Chinese Gambling Incident May Give Beshear New Online Casino Plan
A Chinese man cut off his finger to break his ex-wife from her mahjong wagering habit. The extreme measure caused the woman to promise never to play again, even as the finger was being reattached at a nearby hospital. Governor Steve Beshear of Kentucky may take note, as his troubles worsen and his plans to shut down online casinos seem headed for derailment by the courts.
Beshear ran for office on a platform that promised no new taxes, reductions in government spending, and the legalization of casinos. But the state budget is massively in the red, and Beshear has reversed all his campaign promises.
He has recently proposed a seventy-cent raise in taxes on a pack of cigarettes. The legislature did not allow a vote on a potential referendum to establish casinos. And he famously has wasted state resources and valuable court time trying to craft a viable argument to seize the domain names of 141 online casinos, only to see legal scholars poke holes in his case, currently before the state Court of Appeals.
Beshear's thinking seems to be that if he can't use gambling to increase state revenues, he'll try to prevent his prisoners... oops, constituents from playing at legal casinos based elsewhere, whether it be in neighboring states or on the Internet. His representatives in court have called domain names "gambling devices", which allow Kentuckians to gamble outside the state's tax net.
When asked by a judge during the appeal hearing if buses carrying residents over state boundaries to Indiana casinos were also gambling devices, and could thus be forfeited, attorneys for the state replied in the affirmative. It appears any method necessary to force patrons to only gamble inside state boundaries at venues feeding state revenues is acceptable.
Greg Stumbo, a state Representative, has proposed installing video lottery terminals, which are essentially slot machines, at Kentucky race tracks to draw gamblers leaving the state and fund purses to keep the quality of racing up. Hopefully, Kentucky will adopt this plan and others like it before Beshear threatens to cut off the fingers of loved ones to punish out-of-state gambling.
