Don't pretend that the economy is all bad. Lottery ticket sales are booming! American states are beaming at the prospect of closing their yawning budget gaps with the final dollars of the desperate poor.

Gambling is the future of the media! Newspapers aren't much good to anybody looking to make a buck off investing in their stock—but that doesn't mean that you can't make your newspaper fortune through sweet, sweet gambling, come on now seven seven seven baby need a new pair of shoes, yea! After the jump, we've listed the half-dozen most famous economically challenged papers in the country, along with our official odds for their long-term survival. Place your bets, and give 5% to the house:

What's this—monetary distress for Donald Trump, the richest man in the universe? Trump is being sued by Deutsche Bank for failing to pay off a loan for his new Chicago high rise tower, which he personally guaranteed to the tune of $40 million. That makes it a great time to raise the perpetual question, "How much is Trump really worth?" A safe guess: far less than he was the last time anybody took the trouble to calculate:

A plan to construct the first casino in New York City—4,500 slot machines at Aqueduct Race Track in Queens—is one step closer to becoming a reality. Now whatever money you still have left amid the recession you'll now be able to lose here at home, without traveling all the way to Atlantic City or Foxwoods! [GamingToday]

A judge's ruling last month to allow Kentucky's governor to seize domain names to gambling websites is being upheld. One reprieve that the judge did grant was to let site operators keep their domain names if they install Internet filters to block out any IP address from Kentucky. [TechDirt]

Ha, everybody watches Mad Men and assumes that advertising must be some kind of glamorous industry. Forget it! The best thing agency big shots can hope for these days: "Create affordable meals and boost the cheese-single business" for Kraft. Wow, that's a "panty-dropper" account for sure! Seriously, most ad people are now stuck touting things like money-saving strategies at JCPenney. Try impressing girls with that. The last available prestige account in these trying times: sucking the blood of the poor more effectively with jingles for the state lottery! Facebook pages. Scratch-and-sniff lottery tickets. Gas discounts. Partnering with Indiana Jones and Deal or No Deal. Lotteries are doing all these things (and more!) to attract the dwindling dollars of desperate Americans into their swollen coffers.

Tragic news for all those who live in trailer parks and think a night out on the town involves a $9.99 all-you-can-eat buffet: A number of casinos are now planning to ban smoking, which means it will no longer be able to tug on a slot machine handle with one hand while holding a Newport in the other. [WSJ]

A Wisconsin couple bought four lottery tickets-all with the same numbers, for the same drawing-and won. AP headline: "Wisconsin couple each hit lottery - twice." Same story on WNBC.com, headline: "Has Couple Found Formula To Win Lottery?" Same story on Drudge, headline: "Couple Finds Formula To Win Lottery; Rakes In $700K This Week!" This is why America is losing.

Gambling addiction is a serious problem that afflicts hundreds of thousands of Americans. To an addict, it may seem like slot machines are stalking you—calling you. It's tragic. So one ad agency for Empire City Casino said, "Let's go with that!" Click to watch how easy it is to tease out a problem gambler's psychosis and use it to lure them right back into the hive of one-armed bandits.

The road to recovery from gambling addiction is a long one, but the first priority is admitting to yourself that you have a problem, which Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis did in his first email missive since quitting the blogosphere:

As Alex Pareene once said with a certain joie de vivre, "Leave it to the French to [insert something racy here]." Well, it doesn't get much racier than advertising to the gays—unless it's advertising to the lesbians! So Paris Las Vegas is appropriating a bit of that fake French savoir faire for their new ad campaign, which features the understated slogan, "Everything's sexier in Paris Las Vegas." Points to them for being inclusive, in a rather blunt and unsophisticated way. Gay-targeted ad pictured; lesbian-targeted ad (the content of which you might be able to guess), after the jump.

The Kentucky Derby is coming up. You don't know shit about racing. But you love betting on things! Who to wager this weekend's drug money on? Allow Jeff Johnson and Pavement's Bob Nostanovich to help. [Vice]

Antigua has fired a salvo against the United States in a long-simmering dispute over trade regulations, promising to give free reign to intellectual property piracy if the US doesn't allow Americans to access Antigua's lucrative online gambling businesses. The World Trade Organization awarded the tiny island nation the right to ignore American copyright laws last December if negotations fail. Antigua's hope is that the Motion Picture Association of America and software companies like Microsoft will pressure the US government to come to terms — after all, The Pirate Bay has been looking for an island paradise. Why doesn't Antigua threaten to publish details of the local tax shelters used by studio and tech executives and their financiers? That seems easier. (Photo by AP/Johnny Jno-Baptiste)

New York Lottery officials had to shut down betting on the number "871" on Tuesday, the Daily News reports. That's the number of Governor Spitzer's sexy hotel room, and wagers on it hit the maximum of $5 million. But it was loser; instead, "662" hit. Which is the year of the death of Christian theologian Maximus the Confessor—whose moniker describes what Eliot Spitzer was recently forced to do regarding his scandal. Read between the lines, gamblers!

This new Broadway musical-themed ad for the Mohegan Sun Casino has inspired reaction on the ad blogs that spans the entire spectrum from "trite" to "gag" to "shit" to "I'd quit if I worked on that" (and indeed, the ad has been mysteriously pulled from YouTube—and UPDATE, the agency tells us that they didn't "pull the spot," just replaced a "rough cut" with the final version). What is for sure is that this is one casino where you are not in danger of, say, waking up in the morning with cocaine strewn across your room and a hazy memory of marrying a hooker; a more likely scenario is having a helluva energetic song and dance session with other goofy, middle aged whites, then going straight to bed to wake up in time for church. Count us in! The full ad [via Agency Spy], after the jump.

New York City's Off-Track Betting parlors, the seediest places left in Manhattan (next to those secret Chinese gambling dens, anyway), are all set to close following an order from noted fun-hater Michael Bloomberg, who's surely done more than any previous mayor to rid the city of its amoral, filthy character, but everyone still loves him anyway because he's not Giuliani and the newsmedia is controlled by and made up of the well-off bastards he's delivered New York to on a silver platter. The Times investigates the wacky, Damon Runyan-esque characters who throw their lives away at the OTB, including the dapper old "retired actor" who says that should the parlors actually close, he'll "probably just stop betting and go to the theater more." We can't let that happen. [NYT]

The Wachowski brothers and James Cameron totally misunderstood the rise of the machines. It's more about cash than world domination.The right computer can already slap around humans at chess, checkers, backgammon, Scrabble, bridge and, yes, Connect Four. Now the bots are taking to poker.

In a bill to allow three brick-and-mortar casinos in the Bay State, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has proposed two-year jail terms and a $25,000 fine for folks caught gambling online. Congressman Barney Frank, who wants federal legislation to regulate online gambling, asks, "Why is gambling in a casino OK and gambling on the Internet is not?"

With the headlines recently being dominated by depressing stories of high-profile Hollywood executives succumbing to their personal demons and sacrificing their jobs, Page Six decides to zig where others have zagged, noting that a long-brewing LAT investigation involving Universal's Ron Meyer's love of high-stakes poker seems (at least for now) to be a scandal non-starter:

Give us $100 and approximately 24,000 more links by December 31, and we'll give you $1,400 back. That's the game identified by Blogebrity, i.e. a new racket of betting on what blog will inaugurate 2007 at the #1 spot on Technorati's Top 100 list of the most-linked blogs. Gawker's currently at #20, and the bookies are giving us +1500 odds. Of course, that puts us well behind such worthies as a nonexistent NPR page (#4) and various nerds, but c'mon, who's the prettiest pony you ever saw? Someone at least join up and tell us how our action looks.