Which presidential candidate is best for poker?

See here for the answer:

http://www.pokerupdate.com/news/law-and-legislation/7141-gary-johnson-still-friend-online-poker/

One last plug for Gary Johnson

Then I'll shut up about him. For a while, anyway. (I fully expect he'll be running again in 2016, and I fully expect to be an enthusiastic supporter again then.)

This is one of the more interesting pieces I've seen about Johnson. It emphasizes his ability to be more a pragmatist than an ideologue: "“I think libertarians need somebody who can articulate getting from A to Z. But you know, if G is achievable, how about it? Let’s get there!”

I also like his willingness to say "I don't know" when asked about something he hadn't considered before, and his unwillingness to declare all use of military for humanitarian reasons off-limits. I think he is right that we can't stop all atrocities around the world, but that we have to remain open to stopping genocides when we can.

By the way, you can watch what should be an interesting debate between Johnson and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, 9 pm EST/6 pm PST tonight, streaming here: http://rt.com/

Oh, and have I mentioned that Johnson is the only candidate who openly advocates your right to play online poker, and has spent time hanging out at the WSOP trying to reach out to poker players as a constituency? I have? OK, then--never mind.

I'll leave you with my two favorite paragraphs:

A curious thing about Johnson’s candidacy is that if you are not a libertarian – but you are liberal who believes in basic civil rights, the right to due process, personal privacy, an unregulated Internet, a peaceful foreign policy, marriage equality, and an end to crony corporatism and pro-wall street policy-making, for example, then Johnson – not Obama – is much closer to you on policy, but you’ll probably vote for Obama. Similarly, if you are a conservative who believes in the Constitution, small government, free markets, balanced budgets and the Fed out of huge areas of your personal and economic life that could be better handled by yourself or even the States, then Johnson – not Romney – is much closer to you on policy, but you’ll probably vote for Romney.... 

There is a greater difference between the end of the two party system and its continuation than there is between an Obama presidency and a Romney presidency. A choice between two things that are the same is no choice at all. Much nonsense is written about “wasted votes”. By any accurate definition, a wasted vote would be one that, even if repeated indefinitely, could change nothing of substance. A vote for the duopoly, whether you prefer Obama flavor or Romney flavor, would be such a vote. When you see that, you see that the only way not to waste one’s vote is to vote to break the duopoly, which means to vote for Gary Johnson.

How to vote for limited government

To people who care deeply about limited government as a principle, it's perfectly obvious why one cannot vote for Barack Obama. But Judd Weiss provides an excellent explanation of why such people also cannot reasonably cast a vote for Mitt Romney. A few choice excerpts:

Both Romney and Obama will drive full speed towards the cliff. The only difference is Obama will drive a little faster, but it's a negligible difference, and certainly not one worth spending energy on.  

Our only hope to prevent a bleak dystopian scenario from unfolding is to send a powerful NO!! in the face of the forces that are pushing us there....  

People complain about politicians not having principles, but that's only because it's the ones without principles who win. If having principles makes a politician unelectable, that's not an indictment on the politician, it's an indictment on the voters....  

It's not just that Mitt Romney lacks clear principles, he is actually worse on economic principles than many of the Republicans that the Tea Party overthrew in 2010. 

Everything the successful Tea Party stood for is abandoned with Romney. Sure there's limited government rhetoric, mixed with statements like "Regulation is essential. You can't have a free market work if you don't have regulation".

If you think Democrats are sorely disillusioned with Obama after 4 years of disappointment, can you just imagine how most Republicans will feel after 4 years of daily nonsense like that from Romney?  

...Romney doesn't actually understand or have concern for limited government free market principles, he's only concerned about coached talking points. Romney doesn't even understand principles, period. He spends much of his time defending himself from his inconsistencies.  

I cannot for the life of me see how Romney represents hope for something better than Obama....  

If we get enough votes for Johnson, and Romney suffers a decisive loss against a weak President as a result of it, you can be sure that it will be noticed. Gary Johnson is a very effective protest vote to let the rest of the political establishment know that there is a strong movement for liberty that you dismiss at your own peril.  

Obama was an embarrassing mistake for those on the left. Romney will be far more embarrassing and disastrous. Don't constrain yourself to options that you know are awful. There is no hope for anything good to come out of a Romney presidency. If we want limited government principles but we all jump on board and vote for Mitt Romney anyway, then we truly have no hope for the future, and we have ourselves to blame.

