Category Archives: gambling

If you can’t trust the game—-

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The NFL announced last week that five players have been suspended for betting on sports contests.  Three are suspended for at least a year. Three can resume playing in game seven of the upcoming season.  Four of the players involved are with the Detroit Lions. The team has released two of them.

They aren’t the first.  Last year the NFL suspended Calvin Ridley of the Atlanta Falcons for gambling.

The Detroit Lions reportedly (ESPN) organization has fired several staff members from various departments who also might have been gambling.

A few days before that announcement, Ohio residents began wagering on sports.  The first bet was placed by former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Pete Rose, who has been banned from the Baseball Hall of Fame because of gambling.  As baseball and other sports crawl farther under the covers with gamblers, are they creeping closer to admitting people such as Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson to Halls of Fame?  Will fans believe them as much as they once did that the answer is “no.”

One of those lobbying for sports wagering in Missouri has said it will enhance fan participation in the games.

Associated Press columnist Kyle Hightower, however, wonders if our pro sports teams are undermining public confidence in themselves, writing, “The incidents have driven a public conversation about the integrity of pro sports as legalized sports betting takes a greater hold in this country.”

He quotes Professor Declan Hill at the University of New Haven who says “Leagues are dancing with the devil. Here’s what happens.  There’ll be one play that’s kind of weird and dubious and sports fans will start to do, ‘Was that legitimate?’ And then there’ll be another one. And another one and another one. And after a few years, the sports leagues will have a problem because their fundamental credibility is being debated by their fans.”

Hightower sees players becoming “ambassadors for gambling companies” by appearing in sports gambling advertisements and promotions.

Huge money is involved here—more than $220 billion since the U. S. Supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018.  Leagues already are providing official stats to the big gambling companies. Some fans already wonder how pure leagues can be when this kind of big money is involved. And the money is going to be even bigger.

Missouri is an island surrounded by states with sports betting. The industry is leaning hard on the Missouri legislature to end that status. So far, internal squabbling among gambling interests has frustrated sports wagering backers.  But it seems inevitable that our lawmakers eventually will buckle.

And what will happen to our trust in the games we watch when the fans’ “participation” in the games is “enhanced?”

Humans play these games and humans make mistakes and not always by accident.  In the future fans might ask if a mistake really is a mistake? Every suspension for gambling chips away at confidence in The Game, whatever game it might be.  What happens when we wonder if that error was accidental or that missed block was really just a miss; that the pass was not intentionally thrown an inch too high or too long or too short; that the goalie really did just miss that puck or that those two free throws that bounced off the rim could have gone in?

Our pro sports teams have spent decades emphasizing the integrity of their games. We worry that the lure of big money will erode the confidence we have as we watch from the games’ grandstand.  How can we know?

How can we trust what we see?

It appears to be too late for such concerns to be prohibitive of gambling involvement in sports.

Hightower’s article concludes with a comment from Karol Corcoran, the general manager of FanDuel, one of the biggest online gambling operators, who says, “We’re in an ecosystem with customers, we’re the operators, with the leagues with our data providers. It’s important for all of us that we build together a sustainable industry. And being very careful about integrity is part of that.”

The fox is in the hen house.   And it is talking about integrity.

We wish we could say we are comforted.

—-because the fox is always hungry.

We hope we can still love and trust our games five years, ten years, from now.

 

“1776” in 2023

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We still don’t have sports wagering in Missouri.  But we do have video lottery terminals—and that really aggravates the casino folks and the pro sports teams that have seen another year of huffing and puffing on their parts gone to waste.

Watching the annual efforts of the gaming industry to bully the legislature into giving it as sweet a sweetheart deal as possible on sports wagering while VLT advocates argue that they have a right to the gambling dollar, too, has become tiresome.  Casinos see VLTs as competition.  VLT people don’t disagree but say the idea that casinos should have a monopoly on emptying the pockets of gullible Missourians is, well, unfair.

There is, of course, nothing fair about commercial gambling regardless of whether it is conducted in noisy, gaudily decorated casinos or whether it’s conducted next to the pork rinds rack or the beer cooler at the convenience store.

Neither side is interested in compromise.  And the result has been for several years the same: a deadlock at the end of a legislative session that runs the session off the rails and kills a lot of legislation that has the possibility of a greater positive impact on the lives of Missourians.  Or maybe negative impact.  But those points haven’t gotten argued.

