The Absurdity of Congress's New Ban on Online Gambling.

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Joel Stein has a (very long) comment =sometimes known as an article= about the new US law on Internet gambling; Joel does not gamble and is pretty upset by the new law:

We've extracted only a few of his comments for you:

"t breaks my heart when the greed our nation is famous for gets trumped by the religious posturing we were founded on. It's a horrible conundrum. Either we give up the tax receipts on the $6 billion that Americans spend gambling online, or we let people do whatever they want with their own money. It's like making Poland choose between scowling and yelling.

So we've decided to forfeit all that income — almost enough to let us invade a very small Middle Eastern country, or at least an emirate — to foreign governments. Within 10 years, all the world's great bridges to nowhere will be on the Isle of Man. .......

At a time when giving up free tax revenue seems particularly insane, the Senate was smart enough to bury the new law in a bill aimed at enhancing port security. Senators didn't see the irony of linking legislation that takes away some of our freedoms with legislation about protecting our remaining freedoms from terrorist attack. <---- we think they ignored it :)

Legislating vice never works, mostly because vice is a lot of fun. The laws wind up being weakened by so many inconsistencies — you can gamble on a boat permanently docked a few feet off the riverbank as long as it pretends to sail every 15 minutes; you can drink in public as long as it's covered by a brown bag; you can't clone stem cells but you can clone Kelly LeBrock — they make us lose respect for the law in general.

So, as more people gamble online, the government will eventually have to find a way to back down without looking stupid. The obvious solution is to borrow the Indian casino reparations idea and allow gambling sites to be run by released Guantanamo Bay prisoners. Not only would the profits erase any bad feelings, the former detainees would be great at running poker sites. After all, four years of water-boarding is the perfect training for having to listen to endless stories about bad beats."

John Stein is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he can be reached at: jstein@latimescolumnists.com