Janus is a figure from ancient Roman religion and myth. He is depicted as having two faces looking in the opposite direction. Attorney General Healey has taken on that form. When she looks to the left she says one thing and looking to the right says the exact opposite.
The wonder of it is that no one in the media seems to pick it up. Our major newspapers and television news outlets have become mere stenographers producing what she says without giving it any analysis. It goes back to what I wrote about a long time ago about how people who are in favor are given passes.
As you know Attorney General Healey is trying to decide what to do about the gambling outfit called DraftsKing. The problem she is having such trouble it is backed by big money people like Bob Kraft who it appears have been able to exercise control over her good judgment. Leave out the power brokers and she would have come down with a decision a lot sooner than the end of the football betting season.
You wonder why I’m writing again on this. For one thing, I prosecuted many people who were in the business of illegal gaming. I believed as long as people violated a criminal statute on gaming they should be prosecuted. I was never concerned with the date the statute was enacted.
As I noted before our attorney general after seeing the actions of Nevada and New York has admitted that daily fantasy football “involves a form of gambling.” The follow-up to that should have been, “if that is so why don’t you shut it down like they did in New York.” She had an answer ready. She said “… I’m not going to use a several-hundred-year-old criminal statute that was written in a time when this kind of industry was never envisioned.”
While she was saying that out of the left side of her face, she was announcing the total opposite last Friday afternoon which is usually when you put out news that you hope few will cover. Why is the attorney general slipping the news out then? You don’t think she doesn’t want us to wonder why in one situation involving big money she refuses to use,”a several-hundred-year-old criminal statute” and in another involving a bunch of nobodies that she is.
Through the right side she just said that the “Suffolk grand jury indicted the 33 suspects this week on a total of 122 counts, including money laundering and registering bets, for operating the Costa Rica-based betting website”
Her statement went on: “These charges are the culmination of a thorough, months-long joint investigation that uncovered an extensive illegal gambling operation in Massachusetts. . . . These defendants amassed a network of bettors in a multimillion dollar enterprise that utilized an off-shore betting website for their bookkeeping in an attempt to circumvent state gambling laws.”
As I noted, no one picked this up.
Adding to the Massachusetss elected official nonsense was our Governor telling us he played a free game on DraftKings and he is of the opinion it requires skill. Has there ever been a more moronic statement? Baker knows nothing about it, plays it once, and it suddenly becomes a game of skill even though he has no skill at it. Give me a break.
I heard from a parent of a kid in high school that her son told her some of his friends play the daily fantasy football. Imagine all the college kids using their credit cards to play it. 95% of them will lose. Add the credit card debt on top of the college loans or the increase in college loans to pay off the credit card debt.
The big winners will be the credit card companies and the owners of these gaming operations like Bob Kraft, already billionaires. The losers will be the parents trying to dig their kids out of debt, the kids trying to get out of debt, and society as a whole when we are all told that the government will pick up all the debt of the kids because the kids did not know what they were doing like it did during the mortgage melt down.
Matt- Kids are wagering already on sports on campus, using cash advances off of their cedit cards has been happening since day 1. This is trying to hold down an industry that can’t be eliminated, it can be regulated though.
Doubting:
I have no problem with legalizing it. I do have a problem when some are doing the same thing are prosecuted and others are not. Anyone who suggests playing fantasy football is not gambling is either lying or stupid. If it is gambling regulate it but also regulate all sports gambling and make it legal. I don’t know what is so hard about it that I have to listen to our elective official spinning out nonsense.
Time magazine asserted that our foreign policy has been incoherent for twenty five years. A Congressman from Minnesota said we have been on all the different sides at one time or another in the Middle East over that period. Rand Paul claims the first step we must take is to stop arming our enemies which we are doing in Syria. ISIS, Al Nusra, Al Qaeda, Al Shabab and Boko Haram are all Sunni Muslim terrorist groups. President George W Bush said he would make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them. What about those who fund them? Most of their finances come from Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. How do we permit this? Fifteen of the nineteen killers on 9-11-2001 were Saudis. All were Sunnis. There is a local force in the Middle East that is opposed to Sunni terror. It is the Shia. It’s time for the West to pivot. We should align ourselves with Russia, Assad, Iran, the Iraq Shia, Hezbollah and the Houtis. Arm and train the Shia. Give them logistical and intelligence assistance. Treat the Shia the way we treat the Kurds. Don’t let Turkey, the oil sheiks and Israel veto a coherent policy. The enemy of our enemy is our friend. Victory over ISIS would be assured and it would be done with Arab boots on the ground not American forces. Enough American blood has already been shed. We can’t bomb them back to the stone age because they are already there but the Kurds and Shia can overpower them. There are 100 million Shia in that region lets engage them.
NC:
The foreign policy we had up until 1989 was that we would resist the Soviet Union with all our heart and soul. When it fell apart so did our foreign policy. We had won so we started to elect fools who knew no more about foreign nations and events than the writers of the Daily Racing Form.
As for your statement about where the funds for these ISIS terrorist come from I can not do better than refer you to this: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39727/paris-attacks-middle-eastern-oligarchies/ He agrees with you.
Our problem is there are a billion Sunnis who we do not want to alienate even though they have provided the money and forces to ISIS, al Qaeda, and other Muslim terrorist groups. We expect that these Sunni nations will help us in our fight against the Sunni ISIS but we are deluding ourselves. Turkey will not accept us supporting the Shia; nor will the Kurds who are also Sunni.
You want to align us with the Devil’s Axis: Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria. You offer a recipe for continued instability and the empowerment of more evil foes than ISIS. The Sunni nations would not tolerate that.
My recipe has no chance of being accepted but is the only true way forward.I will set it out again later this week. It is the only way out.