We are reminded of John Adams’ rant early in the musical “1776,” as he rails against Congress’s inability to decide whether to declare independence from Britain:

You see, we piddle, twiddle, and resolve
Not one damn thing do we solve
Piddle, twiddle, and resolve
Nothing’s ever solved in
Foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy
Philadephia!

Now, to be honest, Jefferson City is none of those things. Well, mostly. It’s not foul or fetid or fuming and filthy, although at times in the spring and the fall when the water temperature of the Missouri River is several degrees different from the air temperature, there’s plenty of fog. One almost has to get out and lead their car across the bridge, the fog is so thick.

Casino gambling is legal. Sports wagering is not.  VLTs are legal as far as their advocates are concerned but there is no law allowing them or regulating them. One county has a court ruling that says VLTs are illegal in that county.

The future?  The people who can step in and solve the problem won’t do it.  There are no grownups in the room on this one.

One person is position to provide some leadership is Attorney General Andrew Bailey.  But the Post-Dispatch reported the other day that the issue is too “complex” for him to say whether VLTs are or are not legal or to take action to find out.

He apparently is not interested in determining what machines are legal and which ones are not—or to offer suggestions to legislators who might want to put the definition in the statute books.  The article quotes Bailey saying on St. Louis radio station KTRS, “It’s impossible to make a blanket determination that everything that looks like an illegal gaming machine must therefore by definition be an illegal gambling machine.”

Others, however, say a duck is a duck.

It’s a local issue, he says, not something for the state to determine.

So, does that mean that the legislature should just butt out of the VLT discussion?

Should the state butt out of the discussion of sports wagering, too?  Should that be a local issue?

Just imagine how much fun it would be to be able to place a sports bet while standing next to a gas hose attached to your car in Callaway County but not be able to try your luck at a VLT when you go inside to get some fake bacon to snack on while you drive to Boone County, where you can spend a few minutes risking the family fortune on a VLT but not be able to bet on a sporting event when you get a beer to wash down the fake bacon.

Then you go to Cooper County to empty your pockets at the blackjack table in a legal casino.

It wouldn’t hurt if the state’s top legal officer, instead of just brushing off the issue, offered to be a mediator.  It’s not one of his constitutional duties but our attorneys general of late have set a precedent, regrettable though it might be, of straying far beyond their constitutional duties—all the way to the southern border or into the elections held in selected states.

But that’s not going to happen.  The Post-Dispatch also reported that money is fueling the Piddling and the Twiddling.

It seems that two VLT companies have taken the state to court charging it is harassing them by trying to remove their machines from convenience stores although there’s no proven law making them illegal.  Normally the Attorney General is the defense attorney for the state when it is sued. Not Bailey.  The newspaper reports he took a $25,000 campaign donation from a political action committee with ties to former House Speaker Steve Tilley, now a lobbyist for a gambling company. The story also says Bailey had taken “tens of thousands of dollars” from the two VLT companies involved in the lawsuit.

Boy oh boy.  These folks certainly know how to cultivate the public’s confidence in government, don’t they?

Will the issue of sports wagering versus video lottery terminals be resolved by the 2024 legislature?

We consulted the most reliable predictor of future events, the Magic 8 Ball.  “Don’t count on it,” the ball said.   “My sources say no,” was another response. But there were three versions of “yes” when I kept asking.

Will there be more piddling and twiddling? “Sources point to yes,” said the ball.

So—there’s your definitive answer to this matter where the issues are so clear-cut and the participants are so vitally interested in what’s in the best public interest.

 

And Down the Stretch They Come

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It’s like the Kentucky Derby this past weekend.  The big group of horses rounds the last turn, accelerating, bumping, jostling, looking for an opening, straining for the finishing line.

And then, it’s over.  Suddenly.  Done.  In the record books. The exhausted competitors head back to their barns.

The last week of this year’s regular legislative session begins today.  All of the work, the hopes, the politicking, the lobbying, the deals and compromises, the conflicts and the consensus-building comes to a merciful end at 6 p.m. Friday.

The public has no concept of what their elected representatives go through on their behalf—or at the behest of those with power to force decisions—between early January and mid-May, especially in the weeks after Easter break when the clock begins to tick more loudly and the calendar pages fall more quickly.

The greatest responsibility the legislature has each year is passage of a state budget.  This year it is $51 billion, huge, the largest budget in state history.  The state is flush with money and sometimes there’s more fighting about state spending when there’s a lot than there is when there’s a little.  With the little, lawmakers have to cover the basic services. With a lot, there are more pet projects, more promises to be fulfilled, more conflicts about what constitutes responsible fiscal policy.

