Super Bowl Sunday, for Las Vegas sports books this is the busiest weekend of the year. It surpasses the World Series by almost double, even given the fact that with seven possible games the revenue for the Superbowl is almost double. And more than three times that of the NBA playoffs which also can go as many as seven games. Given the revenue of the playoff games leading up to the Superbowl can often exceed the total revenue of a small country.

This year's betting saw over $80 million dollars cross the counter of the Las Vegas sports books. Add another $100 million wagered on the playoff games and add another $90 million pumped into the Las Vegas economy over the past three days and you can take that $270 million dollars and purchase an NFL franchise and tell the league to go stuff itself when it tells Las Vegas they're not allowed to advertise on the Superbowl broadcast.

Not even on the six hour long pre-game broadcast. Now we know how Rodney Dangerfield feels, we get no respect. The price this year was around $2 million dollars for a 30 second spot. Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce was ready to drop at least $6 million on ads showing Las Vegas as an entertainment destination. Our ads say nothing about gambling at all. These were the ads that the city was stuck with through the 80's and 90's as we were not allowed to show any forms of gambling on our commercials. People were seen walking past Caesar's and the MGM, drinking and eating and watching shows, but not even a quarter was shown being dropped into a slot machine. Not even a $2 pass line was allowed in the commercials. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that the FCC allowed us to advertise the fact that Las Vegas has gambling.

People were astounded that every ad they saw for Vegas had nothing about gambling in their advertisements. No one I ever knew ever vacationed in a city just for the food. Nobody travels hundreds of miles into a barren desert to see Wayne Newton and eat Burritos. Everyone in the country since the 1950's knows Las Vegas was built on casino gambling yet the FCC wouldn't allow a card or die to be shown on television in a reality based commercial (the excuse the FCC used to allow movies and television shows about Las Vegas and gambling but not commercials.)

But this rejection by the NFL is no surprise to us. The league has a long-standing policy against sports betting and casino gambling and anything else that comes under the heading of "FUN AND GAMES" Yet for us here in Sin City we understand the hypocrisy of the NFL rules since the NBA and MLB adheres to the same rules when it comes to dealing with it's 1.45 million people that occupy our valley. But when it comes to hypocrisy let's take a look at the other commercials the NFL approves of for their broadcast.

The most popular commercials as well as the largest revenue the NFL receives from running ads are the beer commercials. Anheuser-Busch which will flood the game with more than five minutes of commercials for Budweiser and Bud Light, which adds up to over $10 million dollars and that doesn't include the cost of filming the commercial which costs millions. Of course, advertising beer to an audience containing a large segment of children and teenagers as well as current alcoholics and former alcoholics as well as everyone else that experiences alcohol and alcohol-related problems is totally acceptable to the NFL.

But ask MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) M.A.D.D. reports that beer is the alcoholic drink of choice in most cases of heavy drinking, binge drinking, drunk driving and underage drinking. Moreover, according to MADD, young people consume about 1.1 billion cans of beer annually, or about 10% of all beer sold in the U.S., making it the number one drug problem among young people and American families.

The opening add of the Superbowl is the Budweiser horses in an open snowy field playing what looks to be a game of football. A Zebra is on the sidelines looking into a mock-up referee's replay reviewing screen watching a replay of the last play. A cowboy on the fence watching this unfold comments to another cowboy "That ref's a jackass." And the other cowboy replies "Nope, I think he's a Zebra." The day after the Superbowl that ad was all any of the sports shows were talking about. The game itself being a total dud, it was only the beer advertisers that saved the day, along with a FedEx add that knocked off the years old Tom Hanks movie "Castaway" Yet in selling millions more cans of their precious beer by the cutsie adds shown during the game, remember that more than 1,400 college students will die from binge drinking, DUI accidents, and other alcohol related accidents, 500,000 will be injured by alcohol related accidents, 70,000 will be sexually assaulted and 400,000 will engage in unprotected sex while under the influence (o.k. so that's not an argument…in fact, that'll probably sell more beer.)

The next runner up in the Superbowl commercial adds is Pepsi-Cola. And who is their main spokesperson? The Heroin clouded low-life Elmer Fudd version of Hell known as Ossie Osborn. This is the new American advertisers idea of the typical American dysfunctional family on 8-Balls (a mixture of Heroin and Speed, what John Belushi died from) Yet the Pepsi-Cola company is going to teach us that according to Ossie, the word FUCK can now be used in place of the words, hello, goodbye, mom, dad, yes, no, please and thank you as well as an adjective to describe everything from hot to cold, good or bad and anything that happens between the hours of 6 pm and 6 pm.

