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/

The poker of politics

Clever, interesting, and original look at the presidential race as a poker tournament:

http://www.pokerupdate.com/articles/lifestyle/08122-presidential-poker-tournament-field-grows-beyond-expectations/

Ignorance of politicians

Jon Ralston, a long-time political reporter in Nevada, has a blog post about the remarkable week Senator Dean Heller had recently--remarkable in terms of the public display of his ignorance, untrustworthiness, inconsistency, pandering, and prejudices.

Here's my favorite part, on the subject of Internet gaming:

When he subsequently did an interview with Amy Tarkanian and Jeff Gillan on KSNV, Heller made it crystal clear he has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to the substance of the issue:  

“First of all we have to understand where we are today,” he said. “There’s something called the Wire Act passed a dozen or so years ago. That specifically said you can't gamble online.”  

The only facts he got wrong here are every one he stated.  

First, the Wire Act was passed in 1961, slightly more than a dozen years ago and was an attempt by Robert Kennedy to outlaw interstate gambling. Second, since the Internet did not exist, it did not say, “specifically you can’t gamble online.”  

Folks, this is a United States senator explaining his tortured position on an issue and clearly having no clue. None.

Whole thing here.

This is not just a United States senator; it's a United States senator representing Nevada, a state where gambling is the leading industry. A state that recently legalized in-state online poker and, just a few days ago, expanded that to interstate by entering a compact with Delaware to share player pools. And at least one of its two senators has no idea what the status of the law is on that subject.

It's not just that he doesn't know; it's that he's fully willing to put his ignorance on public display, apparently proud of it. It would be far more respectable if he would have said, "Y'know, that's something that I really should have a better handle on, but I have to admit I don't. Tell you what--let me bone up on the subject and then invite you to do a follow-up interview when I'm better prepared to discuss the details." But he doesn't even have the decency to be ashamed of his ignorance.

I was living in Minnesota when the state passed a law legalizing poker at horse racing tracks. But the legislature did something strange: they capped the betting at $60 per bet. This was explicitly done for the purpose of protecting citizens from losing too much money. (The worst abuses of liberty nearly always come in the guise of protecting people from themselves.)

Here's the perverse effect of that law: The racinos (the stupid word they came up with for the hybrid creatures) can spread $30-60 limit games, but not $1-2 no-limit games, even with a capped buy-in. Now, my readers are pretty well-informed about poker. So tell me: in which game do you think you can lose your life savings more quickly: a $1-2 NLHE game with a capped buy-in of, say, $500, or a FLHE $30-60 game?

Even though I think I'd have an edge on the competition, I wouldn't touch a $30-60 game, because I know how a fairly unremarkable streak of bad luck could wipe me out.

The point is this: the Minnesota legislature collectively knew nothing about poker, so they passed a law that makes no sense, simply because it sort of sounded like it might be a sensible thing.

This is no rarity. The great majority of legislators voting on the great majority of legislation know nothing or next to nothing about the subject of the bill. And they are not even a little bit embarrassed about their ignorance. They don't need to be, because most of their constituents are even less informed, so there's not much danger of being outed as an ignoramus among the people whose opinions matter. Most politicians care much more about image than fact. They care far more about what sound bites might make them look good or bad, as a result of a particular vote, than what the actual effects of the bill will be.

I could multiply examples endlessly, were I to go to another subject that I know pretty well--gun control. The stupidity of most firearms legislation might shock you, if you've never had it explained to you before. As just one fine example, here is an exhaustive, devastating analysis of everything that was wrong with the "assault weapons" ban proposed last year by Senator Dianne Feinstein. If you actually read that analysis, you will know more about the subject than most of the members of Congress who cast a vote on it.

I write all of this just to remind you of an important lesson: Most politicians are self-absorbed, ignorant, lying weasels whose main focus nearly all of the time is getting themselves reelected, not what's sensible or good for their state or nation, nor what's constitutional, nor what best promotes freedom and prosperity. It is vital to keep this in mind, so that you're never tempted to give them any more power, money, or control over your life than they currently have.


ADDENDUM 

Just a few minutes after posting this, I remembered an even better example that I wish I had used instead. A few years ago, Representative Carolyn McCarthy, one of the most persistent gun banners in Congress, proposed her own version of an "assault weapons" ban. Remember--this was her own bill, not just one that she was voting for. Yet Tucker Carlson asked her to explain some of the specific things that her proposed legislation would outlaw--and she didn't know what they were!

The most famous example from this interview is when he asked her to define a "barrel shroud," which her bill would have made illegal. A barrel shroud is simply a heat shield around a rifle barrel, so that you don't burn your hand on the gun when the barrel gets hot. It changes not one blessed thing about how far, how fast, or how accurately you can shoot a gun. It looks like this:

Now watch Rep. McCarthy flounder, then take a wild stab at guessing what it was that she wanted to ban:




Did you catch that? Carlson talks over her, so it's easy to miss it, but she says that a barrel shroud is the "shoulder thing that goes up."

