Opinion
Column: Bush springs Internet gaming ban on public


"Saturday nights are frantic at the world’s biggest card club, the Commerce Casino just east of downtown L.A. But last weekend, this football field–size mecca of 250 tables couldn’t contain the crowd, with lines snaking out to the parking lot by 8 p.m. Hundreds of poker fanatics had been forced out of their bedrooms, out of their pajamas and into their cars because of one of the stupidest — and most hypocritical — laws yet to be passed by the Republican Congress and signed into law by You-Know-Who.

Almost completely under the media radar last week, George W. Bush pushed ahead with a prohibition on Internet gambling, including online poker, by blocking American banks and credit-card companies from making payments to offshore wagering sites. Who cares, you might ask? Well, something like 23 million Americans who, on a daily basis, play online for real money. Maybe the only other thing more people do every day is take a leak. And it’s probably twice the number of people who would vote for Dubya nowadays if, God forbid, he could run a third time. “Fucking Bush,” said a disgusted 25-year-old UCLA grad student from behind his smoke-gray Ray-Bans sitting next to me at the $200 buy-in Texas hold ’em table. “He’s the first president who I voted for. Now I’m never going to vote Republican again. Never.” A few moments later, this young man busted out on a dominated pair of jacks. Reading the hands of online opponents is one thing, but sussing out the live human being sitting across from you holding aces is, apparently, quite another. “I hate having to come to this damn place,” he said, storming toward the ATM.

What’s ticked off a lot of online card players is the devious way in which the Bushies slid the ban by the American people. With no public debate whatsoever, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist attached the bill as a rider on the much-belated SAFE Port Act, and the president signed it last Friday. The veritable Godfather of Poker, Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, publicly fumed: “I can’t believe the underhanded way this new bill restricting online poker was passed through Congress. What does Internet poker have to do with the safe-port bill? We Texans don’t like this kind of trickery.” Neither do more than 100,000 others who quickly rushed to join the newly formed prolegalization Poker Players Alliance, the PPA."

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Marc Cooper: Bush's Big Bluff (The LA Weekly 10/19)
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