Time of plenty tend to breed unnecessary discussions of policies that ultimately will make times of little even worse.  It becomes harder to defend a system that allows consistent fiscal responsibility in good times as well as bad.

This is the week when bills become Christmas Trees, as they’re called in legislative circles—bills that begin as simple measures suddenly exploding in size as lawmakers who see their bills doomed for failure find bills with better prospects on which they can hang their issues.

Sometimes it works.  Sometimes the bills finish up violating a constitutional standard that a bill can contain only one subject. Sometimes an effort to piggyback a controversial issue onto a relatively non-controversial bill kills both.

Perhaps the biggest issue involving the above scenario involves sports wagering.  Hallway talk is that gambling interests will make one last push to finally get sports wagering by tacking the bill onto a Senate-passed tax bill during House debate and sending it back to the Senate for approval with no time for negotiations. The Senate must take sports wagering, which would face certain death on its own, if it wants to finally approve a more general bill that it has already passed.

If you have trouble following that description, you are not alone.  Bills can become sacrificial lambs as well as becoming Christmas trees.  Believe it or not, the process as a certain fascination the more you watch it.  We will not try to influence your judgment about how moral or ethical that process is.

Sports wagering has at least one strong opponent in the Senate who is prepared to filibuster if the issue returns in some form from the House—and filibustering means there won’t be time for several other bills to be considered as the clock winds down.

So will the sports wagering advocates, desperate to get the issue approved after five years of previous failures, cause the death of other issues because they cannot take “no” for an answer? Again?

This is a nervous time for majority leadership in both chambers because they know every deck contains 52 wild cards at this time of year.   To their credit, they’ve run the place pretty well in 2023, particularly compared the debacle of 2022. But they know their leadership legacy might rest on what happens by 6 p.m. Friday.

Everybody is excited to be coming to Jefferson City each January.  But speed limits will become  just roadside advisories for a lot of people after the gavel falls Friday evening.

The VLT Problem

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One of the biggest hurdles that casino gambling has not been able to clear in Missouri as it tries to legitimize sports wagering is the VLT.

That’s not a sandwich. It’s one of those gambling machines that are proliferating throughout the convenience stores of Missouri.  Video Lottery Terminals. Are they slot machines or something else. Are they legal or illegal? Is there an age limit for using them?  Should they be hidden from general public view or should they be right next to the door, on the aisles next to the snacks.

Is Missouri starting to look like Las Vegas, at least in our convenience stores?

Your correspondent likes to say that he has been to Las Vegas about twenty times, which is about 19½ times more than he ever wanted to go.  If the gambling industry could figure out how to put slot machines on those accordion-like jetways between the terminal and the front hatch of the plane, they would.  But you can hear the slot machines in the gate areas almost as soon as ou get off the plane.

Several people have opined they will not buy gas at a convenience store that has these infernal machines.

The casino industry trying to get sports wagering approved by the legislature has found itself in the clutches of the video lottery terminal people. And vice-versa. A sports wagering bill hits the floor for debate and somebody tries to amend a VLT-licensing bill onto it.  It’s especially frustrating to the sports wagering folks in the Senate where an attempt to attach a VLT bill to a sports wagering bill can generate a filibuster at the drop of a chip—by a VLT Senator who wants it to be added or a sports wagering Senator who doesn’t want it be adopted.

Now there’s another question fogging the discussion.  Should the legislature be discussing legalizing VLTs while a class action lawsuit accuses the company that supplies many of those machines with violations of state consumer protection and federal racketeering laws (the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act).

Our former colleague in the press corps, Rudi Keller of Missouri Independent, reports the federal court lawsuit accuses Torch Electronics of putting hundreds of machines—the lawsuit says they’re illegal gambling devices—in locations all over the state. Critics of VLTs also say there are no protections that will keep children from using the machines, and to rid Missouri of machines that the suit says entice people who already have gambling problems to play them.

Torch, in previous criminal and civil cases has claimed the machines don’t violate state gambling laws.  And it claims they’re not gambling machines because players are offered a chance to know the outcome before they put in their money.

