Posted by Johnnymac 4:44 PM
Fro, I hear what you are saying but many many many more people are in favor of these laws than are against them. This isn't the Dubai Ports deal or the Senate's unbelievably arrogant and short-sighted "comprehensive" immigration bill. In those circumstances, the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys and Fox News Channels (your favorite sources of media, I know) all helped worked the "public" into a tizzy and then naturally the politicians had to listen to their base and they let those dumb ideas die. A quick check just now doesn't show anything on either Limbaugh's or Hannity's website even mentioning this bill (as compared to how crazy they were over the other two topics) and I watch Fox News all day at work and I have yet to see it mentioned outside of the normal newsbreaks.

There are a lot of vocal poker players out there, I agree, but there are a lot more people who probably wouldn't vote to make B&M legal or not to eventually enforce the law againt the online rooms. This is because, politically, it's a losing deal: no politician is going to give his opponent a chance to use it as a campaign issue by saying, "Senator Bob voted to let your kids play poker on the internet, next he'll probably vote to let your kids drink absinthe while having unprotected sex with illegal immigrants in our public schools and emergency rooms. Vote for me instead!" You and I both know that's the way it works.

Maybe in the far far distant future things will change, but you're dreaming if you think that a bunch of vocal Chris Moneymaker and Dutch Boyd types are going to somehow cause this to change.

I wish none of this was true - I like playing online poker, don't get me wrong - but at the same time, as I have said in similar situations, my liking to gamble or play poker doesn't mean that I think everyone should be doing it. I think government lotteries are TERRIBLE things. I think the relatively recent proliferation of casinos all over the country and outside of Vegas and Atlantic City are probably not good for the public welfare as a whole, but at least B&M casinos and lotteries are at least regulated a little bit and the government gets some tax revenue out of it. I think easy-to-find gambling preys on those people who can least afford to do it and I don't think it would be such a bad thing if there was a little oversight in place. I would rather see online gambling regulated and taxed instead of done away with altogether, but as I said, that's probably not going to happen and we're more likely to see it go away. I don't think that would be the end of the world, but that's not my point. My point simply, is that someday soon, it WILL be unequivocally illegal to play online poker and people will begin to be prosecuted for it. Period.

With regards to the WTO/Antigua comment below - the complaint is that blocking the offshore gambling sites is "protectionist" in the sense that if the offshore sites were to be blocked, some states' domestic horseracing and lotteries would theoretically still be allowed online and thus from a world trade sense the US would be unfairly favoring its domestic gambling industry at the expense of a foreign one. That whole complaint is unrelated to this bill, but at the same time this bill doesn't fix the underlying contradiction because it still make the same lottery and horseracing exemptions. If the US were to ban ALL online gambling, then that would be compliant with the WTO because the WTO isn't meant to dictate law or public policy, just the terms of trade and if it's legal to do something domestically then the WTO forces you to make it legal internationally, too.

I can see the argument that his has the real potential to trip things up, but, from what I understand right now, really all it would affect is the tactic of blocking the sites. Kiddie porn is still illegal, too, and I'm sure (although I wouldn't personally know... of course) that there are foreign websites featuring kiddie porn that are easily accessible on the internet this very instant and not blocked by Time Warner Cable. And who's to say that the government just won't subpoena the ISP's for names of people accessing the gambling sites just like they do the perverts who access the porno sites or the P2P music sharing sites? I would bet that the FBI might even like to keep them open because then it's a ready-made trap to go shoot gamblers in a barrel, so to speak.

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