Posted on 11/10/2007 5:23:00 AM PST by xtinct
Even as Governor Deval Patrick seeks to license three resort casinos in Massachusetts, he hopes to clamp down on the explosion in Internet gambling by making it illegal for state residents to place a bet on line. He has proposed jail terms of up to two years and $25,000 fines for violators.
The provision, buried deep in Patrick's bill to allow three casinos to the state, puts the governor at odds with a fellow Democrat: US Representative Barney Frank, the sponsor of federal legislation to license and regulate online gambling nationally. Yesterday Frank strongly criticized the governor's plan to punish online gamers while inviting casino operators to set up shop.
"Why is gambling in a casino OK and gambling on the Internet is not?" Frank said. "He's making a big mistake. He's giving opponents an argument against him."
A 46-year-old federal law prohibits betting using telephone lines, which the US Department of Justice has interpreted as prohibiting all online gambling. The government's policy has been to prosecute the operators of Internet gambling sites, but not the gamblers.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
I don't gamble at all... BUT I think a bigger question is, "How will Deval Patrick and company know who is gambling online? Are these freaks already watching our online habits? For what reason?"
This appears to be Big Brother freaky.
Where's the ACLU?
Can’t allow internet gambling... good thing I already have an account at Ameritrade.
Because the State can't get a cut through a tax or fee?
It’s all about the money...
I know its a problem where I work because I see the owner of the company on the puter almost all day at these online gambling sights instead of trying to run the company properly, and I am charged with trying to run the company as cheaply as possible, hmmmm...
Buy the business from him when he goes broke.
It’s really about a resident ONLY being able to gamble through the Big Dig Mob, isn’t it? Just the usual $$thing.
How will Massachusetts KNOW who is or isn't gambling online?
Are the powers that be already watching what people do online?
Isn't that an invasion of privacy for something as idiotic as gambling?
If I had about $3 million maybe though I think the patriarch (his father) will do something about it soon, I have been working for them 12 years at a concrete batch plant in Alaska.
The government wants to control all sectors of the economy. It wants to control all aspects of internet commerce. It is doing it a little at a time.
Remember - goal 1 of communism is to collectivize all means of production.
Massachusetts residents (I’m one) were generally in favor of legalizing casino gambling before this. Stroll through the vast parking lots at Foxwoods and count all the Mass. license plates, then just imagine all the billions of dollars leaving the state. But now, not so much.
I favor personal freedom, even if the choices made (online gambling, smoking, drinking, et al) are stupid ones. I know many FReepers oppose these sins and want them to become (or remain) criminal offenses, but I disagree. Let me make my own choices and call myself free than to suffer under “nanny state” oversight. Just because something offends you personally (hate speech, conservative talk radio, heroin, gun ownership, etc.) doesn’t mean you can or should outlaw it. Let freedom ring.
Neither do the casino’s, they’ve fought this tooth and nail, in every state that has casino’s.
I don't use "telephone lines" to gamble. I use cable.
Land of the free, my ass.
Here’s the way I think about this.
Anyone who goes in for gambling is an idiot who doesn’t understand the first thing about how it all works. It is a scam to fleece suckers, pure and simple.
So who gets to run the scam? That is the only issue here. The government wants in on the racket. In the old days, gambling was illegal all around, so only crooks ran the numbers games and illegal gambling halls. Then the government legalized gambling in many places, in order to take their own cut. They put themselves in the place of doing the ‘protection.” They made all sorts of promises, that the earnings would help schools and cut taxes, for example. Neither promise has been delivered. That is because the whole scheme is at its base still a scam. Racketeers do not keep promises, and neither does the government when it gets into the racketeering role.
Now we have governments directly involved, and running advertisements promoting what is basically a dishonest swindle. This is the same government which is supposed to be able, in their wisdom, to educate our children, and even control problems with the weather.
Unless the general public takes things in hand, we are almost helpless against these forms of corruption. But we are not quite totally helpless. The best defense is never, never to buy a lottery ticket, and never turn over your hard-earning and after-tax dollars to the gambling racket (now called, in Orwellian terms, the “gaming industry”).
Every time you do not buy a lottery ticket, you win. Non-participation is the best, and only way to stick it to the government racketeers and the sheep-like suckers who support them.
Ummmmm.....and when you set yourself on fire, and end up in county hospital as a charge on the public?
When you get addicted to gambling and get caught embezzling from a public company to keep the knucklecrushers happy?
When you get hooked after one hit of crystal meth or rock cocaine, and some cop has to take a gun away from you in somebody else's house while you're cleaning the place out to feed your monkey?
When you run up a big gambling/drug/business debt to the Mob, and then somebody puts a gun in your hand and asks you to blow up Lee Harvey Oswald? Or Bobby Kennedy?
I could go on. If you lived by yourself in a little hideaway valley in the Coeur d'Alenes or the Selkirks, that'd be one thing. But if you live among people and screw up, you're going to end up a charge on the county or state, and you might take someone else with you.
“When you get addicted to gambling and get caught embezzling from a public company to keep the knucklecrushers happy?”
What is it that makes the government-sanctioned type of gambling non-addictive, compared to the apparantly highly addictive internet gambling that is being targeted?
“To answer other posters outrage about prohibiting online gambling, the DOJ (and others) have done exhaustive reports on the problem and how it relates to funding terrorism and organized crime. The overseas, really, really, really bad kind of organized crime.”
Do you have a link to any of these exhaustive reports?
In any case no matter if you haven’t. I gamble online, mainly with reputable uk-based bookmakers like Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral, etc. I take it you don’t think they are involved in funding terrorism.
If that was really the concern, then the obvious answer would be to legalise and regulate the industry, then Americans would be able to gamble with US-based and regulated companies. No doubt they’d be more content with that as well.
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