Gary Johnson

The guy I met a couple of weeks ago at Mandalay Bay--the one who gave me the Gary Johnson t-shirt--invited me to a private "meet the candidate" thing tonight at the Palazzo. I went, but I had incorrectly remembered the starting time, and ended up getting there just as Mr. Johnson was telling the crowd, "Thanks for coming. Gotta run and catch a plane!" And he was out the door before I had a chance to shake his hand. I was going to tell him that he's the first presidential candidate in my lifetime that I am enthusiastic, rather than lukewarm, to support. Oh well. I'm sure he's heard that thousands of times already.

The gathering was at the Dal Toro restaurant, which I had never even heard of before. This created a bonus situation. You see, they have a small but nice collection of cars there, and I got to walk around and lust after them when there was almost nobody else around to get in the way. Some bonus pictures for you:

In other news, today I did a 24.1-mile bike ride, including about 1100 feet of up then down. It was the full length of that trail I first tried last week. I am now ready for the Tour de France. Well, as soon as I can walk again anyway.

I voted today

An absentee ballot by mail, as I always do:

Grumps for Gary

Now wouldn't that be a great campaign slogan? 

OK, maybe not. 

I'm just home from a few hours playing at Mandalay Bay during the early football games. I noticed that another player at my table was wearing a Gary Johnson t-shirt. I showed him on my phone the post that I wrote last year about why I thought Johnson was the best presidential candidate. It turns out that he works for the Johnson campaign, and he offered me a t-shirt, which I gladly accepted. I promised him I would post a picture of me wearing it: 

Why do I like Johnson so much? Well, I answered that in a fair amount of detail in that previous post, so I'll refer you to it. But here's the Reader's Digest condensed version. 

The three issues I care most passionately about can broadly be described as follows: 

• Radical cuts in federal spending in order to put us on a path of fiscal responsibility, before we experience a catastrophic economic meltdown from what I believe is an imminently looming combination of crushing debt, hyperinflation, and soaring interest rates. 
• Maximizing individual liberties--especially, but not exclusively, those enumerated in the Bill of Rights. 
• Strictly limiting the size, scope, power, and responsibilities of all branches of the federal government to those spelled out in the Constitution. 

On all three of these general issues, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are just unspeakably awful--so bad that it's impossible for me to say which of them is marginally better or worse than the other. I could not cast a vote for either one of them in good conscience.

The differences between the two major-party candidates pale next to the fact that you can be absolutely certain that both of them would substantially worsen the nation's health on all three of my major points. Neither of them is even the least bit interested in cutting the federal deficit and debt. Neither of them gives two hoots about individual rights. And both of them explicitly tell us that they want to expand, not contract, the size and power of the federal government (though each in different areas). I won't stand for that--and I certainly won't vote for it.

Conversely, all three are areas on which Johnson and I see eye to eye, and I believe him when he says that he would make these things among the top priorities and guiding principles of his presidency.

It is an added bonus that Gary Johnson is the only candidate explicitly calling for full decriminalization of online poker (which, of course, I'm legally and morally obligated to point out in a poker blog). The others won't. Both Romney personally and the GOP platform are opposed to online gaming of any sort. If Obama is in favor of your right to play poker from home legally, he's too much of a political weenie to say so, which means you can't count on him.

There. I hope this mini-screed was worth the cost of a t-shirt to the campaign.


P.S. Confidential to the Johnson campaign people: Were I in charge of things over there, I would consider adopting as a campaign slogan that great phrase from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "A New Birth of Freedom." That is what this country most sorely needs right now, and your guy is the only one who is interested in bringing it about.

Candidates on poker

The Epic Poker web site has put up two pieces in recent days about the presidential candidates' positions on online poker (and/or online gaming more generally).

First is Jen Newell's short assessment of where the candidates stand. Not surprisingly, Ron Paul is, as always, for maximal personal freedom, so he opposes not only prohibitions on online gaming, but any governmental attempt to control the Internet. Also not surprisingly, Mitt Romney is opposed to any expansion of gambling. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have not taken official positions. Which, if you ask me, means that they can't be counted on to be supporters. Also, given their naked appeals to hard-core religious conservatives, who think they are tasked by God to impose their moral values on the rest of the world by force, it's hard to believe either one would ever come out in favor of online gaming.

Last in the "not surprisingly" category is candidate Barack Obama, who has never lifted a finger to help poker players or even bothered to promise that he would. (Not that his promise means anything, given the appalling rate at which he breaks them.) And if you think he gives a rat's ass about personal freedom as a general principle, well, you just haven't been paying attention the last four years, have you?

Second is Dan O'Brien's opinion piece, explaining his support of Ron Paul. He nails the reasons that poker players specifically, and fans of personal liberty generally, should vote for Paul.