If you want to know the difference between slot machines and VLTs (the casino people say they’re the same animal but dressed differently. The VLT people say they’re  more like lottery machines), you might to go to VLTs vs Slots (The Different between VLT and Slot Machine 2023) (slotsguy.com)

The casino industry sees them as competition for their slot machines, particularly because these machines are anywhere in the state and the casinos are restricted to just 13 locations on our two great rivers.

The casinos are under the Missouri Gaming Commission. The VLTs would be regulated by these state lottery.

We’ve already seen an early dustup on this issue in the Senate where Senator Denny Hoskins of Warrensburg, a longtime supporter of VLTs, saw his bill combining both issues killed in committee while a stand-alone sports wagering bill was voted out for debate. He locked down the senate for a couple of hours a week before spring break and he had friends helping him.

While that fight will continue at the capitol, another fight is shaping up in the courts.

Rudi recalls that Torch put its first machines in Missouri five years ago. Complaints led the Highway Patrol to investigate them and recommend to prosecutors about 200 cases complaining the VLTs violate state gaming laws.

But only one prosecutor has gone after VLTs.  Machines in a convenience store in Platte County were destroyed after a judge found they violated the law. Other prosecutors seem to think they have bigger fish to fry than prosecuting people who run convenience stores with these machines in them.

One interesting issue in the class action lawsuit claims that Torch and a co-defendant, Warrenton Oil have combined to make more than $955 thousand in political donations in the last five years.  We haven’t checked to see how much the casinos have made in political donations but they do stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars in sports wagering and they have invested a lot of time and manpower in the effort for about six years.

But so far all of the various pressure campaigns and campaign finance issues, neither sports wagering nor legal VLTs has passed the legislature.

The legislature returns from its spring break in a few days. The sports wagering legislation is waiting for debate in both the House and the Senate.  The discussions are likely to be lengthy, even in the House where there are rules against interminable talking by members.  But in the Senate there are no debate limits.

Another factor enters in.  Last year, the six major sports teams in Missouri started making noises about a petition campaign to put sports wagering on a 2024 ballot if the legislature did not enact it.  That has raised the stakes on the issue in the legislature this year.

Officials with the sports teams have testified this year that they are “agnostic” about VLTs, an indication the devices won’t be part of a ballot issue as far as they’re concerned.

The last time we ran some traps at the capitol, the sentiment was that sports wagering might not make it to the governor for his signature this year, again. But nothing is dead until the gavel drops at 6 p.m. May 12.

Wanna bet how this mess turns out?

 

Gambling Addiction? Don’t Blame Us

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The big push is underway in the legislature to let Missourians bet on sports.  A House committee has held a perfunctory hearing on two bills that have a tax structure in which the state will LOSE money.  An industry that profits from tilting the tables against its customers is about to tilt the tables against the state. And it’s likely the legislature will let them get away with it.

An article last week in The Hill, a D.C. publication that reports on government, says gambling addiction is going to be “the next opioid crisis.”

And the casino industry does not seem to care. At least not in Missouri.

Nationwide legal sports wagering will be five years old this year.  The Supreme Court threw out the national ban on it in 2018.  The growth of this betting has been nothing short of explosive. Missouri legislative fiscal experts say profits from sports wagering will exceed profits from all table games in all of our thirteen casinos in just three years.

The gambling industry has spent, and is spending, huge amounts of money wooing state legislatures. Last year The New York Times investigation detailed how it was done in Kansas. The newspaper also had a reporter in Missouri but when the issue died in a completely dysfunctional Senate, the investigation focused elsewhere.

It’s coming to Missouri—on the gaming industry’s terms.  A bill in the House that would allow sports wagering on the state’s terms will get a hearing this year but will go nowhere. That’s the official word.

The industry-backed bills set aside up to one-half million dollars for dealing with people who are affected by gambling addictions. If you think the casinos are being noble and responsible in doing this, you are wrong. They want nothing to do with that funding.

The money, instead, will come from the fund underwritten by fees the casinos pay for each person who enters the gambling area—fees that have been rendered woefully inadequate because of inflation since they were put in place n 1993.  The industry has fought, successfully, every attempt to bring the two dollars up to contemporary values.

One result of that resistance is that funding for our veterans homes is about one-third what it was a decade ago and it’s going to get worse.  Even the host cities of our casinos have seen their casino payments decline by about half, a circumstance their association doesn’t seem to think is worth discussing.

The bills in the House that set aside that half million dollars take it from the programs that draw support from that admission fee fund, meaning taking funding away from the veterans homes, the host cities, a state college scholarship program and a National Guard funeral escort program.

