Wanna Bet?
Wanna Bet? One morning this past April, Terri Lynn Revere parked in the sun outside Landry's Cafe in Bridge City, Louisiana, where she proceeded to play video poker virtually non-stop for more than...
...Unless the country somehow shakes itself awake on this issue, the Terri Lynn Reveres and LeRoy Iversons and Sgt...
...And in modern America, gambling is unique among habits of personal and collateral destruction...
...It could begin to happen in a matter of months...
...It should never have come to such a pass...
...It worked...
...At 3:00 a.m., his children—and 40 other unsupervised minors—were still playing in the arcade...
...Because the vice in question is gambling...
...Video images of Atlantic City roulette wheels will become as familiar to your children as the Wendy's hamburger man...
...Except that now he was comatose, with a body temperature of 107.5 degrees...
...The nation made no conscious, discrete decision to de-moralize and embrace betting this way...
...It's hard to imagine this Congress even thinking about such moves, isn't it...
...The Ninth Circuit was right, after all: The federal government has actively abetted state governments in the vigorous promotion of gambling...
...Shortly after midnight, he crossed the Nevada state line and stopped at the Primadonna Hotel...
...bourgeois virtue be damned...
...Hungry for more cash from an ever larger pool of "players," lotteries mounted large-scale, aggressive ad campaigns...
...And even this last restriction may well soon end...
...Jared was rushed to a local hospital...
...In this respect, at least, blame must be spread much more broadly...
...In either case, needless to say, Congress would be ferociously opposed by the states, by the Indian tribes, by publishers and broadcasters, and by well-funded casino lobbyists...
...So they must compete for customers on the basis of "brand differentiation" alone...
...They have very few options...
...The Ninth U.S...
...These states all said they were instituting lotteries to achieve some unimpeachable goal, like "financing the schools...
...All three of these are cases of gross negligence...
...Then he took a seat upstairs in the casino...
...In fact, that ban now applies only to the private casinos...
...At 5:00 a.m., security guards found seven-year-old Sherrice Iverson in a restroom...
...Gail Baker of Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia, drove the quick mile to Jasper County, South Carolina...
...Baker finally got home, around 9:30 p.m., she noticed that her daughter, Joy, was no longer breathing...
...solicitor general Seth Waxman has until December 23 to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court...
...Unless, that is, the House and Senate act to repair the dikes...
...Under existing constitutional guidelines, accurate advertising of lawful commerce may be regulated only so as directly and narrowly to advance a substantial government interest...
...But the Ninth Circuit was not impressed...
...When Revere pulled herself away around 2:30 p.m., the boy she was baby-sitting, two-year-old Jared Sternbergh, was still inside her locked van, just where she'd left him...
...The country's cultural and political resistance to the expansion of gambling has been grievously dulled by years and years of such relentless official propaganda...
...Congress might seek to reenact the pre-1975 general ban on gambling ads...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...But in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, a dozen states, beginning with New Hampshire, fixed on the voluntary lottery as a "fair" and "efficient" source of new operating revenue—one much less likely to roil voters than a broad-based tax increase...
...She had also been dead, of acute dehydration, since 4:00 p.m...
...LeRoy Iverson drove out of Los Angeles on May 24 and headed toward Las Vegas...
...Then, we expect, things will probably go badly...
...instead, they simply displace previously existing tax dollars—or disguise additional spending elsewhere in a state's budget...
...More than half the states are now home to full-scale casino operations, owned either by Indian tribes or licensed private corporations...
...Most state governments, for most of this century, banned most forms of gambling...
...It happened piecemeal, with little thought or debate at any given moment...
...So the dishonesty intensified and metastasized...
...they remain entirely responsible for their actions...
...U.S...
...She had been raped and strangled...
...they are a regressive assault on the poor...
...Not really...
...Or Congress might quit fooling with advertising altogether and seek to enact a ban or restrictions on gambling directly, as a matter of federal law...
...When it does, what are the casinos likely to do...
...But it has...
...Three months ago, on August 29, Sgt...
...We are on the verge of a full and abject national surrender to the culture of gambling...
...Given the chance, in other words, they will probably advertise...
...But they are not responsible for the vice itself—for the opportunity and inducement to behave so ruinously...
...Congress has seen fit to exempt the Indians, too, from the federal gambling-promotion ban...
...In support of these bans, federal law contained a near-total prohibition against advertisements for "any lottery, gift enterprise, or similar scheme, offering prizes dependent in whole or in part upon lot or chance...
...When Sgt...
...Lotteries are not "fair...
...Circuit Court of Appeals, in a case involving two Nevada television stations, has recently struck down the casino-advertising ban on First Amendment grounds...
...The adults involved cannot be excused by the fact that they were in the grip of an obsessional vice at the time...
...One morning this past April, Terri Lynn Revere parked in the sun outside Landry's Cafe in Bridge City, Louisiana, where she proceeded to play video poker virtually non-stop for more than four hours...
...He probably will, and the court will probably accept the case, as almost always happens when a federal statute is ruled unconstitutional...
...Iverson dropped off his two children at a basement video arcade in the hotel's basement...
...Having already acted to legalize advertising by every imaginable kind of gambling enterprise except private casinos, the court concluded, the federal government may no longer plausibly assert an interest in discouraging gambling generally...
...It is a vice widely administered, subsidized, and promoted by government...
...Gail Bakers will be with us—and on our consciences—forever...
...Nor do lottery revenues "finance the schools...
...state treasuries net only about half the total proceeds...
...Alarmist...
...They function in a profit-regulated, increasingly saturated market...
...He died the next day...
...The Clinton administration contended that there was such an interest embodied in the law: the "federal interest in discouraging public participation in commercial lotteries, including casino gambling, and thereby minimizing the wide variety of social ills that have historically been associated with these forms of gambling...
...This was a lie...
...It cannot suddenly pretend to be a principled gambling opponent...
...And they will probably do so in a very big way, in every state whose laws sanction any kind of gambling—which means very nearly everywhere...
...In January 1975, foolishly eager to accommodate all this dishonesty, Congress exempted state lottery agencies from the federal ban on gambling promotion...
...Neither are lotteries efficient...
...At the State Line Casino, she played video poker for seven and a half straight hours, until her husband arrived to fetch her...
...Today, 37 states and the District of Columbia, with a total population comprising the vast majority of Americans, spend nearly half a billion dollars each year to flack their lotteries...
...The ten-day-old infant had been alone in the car the whole while...
...Other states aped the model...
...You can get rich quick, and you should try," we are told...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 14