My only disagreement with O'Brien comes at the end of his essay, where he says that if Paul is not on the ballot in November he won't vote. Hey, why not vote for Gary Johnson, who is likely to be the Libertarian Party candidate, and thus on the ballot in all 50 states? Sure, he's probably not going to win, but why not use your vote to show your enthusiasm for freedom, rather than sit out the election? Johnson is as good as Paul on leaving people alone to live their lives the way they choose to, which includes playing poker online. As Newell reminds us, Johnson was the only candidate to show up at the World Series of Poker to make an explicit appeal to poker players for their support. He's solidly, unquestionably on our side.

Addendum, February 7, 2012

One of my Twitter followers told me that Santorum was on local channel 3's show "Face to Face" with reporter Jon Ralston last week. I found the January 31 program online here:

http://www.mynews3.com/content/programming/local/facetoface/default.aspx

Ralston asks him directly about online gaming, and Santorum's response is completely negative. He is opposed to it, thinks it's "dangerous." The discussion starts at the 15:00 mark (note that the counter runs backwards), and goes on for about three minutes.

Santorum has gone on record as saying, "The essential issue in this race is freedom." By his own standard, then, he loses. He is decidedly not a champion of freedom. He has openly denounced the "idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do...that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom (and) we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues."

So if you relish the thought of having the federal government force your most personal decisions to go just the way Rick Santorum thinks they ought to, by all means, throw him your vote. Me? I'd vote for a mummified Richard Nixon before I'd support a would-be tyrant like Santorum.

How can you not like Gary Johnson?

[Note: On November 21, 2011, I accidentally deleted this post while doing some blog clean-up. What follows is reposted from a Google cache of the original that I found. I'm not sure links and formatting will be right, but at least the main content is there. The three comments are, I'm afraid, lost to the ether. Google's cache didn't save them.]

The more I learn about Gary Johnson, the more I like him. In fact, the more I learn about him, the more I find myself thinking, "How could anybody possibly prefer any other presidential candidate to him?"


If you're a regular reader, you already know that no candidate for any office has been more attentive to poker players than Johnson. As mentioned in a previous post, here, he has gone out of his way to embrace the freedom to play online poker as an issue. (Did you see any other presidential candidates at the WSOP to meet players? Didn't think so.) But there is much more to the man and the candidacy than that.

The issue I consider to be most critical to the nation these days is federal spending. We are heading over a precipice with the foot firmly on the gas pedal, like Thelma and Louise. Obama clearly cares not one whit about this. Oh, he'll occasionally say things about how the current course is "unsustainable," but his policies and proposals just continue to make things worse. Why, just this week he released a budget document with recommendations for the Congressional committee tasked with finding spending cuts. The proposal in it would increase the federal debt by another 7.5 trillion dollars, and he had the gall to title it, "Living Within Our Means." This is not a man who can be taken seriously. He's a joke, an embarrassment. Worse than that, he's a serious menace to the long-term economic vitality of the United States.

Even the Republicans are, for the most part, not telling the populace the truth about how dire the fiscal situation is--about how close we are to having the cost of borrowing skyrocket over a very short period of time, and how devastating that will be to the economy. Even Paul Ryan's plan merely slows down the rate of increase, rather than actually cutting spending. It is the bare minimum in terms of what can be considered a serious proposal, but it was immediately attacked by Obama, most other Democrats, and even many Republicans as being too radical. The only ones who really take the matter seriously are Johnson and Ron Paul. Paul has a bigger following, but Johnson is far more electable. He is also younger, healthier, more pragmatic, less doctrinaire, less shrill, and has a ton more executive experience.

I consider the fiscal situation to be so grim that I am, for the foreseeable future, going to be effectively a single-subject voter. Johnson's willingness to take a meat cleaver to the federal government and budget should be enough to win over Tea Party types, if they would notice him. Conservatives should be dazzled by his commitment to the Constitution, limited government, federalism, low taxes, and free markets. His bona fides on these subjects at least match, if not surpass, those of the clowns of the Palin/Bachmann/Perry lineage.

But even you liberals out there should find much to like about Johnson. He is far more committed to ending the current batch of wars than Obama is. He is better than Obama on civil rights, gay rights, ending the war on marijuana, and immigration. He's pro-choice and against the death penalty. Unlike most Republican candidates, he accepts the scientific consensus on evolution and global warming.