The industry doesn’t care. It accepts no financial responsibility for those who develop problems by over-participation in its offerings.

The Hill article says, “Most Americans ignored the opioid crisis, a staggering increase in overdose deaths in the 1990s and 2000s, until the government and news media processed the data and tendered a response.”  Timothy Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, told the publication, “We have a movement toward expanding what was once considered a sin, what was once considered a vice, and embedding it at every level of American culture, down to kindergarten.”

“You have exactly the same players you had with opioids. You have government. You have industry. You have civilians, a lot of whom will benefit from this. And then you have a population who will develop an addiction, let’s say one [to] one-point-five percent of the population.  It’s a hidden addiction. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it.”

We’ve looked at a lot of studies in this country and others of gambling addiction.  All of them point to gambling addiction at least tripling with the advent of sports wagering.

Lia Nower, the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, told The Hill, “Gambling is a very different addition from drugs or alcohol. If I’m drunk or high, at some point my family is going to figure it out. With gambling, I can be sitting with my kids, watching cartoons, and gambling away my house, my car, everything I own, on my mobile phone. How would you know?”

Nower says New Jersey, the first state to have newly-legal sports wagering studied the issue of problem gambling BEFORE it allowed sports wagering. But she says most states “are just legalizing this stuff without any idea of the effects.” Missouri seems to be in that category.

We have yet to hear anybody outside of those with special interests in the topic, even so much as mention this coming potential public health crisis. Passing a bill with a pick-a-number amount set aside—subject to appropriation by the legislature—is not addressing the problem.  And having the industry that causes the problem directly take responsibility for it seems to be out of the question.

The Missouri Gaming Association once proclaimed, “As good corporate citizens, casinos do more than a fair share for military veterans…We honor and support our military veterans and will continue to do so…”

Just don’t trouble us to adjust outdated admission fees to stop the financial bleeding of Missouri’s nursing homes for veterans. And certainly don’t expect us to have any financial responsibility for veterans or anyone else who become the victims of our enterprise.

Just remember, we’re good corporate citizens. And we expect the people you elected to represent you and to protect your citizens’ interests to do what we want.

“I do think there are watershed moments in all public health crises. Unfortunately, it usually takes some kind of crisis or tragedy to turn the tide,” says Nower.

The “next opioid crisis” and accompanying tragedies is developing at the state capitol. Does your legislator care?

 

“The Casinos Will Never Buy That”

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My Representative, Dave Griffith, has filed a third bill in the House that allows sports wagering.  But this bill is different because it gives the legislature an important choice—it can vote for casino industry legislation that does nothing for the state or it can vote for Rep. Griffith’s bill that says sports wagering will be permitted, but only on the state’s terms.

It’s House Bill 953 if you want to look it up on the House web page.

It says sports wagering is no different from any other kind of casino gambling, despite the industry claiming that it is some kind of special system with low returns (it’s not) and will be taxed at the same rate, 21% of adjusted revenues (what’s left after all bets are paid) instead of the 10% the casinos want.  Based on the fiscal note for the industry’s bill that passed the House but died in the Senate, the industry bill would let casinos keep more than $30 million in tax breaks while paying the state less than $13 million.  And that’s just the first of the problematic parts of the bill.

Rep. Griffith’s bill also would force the casinos to pay for the expected tripling of problem gambling that comes with sports wagering, instead of taking money away from programs and services the state committed long ago to finance with gambling revenue.

The bill also would increase the admission fee that casinos pay to the state, set in 1993 at two dollars and unchanged since.  The contemporary equivalent of two 1993 dollars is $4.10, meaning the casinos are keeping more than they are paying the state in contemporary dollars.

Fifty cents of the new admission fee will go to the casinos own host cities that have lost half of their admission fee funding as casino patronage has fallen to a decade. Fifty cents would go to the state gaming commission with the largest share of those proceeds going to alleviate some of the funding crunch at veterans nursing homes—which last year received about one-third as much as they did a decade ago.  The third fifty cents will provide funding to keep the Steamboat Arabia Museum from being bought by  Pennsylvania museum and moved to Pittsburgh.

The casinos can keep the remaining fifty cents.

The gaming commission will adjust the admission fees for inflation each year so that we don’t see the casinos getting richer and richer off of admission fees while host cities and counties and state programs grow poorer and poorer.

More times than I want to think of, members of the legislature have told me after discussing some of these ideas, “The casinos will never buy that.”