AT&T gets to spend millions of dollars selling their cell phones. According to the Automobile Associations of America, cellular phones are now the leading cause of distraction leading to car accidents in the United States. Dr. George Carlo who was hired by the AMA to study the effects of cell phone use in the U.S. stated the dangers of microwave radiation on the brain from too much cell phone use, including the disruption of pacemakers, and dangerous levels of radiation in young children from the seepage into the skull as well as the compromise of the blood brain barrier and genetic damage that is a known diagnostic marker for cancer.

Visa, another large advertiser trying to sell us more credit cards to Americans already knee-deep in debt. Americans owe more than $700 billion dollars in credit card debt, which amounts to about $8,000 in bills per house-hold. Then there's the Sony Play station adds that try to sell our children as much violence in the home as $200 a unit and $50 a game will purchase. With games that annihilate everyone from Saddam Hussein (O.K., well, I'll give you that) as well as the U.S. Army (yes, Muslim kids play it too.) They want to show us how to crash cars and shoot cops. Can we compare the violence these games tout to the ads of enjoyment in the city of Las Vegas? Yet the NFL says any ad, with or without gambling, is harmful to adults and children alike.

McDonalds runs ads for its Big Mac, super sized with fries and a shake you're looking at over 1,000 calories and a direct line to clogged arteries and obesity. Then let's throw in the Warner Bros. Studios that spent millions and millions to advertise on the Superbowl to let us know movies like Terminator 3 and the Matrix Reloaded were on the horizon…in another 6 months. Let's see, Terminator 3 is the sequel to the other two Terminator movies which were the most violent and realistic movies ever made. How many Harley Davidson Low Riders were sold after Arnold showed us how to ride and shoot at the same time, how many kids were seen in leather jackets and sunglasses after the first one? The Matrix was another winner. It inspired the Trench Coat Mafia, the name those lovely kids in Columbine Colorado named themselves before they brought a couple of assault rifles to school under their Matrix-like trench coats and killed 13 students in the process. (In the court case, the defense attorneys tried to use the influence of the violence of the Matrix and video games alike as a legal defense to the murders and almost succeeded.)

But the NFL says these ads are fine, no problem, but show them a 30 second spot showing classy people having fun in a casino setting, something that's done legally in 48 of the 50 United States, and the NFL has fits. They worry that someone might decide to get on an airplane at some time in the future and spend the money to fly to Las Vegas along with 250 million other visitors every year to our town, and gamble away their life savings, rather than driving down the street to their nearest Indian casino and do the same thing.

Now if this was Fidel Castro advertising fun and sun in Havana casinos with free Communism lessons thrown in at poolside, I could understand the NFL having a problem, but to tell an All-American city like Las Vegas, firmly planted in the American Culture that we're somehow living below American standards in morality, even though rather than making gambling illegal in Las Vegas, we choose, as a nation, to legalize gambling everywhere else as a cure-all to our sagging economies, and have proven to bring tons of money into shriveling towns coffers all over the United States.

So if the NFL wants to call Las Vegas Sin City, we'll take the tag and wear it proudly. We received more advertising as the city the NFL rejected, as the nations BAD BOYS than any $2 million dollar thirty second spot could have brought us. And the advertising was free. Just about every newspaper and magazine carried columns of how Las Vegas was dissed by the NFL not allowing us to advertise on their precious Superbowl and it didn't cost us a dime.

So I'm telling you all right now….DON'T COME TO LAS VEGAS. It's sure doom both economically and morally to anyone stepping off the plane in our town. You're probably taking your life in your hands by coming here. If you're a good person, a moral person, a person who works for your money legally and honestly, if you like good-hearted women with their cloths on, no smoking bars and booze-free nights, WE DON'T WANT YOU. We only want the bad people…that is, unless, you think you're soooo bad?

Rather than having the sign at the entrance of town that says "Welcome to Las Vegas" it should be re-written to say "Welcome to Sin City, enter at your own risk." We do that and you won't be able to get a room in this town ever again.

So don't bitch about the NFL showing our town no respect, it's the best free advertising we could have asked for. The new Las Vegas logo…"LAS VEGAS…WE BAD!!"

Ken Pearlman