It was a rough week for the state Republican party, which lost eight seats in the General Assembly and is left with just 10 seats in the 113-seat legislature.

“I was weeping in my coffee Wednesday morning,” state Chairman Giovanni Cicione conceded. “But then I decided to get over it and look ahead to 2010. We’re going to get back in the saddle.”

Cicione also reports that the party is doing its best to keep its executive director, Marc Pappas. Pappas had been widely expected to leave last Friday, with his predecessor, Donna Perry, returning after her Election Day loss to Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed, of Newport.

But Cicione says it was never the plan for Perry to return. He says hopes to “find a way to keep [Pappas] on” as director.

Pappas, a newcomer to Rhode Island, made a name for himself in the days leading up to the election as the architect of a series of provocative ads produced by the party.

One that drew the most attention featured a car accident scene, next to the words: “The next time you see someone CRUSHED on the highway by an illegal alien with a Rhode Island driver’s license … Remember it was [Portsmouth Sen.] Charles Levesque who got him his license.”

Pappas defended the mailers as accurate and said he wished the party had the money to produce more.

Cicione applauded his executive director as having done “a great job,” but says his future with the party may be a matter of money.

The party was having trouble paying Pappas, but its most recent campaign finance report shows two separate $2,000 payments to him, one on Oct. 14 and the other on Oct. 22. It’s worth noting that Pappas’ home address on the payments is listed as Goffstown, N.H.

It won’t know if it has the money to keep Pappas employed until after it begins its post-election fundraising efforts.

Cicione gets Political Scene’s award for best silver-lining effort: “It’s a shame to lose Republican seats [in the General Assembly] but a veto-proof majority is a veto-proof majority and [the Democrats] already had that, so really there’s no loss of power.”

Murphy stresses House bipartisanship

Aware of what the heavy losses would mean for the already tiny House GOP caucus, House Speaker William J. Murphy has promised to extend an olive branch to the group.

“Politics ended yesterday,” he told Political Scene the day after the election. “And now it’s our job to work together. There are 6 [House] Republicans and my door is open to them.”

He continued: “At the end of the day, politics is over. You have to put it on the back burner and do what’s best for the state.”

The speaker said he’s only a spectator in the other chamber’s race for Senate president, but he said the presumed winner, Paiva Weed is “very capable.”

Murphy doesn’t have to worry much about any threat to his power. In a party caucus Thursday night, he was endorsed for reelection as peaker in a unanimous 68-0 vote.

Gorham feels vindicated

He is not coming back to the House in January, but House Minority Whip Nicholas Gorham is still making noise.

The Coventry Republican was defeated by Democratic newcomer Scott M. Pollard, who campaigned against Gorham’s oddball plan to merge five communities and part of a sixth to form a super-town called Westconnaug.

At an unrelated economic forum hosted by Governor Carcieri last week, stakeholders from business executives to labor leaders agreed that consolidating municipal services would be a good way to save Rhode Island some much needed cash.

“I just couldn’t believe my eyes this morning [when I read the] story about consolidating municipal services,” Gorham declared in a fiery e-mail to Political Scene. “Great idea, and exactly one of the reasons I lost! I was relentlessly attacked by my opponent and others… I tried desperately to explain we were just trying to have a discussion about consolidating municipal government services…but the tide had already turned against me.”

Barrow’s casino ‘payout’ report off the Web site

The owners of the state’s two slot parlors demanded that University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Prof. Clyde Barrow remove from his Web site a report alleging that they had the lowest payouts in New England and among the lowest in the country.

And now the report is gone, while others, dating to January 2004, which were done by Barrow’s Center for Policy Analysis, remain.

What happened? Barrow e-mailed this response: “We routinely remove press releases from our Web site following media reports. We retain them only when a story has a long shelf life, such as the casino debate in Massachusetts.”

The removal came, however, in the wake of a letter in which Twin River’s top lawyer essentially accused Barrow of doing the bidding of competing gambling interests and threatened to hold him “legally accountable” for any damage to the Lincoln parlor’s business.

Drawing his numbers from the Rhode Island Lottery’s own Web site, Barrow recently issued a report that said that the average payout here, at 72 to 73 cents of each wagered dollar, is much lower than it is at most other gambling venues across the country.

But the owners of the two Rhode Island slot halls — and state Lottery officials — said the Rhode Island Lottery does not calculate or display the slot payouts the same way other gambling operators do. Lottery officials here use actual cash-in, cash-out to determine the average payout. Others peg their calculations to the amount of money “wagered,” which is generally a much bigger number because the same dollar is counted again and again every time it “churns” through a machine before the gambler calls it quits.

On Oct. 31, Twin River vice president and general counsel Craig Eaton sent Barrow a letter citing what he called one inaccuracy after another in the professor’s report: “Your many false assertions and your conduct in connection with those misstatements evidence a malicious intent or at a minimum an overwhelming ignorance, deliberate failures to conduct simple investigations, and patent reckless disregard for the facts.”

“Given your prior patrons, we unfortunately are led to suspect that your release is a deliberate attempt to cause substantial economic, reputational and long-term damage to Twin River and the state of Rhode Island in service to a competitor,” wrote Eaton, in an apparent reference to the role Barrow’s center played in the sales pitch for the failed Harrah’s-financed casino proposal for West Warwick.

As was reported at the height of referenda battle in 2006, the UMass-Dartmouth’s Center for Policy was paid $20,000 to conduct a study of the proposed West Warwick casino by the Rhode Island Building Trades Council, a group of construction unions supporting the casino. Barrow is the center’s director. Just as the report was issued, Harrah’s gave the building trades $25,000. The report gave the advocates ammunition to tout $681 million in potential new state revenues, even though there was at that time no legislation pinning down how much the state might get.

Eaton’s letter went on: “Twin River will not allow its business and reputation, much less Rhode Island’s third-largest source of revenue, to be destroyed by libelous statements. We intend to hold you legally accountable … We demand immediate removal of the release from the university’s Web site, an unequivocal retraction and an apology.”

This was Barrow’s response when asked if the report was removed in response to Eaton’s letter, or on the basis of new information. “No and No.” Question: “Do you now agree with their argument that the way the RI Lott presents its numbers is out of sync with other gambling venues, so any direct payout comparison would be off-base?” Answer: “At this point, no.”

“The letter from BLB to me is rife with errors and unsubstantiated assertions … As a social scientist and public policy analyst, I am always open to persuasion, but up to this point neither the Rhode Island Lottery or Twin River has been able to provide the type of data that a social scientist would find persuasive,” he said in an e-mail.

At this point, he argued: “BLB Investors’ dispute should not be with the Center for Policy Analysis, but with the Rhode Island Lottery and how it reports data. When and if such data ever becomes available as the official public record, I will be pleased to review it.”

In the wake of this controversy, the words “payout” have been removed from the Lottery’s own online slot-revenue report. In their place are the words “Cash Out/Cash In Ratio” — lest anyone reach the same conclusion that Barrow did.

kgregg@projo.com