Which led somebody to post this epic lampooning of her ignorance:

Has she been voted out of office by a constituency shocked by the humiliating sight of a member of Congress caught knowing nothing about her own proposed legislation? Nope. She still gets to cast one ignorant vote after another, and propose one stupid law after another.

A quick comparison

Number of children killed by rifle fire in Connecticut that makes Barack Obama cry: 20.

Number of children killed by CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that does not make Barack Obama cry: 176 and counting.

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.

Newspaper editorial board endorses Gary Johnson

The Chattanooga Times-Free Press gets it exactly right: "Romney may be less eager to tax, spend, attack personal freedoms and disregard the constitutional limits on government than his Democratic opponent, President Barack Obama, but only slightly."

http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2012/oct/24/1024b-fp1-gary-johnson-for-president/?opinionfreepress

I voted today

An absentee ballot by mail, as I always do:

Today's great political observation

From A. Barton Hinkle, writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Conservatives were so busy supporting Bush's expansion of war powers that they let him betray their small-government principles in domestic affairs. Liberals have been so happy to see Obama expand government's domestic scope that they have let him betray their values on civil liberties and war powers. In the process, each side has come off looking like a bunch of partisan cheerleaders who care about certain issues only when it's politically convenient. 

That's the thing about principles. If you don't try to apply them consistently, then people are apt to conclude you don't really have any.

Well said, sir.

(Countdown to cries for this blog to "stick to poker" in 3, 2, 1....)

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.

Two Plus Two involved in Gary Johnson campaign

I'm on the email list for Gary Johnson's Nevada campaign. In one I received just a few minutes ago from Jared Lord, the state campaign director, I noticed this interesting tidbit at the end: "Two Plus Two Poker has been very kind to donate office space in Henderson. Right now the space is being underutilized, as I've been working from home...."

I guess sharing office space is OK, but maybe I should warn him about looking in Sklansky's glove compartment.*

*If that reference is too obscure, see here.

Who not to trust in political prognostication

Barry Greenstein, October, 2007:

I'm sure it will be less than 6 months before Congress realizes that they
need to pass legislation contrary to the UIEGA. If it hasn't already happened,
it will happen in a few weeks.

Yeah, right.

I was reminded of this by reading today's post from Shamus, in which he quotes Phil Hellmuth in a recent Card Player magazine interview:

Online poker is going to be licensed and regulated very soon. There are things happening right now that the rest of the poker world doesn’t realize. I think it’s going to happen at the federal level, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by December.

My guess is that he'll end up looking just as deluded as Greenstein did.

Or maybe I will. One never knows. But in the matter of online poker licensing, as with predictions of the Rapture, skeptics have a far better track record than believers.

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.

Shelley Berkley and the PPA

The Poker Players Alliance has done some wacky things before (see Grange95's series of posts here, for example), but today they have added another whopper: They are supporting Shelley Berkley for a Senate seat. See article in the Sun here.

Why is this wacky? Because she voted for the UIGEA, the very thing that has brought online poker down. It's true that she said at the time of her vote that she didn't like it, but in the end, when she had to make the call one way or the other, she voted in favor of passage of the final bill.

To me, that's unforgivable. I would think that the bare minimum requirement for getting political support from the PPA would be that you have not voted to kill online poker. There I go, being all unreasonable again. "Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who!"

The reporter for the Sun is guilty of either failing to do the most basic research, or deliberately withholding information that is crucial for a reader to make an informed judgment. He lets Berkley get away with what is literally a half-truth:

[Senator Dean] Heller hasn’t had the chance to prove his word on Internet poker: He wasn’t in Congress in 2006 when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act — the measure that outlawed transactions of bets — was passed.

Berkley was, and sounded the alarm against it.

“I’m not a stranger to this issue. I stepped up very early, in the early part of my congressional tenure, and I’ve been working on this issue for a decade,” she said. “I was one of the few people who stood up during the port security debate and spoke out against adding this provision in — the ban on Internet gaming — from the start.”

It's true that she spoke against adding the UIGEA to the Safe Ports bill. I remember her floor speech about it. But in the end, she voted for the final bill. She voted to kill online gaming--a fact that she conveniently fails to mention in this news story. There's just no getting around that fact. Speaking against a bill and then voting for it is trying to have it both ways. It demonstrates an utter lack of courage, conviction, and principle. The last thing we need in Washington is more unprincipled legislators. They're worthless. They cannot be trusted to do the right thing when the heat is on. Kick 'em out of office and never let 'em back in. Rep. Berkley had one chance to get this right, and she blew it. Done, end of story, end of political career, as far as I'm concerned.

Ms. Berkley, it's swell that you're looking to repair the damage now, but it would have been a lot better if you and your peers had grown a spine and had said "no" to that awful piece of legislation to begin with. You helped make this mess. I absolutely do not trust you now when you say that you want to clean it up. It's too late for that. You betrayed us. You stabbed us in the back. You are one of the bad guys. Your voting records shows that you are an enemy of personal liberty.

