More From the Powers That Be.

I received a letter from the Speaker of the House yesterday. It was in response to a bit of lobbying that I did back here. I answered a call from our community in an attempt to curb legislation that could affect our rights to play poker. I also received this response from Dick Durbin. Because I received my response from Speaker Hastert in the mail, I will give you the skinny of what I read.

He states:

“…Internet gambling has been illegal for a long time but there has never been an adequate enforcement mechanism. Both H.R.441 and H.R. 4777 have been introduced to give responsibility to financial institutions to police the system by making it illegal for banking instruments such as credit cards or checks to be used to settle Internet wagers.”

For many of us the fact that a financial institution will not allow the use of a credit card or a check, for the purpose of internet gambling, is a non-issue. We have Neteller accounts or some other similar method of turning our money so the effect will be minimal. The person who will be influenced the most will be the casual player or the first time depositor. For example, my brother-in-law deposited $100 into his Party Poker account with his credit card. It was an easy avenue for him to use and made his initial deposit with no problem. He could have wired the money or sent a bank draft instead with the same results. However, if the financial institution of the country were forced to reject his monetary transactions because of this proposed law, he would have never played on-line. He would have avoided using a system like Neteller because of its unfamiliarity.

He also says:

“Moreover, H.R. 4411 provides that enforcement will be accomplished through regulators who work everyday with various institutions. H.R. 4777 enforces the law primarily by court order.” And that “…either piece of legislation may now be placed on the calendar for consideration by the full house.”

Overall, this whole thing looks like more bureaucracy for us to deal with. Regulators and court orders to influence the rights we have as Americans. I can already see people with hidden agendas grandstanding and telling the world about how they are eliminating an unwanted faction of the population while losing players are being busted for a $50 deposit. That sounds like freedom to me.

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M’s team was eliminated from the tournament last night. She pitched well, for the most part, but the team came up short in the end. She now starts the bulk of her travel team schedule as they will play four out of the next five weekends. She is excited and ready to go.

L’s team won their first game of the tourney and will play against the second place team tonight in the semi-finals. It will be a battle of the two top pitchers in the league and should be a barn burner. We beat this team to knock them into second last week so they will be playing for revenge.

The hard thing about last night was that as a coach for both girls, I couldn’t be at both games. In the end I spent the first hour at M’s game and the last hour at L’s game. It worked out well but it sucked not being able to be there the whole time.