Presedential hopeful Bill Frist is real proud of himself. He was able to sneak in a bann on Internet Gambling on to a Port Security Bill about a half hour before that legislation was voted on.
Nice job Asshole. You just created an insentive that will help to fund terrorists. Cringley said it straight in his Friday column:
Any random group of 535 nerds is smarter than the 535 members of the U.S. Congress and able to circumvent ANY regulation if there is enough profit incentive to do so. Well the U.S. Congress has just created such an incentive where there was none before. And once these various payment schemes start appearing, what’s to say some of them can’t be equally used to finance terrorism? Of course they can be used for that purpose.
Thanks a lot Senator Frist.
Here’s a law that purports to end Internet gambling but will instead enable it, a law that is intended to make certain types of financial transactions harder to do but will ultimately make them easier, a law that says nothing about terrorism but will ultimately abet it, making us all less secure in the process.
There is, to my knowledge, no center for Al-Qaida hacking, nor is terrorism as an industry big enough to attract much third-party software development. But ally the interests of terrorists and Internet gamblers who all want to be paid, that’s a $20 billion incentive to corrupt the world financial system — an incentive that didn’t exist before last week.
With the profit motive now in place to create sophisticated underground payment processors - what do you think those vehicles will be used for? Funding terrorism.
This may have come up in discussions if the Senate had the opportunity to debate the bill on it’s own merits. Unfortunately, Bill Frist’s shady tactics did not allow for clean vote or debate on the issue. Are these the types of laws and legislative tactics we could expect more of from a Bill Frist Presidency?
“The government also will be able to ensure that website operators don’t provide links to gambling websites. -Bill Frist
Wonderful. That’s just what we need - the government telling us where we can and cannot link. How can this guy be from the same party that ran on a platform for smaller, less intrusive government to win the House in ‘94?
Although Internet gambling did not have a prominent place on either party’s radar screen just a few years ago, its explosive growth and potential for damaging families made it a very important issue to me and many others in Congress.-Bill Frist
That. . .or maybe it was the billions of dollars you crooks on both sides of the isle raised from brick and mortar casinos. As always, the truth comes out when you follow the money.
On Slashdot, Hackstaw of Spamgormet had this very insightful comment:
In the US, I have noticed a trend since the 60s and 70s to make more “normal” things illegal, and it makes the tension between the system and the government and the people very high. Abraham Lincoln said it best:
“Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
Which was then followed up by HS Thompson:
“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
So much is illegal, but its not “that illegal”, and that is crap. In societies where sex, alcohol, and drugs don’t have these insane and intense laws and taboos against them, they do less of them than here. In societies where pornography and nudity are more tolerated, they have much less rape, child abuse, and teenage pregnancies than we do. In societies where drugs are legal, they do less of them than we do. And the legal consequences keep getting more severe here.
Who do you think has it right? Bill Frist or Abraham Lincoln?
Tagged: Politics |
