Michael Hiltzik: The absurd ban on Internet gambling
One way to gauge the sincerity of lawmakers is by their willingness to let their bills be debated out in the open. The federal ban on Internet gambling flunks that test.
It was enacted in 2006 when Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., who thought he'd be running for President, made common cause with a gang of Congressional blue noses and added it to a bill on port security. The gambling measure wasn't afforded a minute's debate in the Senate, but no one could vote against the ban without voting to open our ports to terrorists, so there you have it--a measure that fails to achieve its purposes politically, fiscally, or moralistically.
Among its flaws, as my Monday column observes, is the lack of any definition of "gambling," which you would expect to be Job One. It exempts betting on horses, for instance, but includes poker. This drives poker players nuts, because they think of their pastime as an expression of psychological warfare and high-level game theory. There's much to be said for their position, but one doesn't have to share it to decry the ban. The column starts below.
No issue brings out America’s talent for self-deception like gambling.
To persuade ourselves that we can keep this particular sin under control, we sequestered casinos in isolated places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City reachable only by superhighways, and isolated them on riverboats where not a single card could be dealt or slot lever pulled until the vessel left the dock.
In Mississippi, the law used to say you couldn’t have a casino unless it floated on water. After Hurricane Katrina forcibly relocated a few of these sin barges onto land the legislature, reading the disaster as a sign from God, revised the law to let them stay put. (The riverboat states, similarly, eventually allowed their floating casinos to remain tied up dockside.)
Which brings us to Internet gambling.
--Michael Hiltzik
The hypocrisy of this country's phony Puritanical and various repressed human proclivities, sponsored mainly by so-called Evangelical Christian conservatives, is nothing short of disgusting. That anyone, or any group, has the right to tell me what I can do, or not do, with my money is preposterous. Worse, these sanctimonious groups masquerade under umbrellas of righteousness, and ostensibly raise issues of morality, addiction, 'home wrecking disease', and other shibboleths when, in fact, they are nothing but paid shills for varied competing gambling interests. Government is equally guilty of hypocrisy with their patchwork gambling laws, and their corrupt lottery operations that spend millions encouraging citizens to gamble on the worst possible chance of winning anything, the lottery, a tax on the poor disguised as a dream. State lottery players would be much better off were they to play the old numbers games operated by the Mafia...their payoffs were much fairer than the bullcrap spouted by our state governments.
I remember being in states that allowed no gambling or liquor of any sort, ever, and under no circumstances...Baptist, for the most part. While gambling, per se, was not only illegal, but a sin...it was perfectly legal to pick up the phone and buy, or sell short, a million or so bushels of wheat on the futures market...with a promise to send a check for the nominal margin. When I asked these bastions of morality what the difference was in using your head to figure out a poker bet or the likelihood of rain 6 months hence...I was told that the poker player 'created' a risk, while the risk of rain or no rain was a natural risk created by God. Well folks, "God" created the internet, AND poker players...let's get our heads in the current century.
Posted by: martscan | October 19, 2009 at 06:21 PM