Raising the Stakes on Online Poker

Townhall.com ^ | 17 August 2009 | George F. Will

[nufsed]

I am surprised we have people claiming to be conservatives who think it’s okay to be armed around the president and that his protection is not a mitigator of their right to carry in public. Most conservatives obey the law and don’t want the president to be shot no matter his politics. We had inmates where I worked who thought like that and we let them settle down in their cells until they got right.

[BluesDuke]

Don’t worry if they lose everything Obama will bail them out.

nmh---Doubtful. Even God's Only Begotten Grandson has his limits. You may remember him saying words to the effect of, "Stay the hell out of Las Vegas," not too far back. Well, a couple of months ago, I figured out why he wanted everyone else to stay the hell out of Vegas---he didn't want the great unwashed horning in on his action!

They booked GOBG at Caesar's Palace for his brief jaunt into and out of town. Big mistake. They should have booked him into the Bellagio. He could have done his daily walk on water there. Might have been interesting to see if he could dodge the dancing fountains without getting his boxers soaked.

Ironic how Democrats share the same traits as Puritans. They want to get rid of everything fun.

Niuhuru---Sad that a) you weren't aware of, or had forgotten, what Marie2 would resurrect in due course; and, more significant, b) Republicans can be as much of a bunch of wet blankets as often as not. (You think it would have been funsy to have in the White House a Republican churl who thinks every last one of his pets---all named Peeve, thank you Mr. Safire---belongs on a political or a legislative agenda?) Mother hen government doesn't always discriminate by party lines.

The vote occurred when the R's were in Charge. Nannies are on both sides. It was one of the several reasons that, people didn't show up to support the statist in Nov.

Sooner or later, Republicans will re-learn that the only thing you get when you run a nanny for office is an awful lot of people, holding their noses regardless, will prefer pulling the lever for the party that makes no apology for being a mother henhouse, rather than the party that makes all apologies for wishing---even if in rhetoric alone, as things turned out---the fox would clean the henhouse out.

I agree with Ronald Reagan about gambling.

ansell2---Wouldn't be the first time he was wrong. Even the great ones miss them now and then. I agree with William F. Buckley, Jr. about gambling: Gambling---Legalise it. Anybody who wants to be anything with anybody may do so, and the prospective mayor wishes every single better the best of luck. (From the jocular newspaper column he wrote, "Mayor, Anyone?" in spring 1965, that kicked off the momentum that resulted in him running for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket.)

You know that if beltway conservative Will is against this, then it’s that bad.

Triple E---I've known that Mr. Will has been against it for quite awhile, now, regardless of the geography in which he bases his operation, but I had not heretofore seen him argue the position this eloquently.

Freedom is more important than the government stopping stupidity.

There's a reason why the State can't stop stupidity. (A properly-construed government---there is a phenomenal difference---wouldn't need either thee or me to remind it that it can't do it.) To do so would mean putting itself out of business. (Hey, there's an idea!)

I’m of mixed emotions on this one. Yes, I think it’s none of the government’s business, no, I despise “gambling” with a passion.

There are things I despise as well. (I don't and never did have any problem with or about gambling---I like to gamble now and again but I'm not exactly a fanatic about it---but if someone else has a problem with or about it, that's their right and they're welcome to it.) But it isn't the State's business merely to despise what I despise; it wouldn't be my business, should I be crazy enough to run for office and a constituency be even crazier enough to elect me, to turn such instrument of the State as is conferred upon me into a weapon to be turned against things I despise merely because I despise them. Whether the mourners care to admit it or not, the very fact that John McCain did and does believe the instruments of the State conferred upon him as an officeholder equaled a mandate to turn them into weapons against his pets Peeve, did as much as anything else to ensure he wouldn't get anywhere near the White House other than by invitation to pow-wow with the President or the President's staff.

poker is a game of skill. i play every day

remaxagnt---And I wish you the very best of luck.

[ml/nj]

And I wish you the very best of luck

Tiger Woods needs some luck too.

ML/NJ

[ansel12]

Liberals embrace government protected decadence, conservatives don't.

Since the sixties the libertine view has largely taken over from the traditional conservatism of the American people, the Europeans used to mock us for for how "straight" and "hung up" we were.

Most people that agree with your views on social conservatism vote democrat so the hard fact is that your fantasy world where it all hangs out baby, like a 60s leftists wet dream, rejects the conservative voter which means that conservatives would form their own traditional American party.

Where are the people that think like you on this chart? Do you think that as soon as they can make the military homosexual and finally eliminate the threat to their "abortion rights" that they will become the new found conservatives to replace those that currently are the conservative movement?

[BluesDuke]

Liberals embrace government protected decadence, conservatives don't.

I hadn't known William F. Buckley, Jr. was a liberal. (He backed legalising gambling his entire life.) Nor had I known heretofore that I was a let-it-all-hang-out-baby sort.

If by that you mean that I think there are things left best to synagogues or churches to tend and mind, it being so that the State is neither competent nor Constitutionally sanctioned to mind them, then yes I am such a type.

