the hell out of Nassau OTB when Andrew Cuomo is in church. See NY Const.. Art. 1, Sec. 3.
You can't close Nassau OTB on Roman Catholic Holidays in preference to Greek Orthodox Holidays.
Brought to you by friends of Gangster Girl Gillibrand. Real Lawyers don't let Governors drive drunk with silly statutes.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324461604578193492494089604.html
D.C. Plays Fizzbin With Online Poker
How to make the poor pay for the welfare state: online gambling.
more in Opinion
»
Sometimes
only a Star Trek metaphor will do. Remember the episode about a
primitive people who developed a planet-girdling civilization based on
the principles of the Chicago gangs? Many modern economic
anthropologists would tell you that the state begins as organized crime,
dividing up rackets and controlling turf.
Case in point: anything having to do with Internet poker.
It starts with the enterprising activities of the Justice Department. Seizing on a 2006 law making it illegal to process U.S. payments for online gambling, federal prosecutors last year brought charges against three offshore poker websites. While admitting no wrongdoing, the sites quickly settled and agreed to hand over substantial sums of money to the department.
Some of these funds were supposed to reimburse the "victims," U.S. poker players who had money in their accounts when the sites were shut down. But so cumbersome and legalistic is the process created by Justice that many lawyers say they don't expect their clients to find it worth the trouble or legal fees. Justice may end up keeping much of the loot itself under asset-forfeiture rules.
Don't expect a hue and cry from gambling interests, however. Bigger stakes are up for grabs, not unlike the turf war Captain Kirk found when he beamed down to the gangster planet Sigma Iotia II.
Having cleared the online poker marketplace of its incumbents, Justice decided that under the 1961 Wire Act most Internet gambling isn't illegal after all. This new "interpretation," which came at the behest of Illinois and New York, has inspired a new light in the eyes of state officials looking for ways to fund the welfare state. Dancing in their heads are visions of new state-sponsored gambling empires built on online poker, online slot machines and online lottery-ticket sales, with politicians collecting most of the vig.
Not everyone is pleased by the prospect. Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican who is retiring this year, doesn't like gambling; Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, doesn't like gambling when it's not controlled by Nevada casinos.
During the lame-duck session, these improbable bedfellows promoted a bill to halt the online gambling stampede, except for online poker. Why the exception? Poker is a great American tradition, say supporters, including former Sen. Al D'Amato, representing something called the Poker Players Alliance.
More to the point, stopping Americans from playing Internet poker is probably impossible. Under the Kyl-Reid proposal, at least players would be pitted against each other, not the house, which is deemed less iniquitous and corrupting.
The bill satisfies Mr. Reid, meanwhile, because Nevada is already pushing ahead with in-state online poker. Nevada's casinos and Nevada's gaming regulators see a federal law as a way to give themselves a headstart in marketing a government-endorsed version of the game to the masses nationally and internationally.
The Kyl-Reid bill, as Captain Kirk would quickly suss out (aided by the deductive powers of Mr. Spock), was destined instantly to become a bone of contention among the various gangs jostling for a piece of the online poker action.
The state lottery commissioners and governors opposed the bill because it would prevent them offering an array of tantalizing new online games to suckers, er, citizens of their states.
Convenience-store owners supported the bill, hoping to block states from selling lottery tickets online, which would cut into the stores' lucrative piece of the over-the-counter lottery racket.
The Nevada casinos naturally favored any law that would give them a leg up in the emerging marketplace for legal online poker.
In hearings before Congress last year, a Native American spokesman argued that tribes must be allowed to offer online poker on grounds that his 101-year-old grandmother had been a reservation schoolteacher fighting to preserve native culture. Therefore, "if anybody deserves to be at the front line in this industry it's Native American people."