If we go past the issues to the question of personality, he's a breath of fresh air. I am sick to death of politicians who give slick, prepared, careful answers, desperate not to offend any possible constituency, without ever telling the real truth. It's insulting and demeaning. It infantilizes citizens, essentially telling them, a la Jack Nicholson, "You can't handle the truth!"

Three pieces I've read about Johnson just in the past 24 hours (which were the immediate impetus for writing this post) add to my belief that he will be different. First, a blogger for The Economist talks about Johnson's "apparent inability to bullshit," his "indifference to optics," and says that he is both "guileless" and "dispositionally allergic to pandering."

That post pointed me to a much longer profile in GQ magazine. After spending several full days on the road with Johnson, reporter Lisa DePaulo concludes, "There is nothing he will not answer, nothing he will not share.... Johnson is fundamentally incapable of bullshitting, which is one of the many, many things that make him so unusual for a presidential candidate."

The third profile I read today is in Outdoor Online. As suits its readership, this one emphasizes Johnson's enthusiasm for extreme sports. But along the way, their reporter, too, couldn't help but notice the candidate's genuineness:

Indeed, Johnson maintains an almost strident disregard for the mix of showmanship and rehearsed modesty mandated by modern politics. It’s the substance of his ideas that matters, he insists, not the style. I asked him if he’d ever considered getting a media coach. “No,” he said. “Then people wouldn’t be seeing me. They’d be seeing someone else’s idea of me.”

...Johnson’s eight years [as governor of New Mexico] were scandal-free. He lowered taxes 14 times, built a $1 billion budget surplus, and departed the governor’s mansion with a favorability rating near 60 percent. “I wanted to know if you could run an honest campaign, get elected as an honest person, and stay honest in office,” Johnson told me. “And I felt that I did that.”

Oh, and did I mention that he strongly supports your right to play poker from home in your underwear?

What's not to like?

More on Gary Johnson, the poker players' candidate

I assume it is pure coincidence that two profiles of Gary Johnson have appeared in the poker media within the last 48 hours. But it's a nice coincidence. Go read them.

http://www.epicpoker.com/news/blog-pages/2011/08/governor-gary-johnson-for-poker.aspx

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2011/09/gary-johnson-could-be-who-poker-players-need-in-office-10957.htm

The first piece points out a hint of contradiction, with Johnson and the PPA palling up to each other, when actually they probably differ quite markedly in their goals. The PPA lobbies for federal licensing, regulation, and taxation of online poker. Unless Johnson's true views on the subject are well out of philosophical line with his other positions, he surely favors a completely hands-off approach: simply decriminalize everything about online gaming (not just poker)--the playing, the provision of the games by sites, and the financial transactions. Let grown-ups decide how to spend their own time and money as long as it isn't hurting anybody else, and let the free market decide what the rake should be, where the servers are located, how rigorous anti-cheating enforcement is, and a thousand other such decisions that would simply be decided by fiat--one size fits all--under a federal licensing scheme.

My guess is that while meeting players and industry leaders at the WSOP, Johnson decided simply to paper over such differences for purposes of making nice with the PPA. But it would shock me if either of them were not fully aware of the ideological, policy, and pragmatic differences between their respective goals.

I like Johnson a lot. He has quickly risen to a status in my eyes as favorable as Ron Paul. He is certainly more electable. His general demeanor comes across as less kooky. To my ears, Paul nearly always sounds like he's talking down to people, ridiculing and insulting positions he disagrees with and people with whom he disagrees. Johnson, conversely, seems more polite and respectful, choosing simply to explain why he takes the positions he does without denigrating contrary views. That approach is likely to be easier for the great unwashed to cozy up to.

Bracelet

I put in my hours this afternoon at Caesars Palace so that I could be home in time for the Mookie tonight (which is about to start).

The only remarkable thing thing that happened was that Linda Johnson played at my table for an hour or so. From the conversations that were taking place, I got the impression that nobody else at the table knew who she was. What? None of you reads Card Player magazine? None of you watches the World Poker Tour? None of you follows poker news, such as the establishment of the Women in Poker Hall of Fame?

But soon she turned the conversation to poker cruises and passed out her business cards. Some players still clearly didn't know anything of her accomplishments.

I missed the part of the conversation in which her history of winning an WSOP bracelet came up, but she had it on, and when somebody asked to see it, she took it off and passed it around for anybody who wanted to take a gander. She won this in Event #2, razz, in the 1997 Series. I like how she has had it customized. I assume that 6-5-4-3-A was what she held in the final hand. The underside was engraved with the date and the event. It looked to me like that was there originally, but it's possible that she had that added, too.

Nice piece of poker bling!