If by that you mean that I incline toward a government that will leave her citizens the hell alone until or unless one citizen would obstruct or abrogate a fellow citizen's equivalent rights, then yes I am such a type.

But I hadn't known until now that, merely because I might like to play a round of blackjack or pinochle (a game I'm beginning to learn at last) now and then, or play a slot machine once in the proverbial blue moon (and I emphasis the "now and then" and "once in the proverbial blue moon" portions, as did my father when I was growing up and he and his cronies rounded up now and then for a hearty round of pinochle with a little green on the table, with my mother happily enough keeping the beer pitcher and hors d'oeuvres fresh on those occasional evenings), it betrays a stance I don't make on behalf of homosexuality (military or otherwise) or abortion.

By the way, noticing your Pew chart, so far as people who think like me go I don't think you'd find very many. I'm Jewish and I voted for neither the Arizona Nanny nor God's Only Begotten Grandson. Unfortunately, in Nevada, you don't get the option for a write-in vote, so I was forced to vote for "none of the above." I'd been prepared quite happily to vote for Groucho Marx as a write-in candidate, and I had three very sound reasons for making such a choice:

1) As Artemus Ward once wrote (and Mark Twain may have adapted), if you can't find a live man who amounts to anything by all means let us have a first class corpse.

2) Groucho Marx himself once said, "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and misapplying the wrong solutions." Name me one comparable shaft of political wisdom to waft from either Arizona Nanny or GOBG.

3) If the dead in Chicago can vote, why couldn't the living in Nevada vote for the dead? He couldn't have done even a millionth of the damage done by the living dead in the nation's capital of organised crime . . .

[mysterio]

Congress probably should fold its interference with Internet gambling

Agreed.

[ansel12]

By the way, noticing your Pew chart, so far as people who think like me go I don't think you'd find very many. I'm Jewish and I voted for neither the Arizona Nanny nor God's Only Begotten Grandson.

You vote against traditional Americanism or social conservatism, most of the people that vote like you are voting democrat as the chart shows, as far as being Jewish and not voting republican, well, Jews have never voted republican (ever) so you are normal there.

[BluesDuke]

You vote against traditional Americanism or social conservatism, most of the people that vote like you are voting democrat as the chart shows . . .

Let them vote as they please, and let them live with the votes they cast. But I don't vote Democratic and haven't for a very, very long time. I think the last Democratic vote I cast was for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when I was in the Air Force in Nebraska in the 1980s but voted as a New Yorker, since it was my native and still-home state when I went into the Air Force in 1982. (I was in the Air Force until 1987.)

You might care to know, too, that even when I cast my vote for Moynihan I was actually a registered member of the New York Conservative Party, a registration I kept so long as I still made New York state my home. (I departed in 1994 and have not lived there since.) I voted for Moynihan a) because I respected him as a thinker and Senator even where I disagreed sharply with his policy positionings, not to mention I had admired his service as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.; and, b) because I wasn't as inclined as my fellow New York Conservatives to continue writing the execrable Alfonse D'Amato blank checks, knowing what I knew of D'Amato's career in Nassau County politics, a county where in D'Amato's generation the Republican Party had been corrupt enough to make you think they'd learned their riffs from Chicago Democrats. There's a case to make that D'Amato may have been one of the five or ten most corrupt members of the U.S. Senate while he was there.)

. . . as far as being Jewish and not voting republican, well, Jews have never voted republican (ever) so you are normal there.

Must be very comfortable making and sharing assumptions without the pestilence of a fact intruding. But I voted for Ronald Reagan twice, George Bush the Elder twice, the second time holding my nose knowing he was going to blow it as bigtime in the election as he had on the tax and budget issues, after which I inclined away from the major parties, because, so far as I could see, the primary distinctions between them were questions of just how fast or just how slow they would accelerate, without the slightest inclination to apply a brake and signal a U-turn except perhaps at gunpoint, the ongoing metastasis of State power.

Now let me give you some traditional Americanism for which I do vote, where the candidacies in question come the closest I can think to meeting it without causing me to hold my nose.

I vote for freedom.

I vote for individual rights and sovereignty.

I vote for a properly-construed government---whose sole legitimate business, other than protecting us from predators at home (real predators, if you please, and not mere vicemongers) and enemies actual or provably and/or tangibly iminent from abroad, is to stay the hell out of your business, my business, every last citzen's business, until or unless one citizen would obstruct or abrogate a fellow citizen's equivalent rights; and, concurrently, I vote against an improperly-consecrated State, which makes its business sticking its nose into every damn last bit of her citizens' business whether it is competent or Constitutionally sanctioned to do so.

[ansel12]

The Jewish vote has never gone for the republican and the anti social conservatives vote about the same as them, as that chart shows.

The conservative vote is the people that most practice their faith, which is so typically American, even Orthodox Jews vote conservative unlike the Jews that don't get into the God thing. Here is another chart of who conservatives are.

[BluesDuke]

The conservative vote is the people that most practice their faith . . .