Indeed, they haven’t and we expect tooth-and-toenails opposition to the Griffith bill this year.

I wonder, however, if those lawmakers who have told me, “The casinos will never buy that” have ever considered how demeaning to the General Assembly that comment is, almost to the point of a self-indictment.

Who’s in charge here?   The legislature or the casinos?   The answer appears quite clear based on what legislation has been moved—although, thankfully, not finally passed.

What does that statement say about the integrity of the individual legislator or of the General Assembly as a whole?

And for those thinking of seeking higher office, what will sell better with the voters: letting them bet on tonight’s game, or standing with the state’s veterans, educators, and even the casinos’ host cities?

We think we know what the general public’s answers would be to these questions—and that answer does not bespeak confidence in those that public presumes will watch out for its interests. Why, then, are lawmakers who have said that willing to accept the premise?  What is it that they are lacking in making that statement?  And how are they fueling a political climate in which their constituents consider themselves victims of government instead of partners in it?

The casino industry has an incredible amount of influence in the capitol.  One representative told me in the first year of efforts to update casino laws and to protect the museum that the industry would be interested in what was being proposed. “I’ve already gotten two checks from them this year,” he told me.

But this year’s different.  The Griffith bill gives lawmakers a choice. Who’s more important: the people lawmakers know back home or the people who want something from them in the capitol hallways?

Is there a place for courage? Integrity?  Service in the name of the people?  Or will it be business as usual?

We’ll find out this year, maybe.   And maybe voters will remember the answer in the campaign year that comes next.

 

Notes from a Quiet Street (post-January celebration)

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We saw something a few days ago at the Capitol that I don’t think we’ve ever seen—generally bipartisan reaction to a governor’s State of the State message. Applause from both sides of the aisle and complimentary assessments from the minority party that exceeded such positive comments we’ve seen in the past regardless of who the governor has been.

We’ll watch in the next four months to see if the good feelings last.

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Our State Representative has filed a sports wagering bill that gives the legislature a choice for the first time in the five years the gambling industry has tried to push the legislature into passing what the industry is demanding.  The new bill also allows sports wagering, but says it will be done on the state’s terms, not the indutry’s terms.  Our lawmakers now have a choice of whether the people are at home are more important than the people in the hallways of the Capitol.

We’ll probably revisit that topic later.

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Both political parties are looking for viable national candidates or tickets for 2024.  We have one for the GOP that will be hard to beat.

Kinsinger and Cheney.

Or

Cheney and Kinsinger

The party is unlikely to nominate either one, let alone both.  But it would seem that both would be attractive to non-Trumpist GOPers and to independents alike and likely would even draw some interest from Democrats, especially if the Democrats nominate a ticket that has weaknesses—and as we write this, there are plenty of questions within the Democratic Party about whether a renomination of Joseph Biden would be the most solid choice, particularly if somebody not named Trump runs on the other side.

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The Hill recently published a list of eight Republicans who could challenge Donald Trump in 2024.  You know Yogi’s old saying about deju vu.  One of the ways The Donald got the nomination in 2016 was because several candidates split the 65% of the primary vote he didn’t get primary after primary, enabling him to get all of the delegates at one-third the price.

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Some think he won’t be a factor by then—that his concern about a new four-year term should be replaced by concern about a 10-15 year term.

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Joe Biden will turn 82 a few weeks after the 2024 election.  Donald Trump will be that old when he finishes a second term, if——

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We are only about 17 or 18 months away from national conventions, a year away from the first primaries.  That’s a long time in politics.  Plenty of time for something good to happen.

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And Lord knows we need something good to happen in our politics.

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We are grateful it is February.  We have weathered the worst month of the year. Cold and snow do not seem so permanent after we have left January.  February is a short month and by the end of it men are playing baseball again and racing engines are running hot. And it stays daylight longer.  And soon there will be a little green haze in the trees.

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Update:  As of this writing, the Mediacom cable that the company laid across our street instead of re-burying it at the end of last September has been ripped out only twice by the snowplow. It quit working a third time, perhaps because regular traffic dislodged it from its attachment post in our neighbor’s yard. But a technician hustled right out and got it hooked back up.

But it’s only February. Plenty of time for snowplows to roam the streets again.

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Super Bowl is next weekend.  That will end the NFL Season and set the stage for the new XFL season that will carry us until the Canadian Football League starts, filling the gap until the next NFL season.