Captain Kirk, it will be remembered, invented the deliberately convoluted card game "Fizzbin" as a ruse to distract the gambling-mad, gangster inhabitants of Sigma Iotia II. The Reid-Kyl gambit may have run out of time, but the feds aren't likely to desist from trying to control so profitable a new racket. State-sponsored gambling is the one acceptable way of raising taxes on lower-income folks to help fund the welfare state. With or without federal regulation, legalized online poker is likely coming your way in 2013. Don't be surprised if one of the games is called Fizzbin.
Case in point: anything having to do with Internet poker.
It starts with the enterprising activities of the Justice Department. Seizing on a 2006 law making it illegal to process U.S. payments for online gambling, federal prosecutors last year brought charges against three offshore poker websites. While admitting no wrongdoing, the sites quickly settled and agreed to hand over substantial sums of money to the department.
Some of these funds were supposed to reimburse the "victims," U.S. poker players who had money in their accounts when the sites were shut down. But so cumbersome and legalistic is the process created by Justice that many lawyers say they don't expect their clients to find it worth the trouble or legal fees. Justice may end up keeping much of the loot itself under asset-forfeiture rules.
Don't expect a hue and cry from gambling interests, however. Bigger stakes are up for grabs, not unlike the turf war Captain Kirk found when he beamed down to the gangster planet Sigma Iotia II.
Having cleared the online poker marketplace of its incumbents, Justice decided that under the 1961 Wire Act most Internet gambling isn't illegal after all. This new "interpretation," which came at the behest of Illinois and New York, has inspired a new light in the eyes of state officials looking for ways to fund the welfare state. Dancing in their heads are visions of new state-sponsored gambling empires built on online poker, online slot machines and online lottery-ticket sales, with politicians collecting most of the vig.
Getty Images
Not everyone is pleased by the prospect. Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican who is retiring this year, doesn't like gambling; Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, doesn't like gambling when it's not controlled by Nevada casinos.
During the lame-duck session, these improbable bedfellows promoted a bill to halt the online gambling stampede, except for online poker. Why the exception? Poker is a great American tradition, say supporters, including former Sen. Al D'Amato, representing something called the Poker Players Alliance.
More to the point, stopping Americans from playing Internet poker is probably impossible. Under the Kyl-Reid proposal, at least players would be pitted against each other, not the house, which is deemed less iniquitous and corrupting.
The bill satisfies Mr. Reid, meanwhile, because Nevada is already pushing ahead with in-state online poker. Nevada's casinos and Nevada's gaming regulators see a federal law as a way to give themselves a headstart in marketing a government-endorsed version of the game to the masses nationally and internationally.
The Kyl-Reid bill, as Captain Kirk would quickly suss out (aided by the deductive powers of Mr. Spock), was destined instantly to become a bone of contention among the various gangs jostling for a piece of the online poker action.
The state lottery commissioners and governors opposed the bill because it would prevent them offering an array of tantalizing new online games to suckers, er, citizens of their states.
Convenience-store owners supported the bill, hoping to block states from selling lottery tickets online, which would cut into the stores' lucrative piece of the over-the-counter lottery racket.
The Nevada casinos naturally favored any law that would give them a leg up in the emerging marketplace for legal online poker.
In hearings before Congress last year, a Native American spokesman argued that tribes must be allowed to offer online poker on grounds that his 101-year-old grandmother had been a reservation schoolteacher fighting to preserve native culture. Therefore, "if anybody deserves to be at the front line in this industry it's Native American people."
Captain Kirk, it will be remembered, invented the deliberately convoluted card game "Fizzbin" as a ruse to distract the gambling-mad, gangster inhabitants of Sigma Iotia II. The Reid-Kyl gambit may have run out of time, but the feds aren't likely to desist from trying to control so profitable a new racket. State-sponsored gambling is the one acceptable way of raising taxes on lower-income folks to help fund the welfare state. With or without federal regulation, legalized online poker is likely coming your way in 2013. Don't be surprised if one of the games is called Fizzbin.
A version of this article appeared December
26, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal,
with the headline: D.C. Plays Fizzbin With Online Poker.
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