And don't bother trying the old line about the UIGEA having been attached to "must-pass" legislation. In the first place, the Safe Ports act was just another round of security theater, a piece of show legislation. Does anybody really believe that our ports are now meaningfully safer than they were before 2006? Of course not. The only sense in which that was "must-pass" legislation is that everybody was afraid of what political opponents would say if they voted no. "She's opposed to making our ports safe!" Well, tough. Deal with that when and if it happens. And if you lose the next election on that basis, so what? You still would have done the right thing. If you're willing to cast votes contrary to your principles because you're worried about what distortions somebody might make of your record, then that means that you care more about reelection than doing what's right for your nation and for your constituents. If that's the case, what the hell good are you, and why in the world should we trust you?

In the second place, if the "safe ports" portion of the bill really was necessary, and if everybody or nearly everybody in Congress agreed with that assessment, then you and all of the others could have voted to kill the amended bill, knowing that the ports provisions would have been reintroduced and would have sailed through on their own in short order later. Of course, that would have required that you vote in accordance with your speech, which is apparently too much to expect of you.

In the third place, consider this hypothetical: Suppose that what had been tacked on to the ports act was not the UIGEA but a provision to send to the states a constitutional amendment repealing the Bill of Rights. It's an outrageous hypothetical, obviously, but it has a point. Would anybody have voted for that amended bill? I doubt it. They would have angrily denounced the unthinkable provision that had been attached, killed the bill, and insisted that a clean, unamended version of the ports act be reintroduced. Ms. Berkley and the others presumably would have judged that not killing the Bill of Rights was more important than the ports provisions. The fact that she did not take the same course of action with the UIGEA proves, in my view, that she considered people's right to use their time and money as they see fit to be much less important than getting the ports act through. Put another way, she does not value my freedom very highly.

Berkley is a demonstrated enemy of online gaming. Her vote was one of the ones that caused all of the current crisis. I consider that an absolute deal-breaker. It stuns me that the PPA would support somebody who actively helped cause the problem they are now trying to fix. I just don't get it.

Gary Johnson

I have heard a few people express the thought that whichever candidate for president in 2012 most strongly endorses legalizing online poker will get their vote.

If that's you, there's no question where your support should go.

Gary Johnson issued this statement on the matter:

“Government has absolutely no business telling Americans what they can do with their own time and their own money on their own computers, and that most certainly should apply to playing poker online. The fact that Americans are now prevented from playing online poker is an outrage. Unfortunately it is but another chilling example of how Congress and the Justice Department continue to trample on our personal liberty.

“As President, I will do everything in my power to restore your right to play online poker, and ensure that such a right can never be taken away again.”

Clear enough?

Did you ever heard such a statement from Barack Obama? No.

His campaign's web page about poker is here.

The fact that he is a strong supporter of individual liberty, constitutionally limited government, and strict fiscal responsibility makes him that much better a candidate. If he and Ron Paul are both still in the race when the Nevada primary rolls around, I'll have a difficult choice. Otherwise, either one is worlds better than anybody else running.

I'm very famous in libertarian circles, you know

Two of my favorite libertarian writers, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie, have a new book out, The Declaration of Independents. As part of their promotional efforts, today they are having "Ask a Libertarian" day. People submit questions via their web site, email, or Twitter, and they crank out quick video answers.

I submitted one on Twitter, and they addressed it about halfway through the video here:

http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/15/ask-a-libertarian-lightning-ro

Here's the background story: Nevada Congressman Joe Heck recently said of the Social Security system, "This pyramid scheme isn't working." He has taken endless heat for this comment, and has been backpedaling like Lance Armstrong doing the Tour de France in reverse. He has also been staying away from the press (see here) and dodging the subject (see here).

But it is an undeniable fact that Social Security is a pyramid scheme, and it is failing--rapidly. We are in a weird political climate where a congressman accidentally blurts out an obvious truth, then feels obliged to deny and run away from it. Such political cowards deserve our scorn, and deserve to lose their elected positions. The first step to fixing the problem is to acknowledge that it exists. Anybody who can't do that should be run out of Congress on a rail.

Hence my question to Welch and Gillespie.

A political rant (by somebody else)

One of the best I've read in a long time. The subject: Why liberals should favor Ron Paul over Barack Obama.

http://www.counterpunch.org/davis04282011.html

Favorite excerpts:

I do have a problem with those who imagine themselves to be liberal-minded citizens of the world casting their vote for Barack Obama and propagating the notion that someone can bomb and/or militarily occupy Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya and still earn more Progressive Points than the guy who would, you know, not do any of that....

Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. There'd be no need for a School of the Americas because the U.S. wouldn't be busy training foreign military personnel the finer points of human rights abuses. Israel would have to carry out its war crimes on its own dime....

[I]t seems to me that if you're going to style yourself a progressive, liberal humanitarian, your first priority really ought to be stopping your government from killing poor people. Second on that list? Stopping your government from putting hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens in cages for decades at a time over non-violent “crimes” committed by consenting adults. Seriously: what the fuck? Social Security's great and all I guess, but not exploding little children with cluster bombs – shouldn't that be at the top of the Liberal Agenda?