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And speaking of the NFL—It has found a way to make an irrelevant football game even more irrelevant.  The All-Star game was flag football. Made-for-TV entertainment.

Watch next year for one-hand below the waist games.

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An article in the local paper about this year’s efforts to get sports wagering approved mentioned Rep. Dave Griffith’s bill but missed an important point.  It’s the first time the legislature has been given a clear altenrative to the casino industry’s demands.  This is the first time the lawmakers will have a chance to decide if sports wagering should be done on the casino industry’s terms….or in the best interests of the people who sent those lawmakers here.

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Premonition

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Your faithful chronicler was invited to speak to a group of freshman, sophomore, and junior State Representatives last week. It turned out they all were Republicans, including some Republican candidates for the House.

If Democrats want to hear the nonpartisan speech, I’d be glad to do it for them.

In fact, the words of a Democrat had a prominent role in the early part of the speech.  I had recited some facts about being raised in a Republican family. But I came of age in the Camelot era, a pedigree that I hope is somewhat behind my efforts as a reporter to harass both parties equally.

As I was researching some of the material for the speech, I came across the speech President Kennedy would have delivered at the Texas Trade Mart. As history records, the world ended for him ten minutes or so before he was to arrive there. The conclusion of the speech reaches across the generations since that day in Dallas.  Here’s the part of that speech that made it into part of my remarks last week:

“In this time of division and hostility, of narrowness and demagoguery often fueled by fear of the different instead of the opportunities presented by the things we have in common, it might be good to reflect on some of President Kennedy’s words again.  The other day I came across some words he would have spoken at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, a day I remember vividly as a young reporter.

Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

But today other voices are heard in the land – voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality,…doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness…

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will “talk sense to the American people.” But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense…

We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

It has been too long since we heard that kind of uplifting challenge. And it’s time for leaders with courage to speak that way again.”

The crowd provided a standing ovation at the end of the talk, which was nice. I hope that means they didn’t think they were listening to nonsense.  And that they won’t go out and deliver it.

Abdicating Authority

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The Senate Appropriations Committee has sent a House-passed bill on sports wagering to the floor for debate.  The bill taxes proceeds from sports wagering at eight percent rather than the 21 percent rate for all other forms of gambling.  Committee Chairman Dan Hegeman says there will be a substitute bill offered on the Senate floor that changes some of the provisions of the House bill.

I could have opposed this bill when it was before the committee a couple of weeks ago but decided not to do it because I’ve told this committee and House committees for about three years why the legislation written by the casino industry should be rejected—-because it does nothing or almost nothing for the state’s interests and, in fact undermines them.

The worst thing the bill proposes—so far—is a series of deductions from the taxes the casinos will pay the state.  The goal, plainly stated in the bill, is to let casino accountants turn profitable days into unprofitable days and then to carry over any paper losses to the next day’s calculations. And if the accountants can show enough days were losers, then an entire month will have no revenues that can be taxed.

This is what I told the committee—with some editorial modifications because this is a column not testimony.

First: The fiscal note on this bill talks about how much the state will gain, which isn’t much, but it does not talk about how much the state will lose because of the ultra-low tax rate proposed and other factors in the bill.  Eight percent of nothing is the same as 21% of nothing, and “nothing” is the goal.

The other two points unfortunately are combined.

This not only is the thirtieth anniversary year of the vote to legalize casino gambling, it also is the thirtieth anniversary of approval of term limits.  This legislation represents an unfortunate combination of these two issues.

We have seen the realization of two important things that critics warned would happen if term limits were adopted.

One was that imposition of term limits would eliminate the institutional memory of the General Assembly.

Institutional memory is passed along by the Elders in any society to newcomers.  It consists not only of previous experiences in what works and what does not. In the legislature’s case, it was a matter of teaching new members about traditions, practices, rules (written and unwritten), and behaviors that are essential to good governing.

It is a matter of understanding why people are “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” in the House and why the phrase, “Everyone is a Senator” is vital to the operations of the Senate.  Both standards are matters of respect and based on the idea that policy is shaped by debate among equals.  A debate between two gentlemen, two ladies, or a lady and a gentleman is a debate between equals. It is a matter of parliamentary discipline and political respect regardless of party, geography, color, gender, faith or any other factor.

“Everyone is a senator” is the same.  Senators debate Senators.  It is not us-versus-them.  Senator-to-Senator does not infer that one is superior to the other.

