Interesting article up at Fox News that seems to make for chilling reading if you’re a fan of online gaming.
But that’s not the case anymore. In March 2006, President Bush signed the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act. Included in that bill was a provision allowing interim U.S. attorneys appointed by the president to serve indefinitely without Senate confirmation. This means that the prosecutors appointed by President Bush to replace those he just fired will be able to serve out the remainder of his term without being subjected to scrutiny from the Senate.
All of this grows even more troubling when you consider what the priorities of the current Justice Department actually are. Attorney General Gonzalez himself, for example, has that the “top priority” of his tenure at the Justice Department would be, of all things, the prosecution of pornography. Not child pornography, mind you. Regular, adult porn–the kind starring and bought, produced, and sold by consenting adults.
Earlier this month, federal officials arrested the founders of Neteller, an overseas online payment processor, while they were in the U.S. to switch planes. They were arrested because Neteller was allowing its U.S. customers to use the service with online gambling sites. It’s the third time U.S. officials have arrested foreign citizens in a U.S. airport on online gambling charges, despite the fact that in all three cases, the suspects were citizens and residents of foreign countries where online gambling is perfectly legal.
The Justice Department is now investigating U.S. firms and/or investors for even doing business with overseas gambling operators.
Last week, federal officials raided several medical marijuana dispensaries in southern California, all legal under state law. Federal law enforcement seized marijuana plants and medical marijuana, but also the medical records of their clients, many of them cancer, AIDS, and multiple sclerosis patients. It’s just the latest in a series of raids that have gone on since California legalized medical marijuana in the mid-1990s. This has been another law enforcement priority of the Bush administration: aggressively enforcing federal drug laws, even in states that have decided to give their citizens a bit more pharmacological freedom.
Perhaps the best example of the Bush administration’s law enforcement priorities is Mary Beth Buchanan, formerly the U.S. attorney in the Pittsburgh area. Ms. Buchanan is widely considered a rising star in the Republican party. Her career has been carefully incubated in the Bush Justice Department, both under first Attorney General John Ashcroft, and under Gonzalez.
Buchanan’s most famous case as attorney general was “operation pipe dreams,” in which some 2,000 law enforcement officers spent $12 million in taxpayer dollars collaborating to arrest 55 people for selling glass-blown bongs over the internet. The trophy in those arrests was actor/comedian Tommy Chong. Despite having no criminal record, Buchanan went after Chong with zeal, because, she said, he had glamorized the use of marijuana in his movies. Chong received the harshest sentence of any of those arrested.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
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