to pay down debt and put a little bit aside, reports the New York Times. The national savings rate is still in the red but a little less so after September.
That should add up to a [...]
The new real estate Web site, Zillow.com, has been accused of purposely misleading users, reports the Los Angeles Times. The charges come from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based fair housing group.
The complaint has gone to the Federal Trade Commission and charges that the Web site's "Zestimates" are being used to overvalue properties and mislead [...]
We at Various Things & Stuff don’t pay much attention to endorsements, nor do we endorse candidates ourselves. We find that only encourages them. Plus, actually meeting with the would-be office seekers can be one of the most tedious, most depressing things in the world.
But we did notice that our old colleagues over at [...]
Monday, October 30, 2006 Gibbapalooza By Steve Sebelius
So now we’re told there’s a tape after all?
After two weeks of being told that there was no tape, it turns out (according to Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith) that an employee of the Hughes Center took a tape from the surveillance cameras of the most infamous parking garage since Watergate and plopped it [...]
Dear fans of Various Things & Stuff:
As some of you may have noticed … well, as one or two of you actually noticed … we were lax in blogging last week. Now, we could tell you all about the hours of TV we were called upon to do, or the scramble to launch a new [...]
There may still be questions about whether the bubble has burst in the Southwestern real estate boom but there is no question that the Realtors are coming in for a hard landing. The Los Angeles Times reports that the state association is projecting a 6 percent drop in membership next year because the industry no longer seems like [...]
A new report from Credit Derivatives Research suggests that derivatives traders are getting inside information and acting on it. Four of the five biggest LBOs this year have seen big pre-announcement jumps in credit-default swaps, reports Bloomberg.
Add to that the fact that Harrah's default swaps also jumped and it would seem like irrefutable evidence. The [...]