By your definitions and your chartings, that statement should read, more properly, "The conservative vote is the people that most practise their religion." Practising a religion is simple business compared to living or practising a faith in God. Just as practising party voting is simple business compared to living or practising principled voting, as do I, on behalf of freedom, individual rights and sovereignty, and properly-construed government---which is even more typically American, as if you could consecrate an absolute and final prescription for typical Americanism that even the Founding Fathers understood in their hips could not necessarily be done above and beyond rhetoric.

[ansel12]

Conservatives are the same Americans they always were, the faithful and the religious. They created this nation and they continue to be the bulk of the conservative voters.

You are mostly on your own out there, but are not conservative.

The post 1960s American culture must be a lot easier for you to endure than what you must see as the unfree first 170 years.

[BluesDuke]

Conservatives are the same Americans they always were, the faithful and the religious.

I didn't know the one was impossible without the other. I say again---religion is simple business but faith, not always so. (I've known many religious practitioners over my lifetime who have practised a religion more from habit or personal custom than from genuine faith; I'm somewhat intrigued that you seem to imply one lacking for religious practise or ritual by definition lacks faith entirely.)

You are mostly on your own out there, but are not conservative.

Heretofore I hadn't known that standing foursquare and unapologetically for freedom, individual rights and sovereignty, and properly-construed government (that with which the United States was born) as opposed to an improperly-consecrated State (that to which the United States has devolved, and over a very long period) was not a truly conservative position.

That said, I yet rue the day when enough of my fellow Jews decided an ancient but profound counsel against what we would call encroaching Statism today, and from God himself, today was to be ignored and not heeded. I refer you thus to I Samuel 8:1-22. I would have been mostly on my own out there, too, had I lived in that era, myself and such like-minded folk as lived concurrently. (It pains me to realise, too, that the king as God described him to Samuel was a bloody piker compared to King Washington DC today . . . )

The post 1960s American culture must be a lot easier for you to endure than what you must see as the unfree first 170 years.

Your continuing assumptions and presumptions offer a suggestion I would be loath to make about any otherwise intelligent man or woman with whom I might debate---namely, that you may be talking quite beyond your competence.

Anyone who knows me well would tell you that I see our freedom as having diminished, profoundly enough, for nearly a century. We could debate quite reasonably the precise moment at which the diminution's gestation began in earnest. (In many ways it didn't even begin with the advent of the Sixteenth Amendment, either. By the way, for the record, I still enjoy much of the music of the 1960s---and not just the rock and roll, either---but that's about it for that otherwise wrenching decade.) But the diminution is there, it has been there for a very long time, and I have made and discussed the point often enough, here and elsewhere, including the point that---we know it certainly didn't end there---it didn't begin in the 1960s.

[ansel12]

You do love to hear yourself go on. The greatest gains for your social goals have already been made by the left since the 1960s, rejoice, but don’t call yourself conservative for it and your continued support for them to go farther.

[BluesDuke]

You do love to hear yourself go on.

No, I thought we were having a discussion. Never mind that you seem rather willing to make assumptions about me or my thinking for which the evidence does not exist.

Until now, I was willing to grant you the benefit of the doubt and accept that you had harboured a small hope of being as Samuel Johnson described Edmund Burke---choosing your side like a fanatic but defending it like a gentleman. (Or a lady, if you happen to be a woman; your handle isn't exactly gender-suggestive.) That was the only assumption I was willing to make of either of us. Until now, at which point I am rather understanding of Don Corleone (in the novel, not the film) throwing up his hands, after hours of trying to convince a recalcitrant strongarm otherwise, and crying out, "But no one can reason with this fellow!"

But I am not inclined to the kind of resolution to which Don Corleone hied, of course, though I am further understanding in the present context of Miss Manners, Judith Martin, when at last she sickened of a recalcitrant fellow school-board member who refused to get that the last thing she thought necessary for working coherence was a weekend kumbaya retreat to get to know each other better: "You don't understand. The only reason I haven't murdered you yet is that I really don't know you all that well and I feel I should give you the benefit of the doubt. Do you want to remove that doubt?"

The greatest gains for your social goals have already been made by the left since the 1960s . . .

Inasmuch as my social goals are nothing greater than my political goals---namely, a government that would leave her citizens the hell alone, on the single condition that they harm none else, understanding that living as one pleases does not by inference suggest living a life of depravity or the right to obstruct or abrogate a neighbour's equivalent rights (and if you think the left holds goals such as those, you don't know the left so well as you think)---it says manifestly more against you than it ever will against me that you continue to make assumptions about me that are simply untrue.

[ansel12]

Look, no offense but I’m not interested in wading through your lengthy musings, I don’t care to get into chatty discussions on the internet, especially with a total stranger who’s opinions I have lost what tiny interest I had in them.

I’m sure that you have great personal ideas that are well thought out to your mind but going against conservatism and America and throwing your vote away doesn’t stir any desire in me to read your time consuming postings.

[altair]

There's a case to make that D'Amato may have been one of the five or ten most corrupt members of the U.S. Senate while he was there.

Just to give me perspective, how would you rank him against Dianne Fienstein?

[BluesDuke]

Just to give me perspective, how would you rank [Alfonse D'Amato] against Dianne Feinstein [sic]?

Birds of a feather with the devil in the details. I had (and have) no respect for either of the pair.