Institutional memory used to teach respect for the understanding that today’s opponent likely will need to be tomorrow’s friend. It was a system that worked for about 175 of Missouri’s 200 years. The sad result of the loss of that memory has been played out in the Senate this year.

The third warning we heard is that after institutional memory is gone, the General Assembly would lose the structure that protects its role as the people’s policy-maker.  Without that structure, without that discipline—critics warned—the power to make policy shifts to two elements that are permanent parts of government outside the chambers—the bureaucracy and the lobbyists.

The warning was that while legislators will come and go, both the bureaucracy and the lobbyists are permanent and their power grows.  And so it is with this bill.

In the last five years, the gaming industry has given legislators 29 bills on sports wagering with the expectation those bills will be passed.  In these five years, not one member of the House and the Senate—I haven’t counted but probably 230 or more people have served in either chamber during that time—not one member of the House or the Senate has independently introduced a bill that puts the General Assembly in charge of this issue.

Not one bill has been written by any member of the Missouri Legislature that legalizes sports wagering on the state’s terms, that asserts the General Assembly’s authority to act on behalf of the people who elected its members. 

And so the warnings from 1992 have come sadly true.  For five years the Missouri General Assembly has abdicated its authority—on this issue—to those who are not physically Ladies, Gentlemen, or Senators, none of whom have any responsibility for, or obligation to the people who sent you here.

And that is why you are being asked by backers of this bill to tell the people who sent you here that it is okay with you if your veterans continue to see declines in financing for their nursing homes, why it is okay with you if the state’s promise of education funding from casino gambling is broken, why it is okay with you if the cities some of you represent that play host to casinos will continue to lose thousands and millions of dollars every year because the gambling industry tells you not to update outdated laws.

It’s not too late to regain control of the process. Committee or floor substitutes, or committee or floor amendments can do it.

But the industry doesn’t want you to do it.  So you have a choice.

When you go home on the evening of May 13th and you have coffee the next morning with some constituents and one asks if you did anything good here this year—what will you say?

—that you stood up for your teachers and your veterans and your home dock cities…..

Or will you say, “I voted to let you bet on a baseball game tonight.”

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Time is running short and pressure to pass what the industry wants in this election year is likely to increase. Now we will learn if the legislature has the spine to act on behalf of the people they meet at home or whether they’ll go with the people they meet in the Capitol halls.

We hope the teachers and the veterans and the college kids looking for state scholarship help, or the city leaders of towns with casinos—and even families of those who become addicted to this industry’s product—ask in these weeks before the election whether their legislator abdicated policy-making power to the people in the halls.

Enhancing (?) Sports

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Baseball season finally has arrived.  By this time next year you might be able to place legal bets on its games.

That will make baseball even better, according to one big name in the biz.

The President of the St. Louis Cardinals, Bill DeWitt III, has told two legislative committees (he’s read the same script twice for one of them) that the Cardinals, Blues, Royals, Chiefs, and soccer teams in St. Louis and Kansas City, “first and foremost…support sports wagering as a way to increase engagement with our fans and provide a fun, exciting new way to enjoy sports.”

Your correspondent does not oppose casinos; voters approved them thirty years ago and it is unlikely they will have a major change of heart.  Sports wagering is inevitable although the proposed legislation guts gambling tax laws that serve the public.

What caught the ear in those hearings was DeWitt’s assertion that sports wagering “will increase engagement with our fans.”

I love baseball.  Some of my earliest memories are of playing the game in the yard of our home in a little Illinois town and hitting a ball that wound up in our living room, the picture window notwithstanding.  I played center field with a catcher’s mitt in my first organized game. I was about seven, and I was scared to death at the plate where I had to face a fourth grader (the town was so small that fourth graders and second graders were on the same teams) throwing smoke, or the fourth grade equivalent.  I remember that in the last game I decided I was going to swing the bat and I did, with my eyes closed, and I felt the ball hit the bat and I opened my eyes in time to see the ball scoot between the legs of the startled pitcher. It was my first official hit.

My first regular fielder’s glove was an Eddie Joost model. Joost was a long-time shortstop for the (then) Philadelphia Athletics, one of the first players to wear glasses in the field.

I played baseball or whatever permutation of it was available to me for as long as there was a game I could play.  I was 65 when I played my most recent game, a slow-pitch co-ed softball game. I took a two-hopper down the third base line and threw a strike over the shoulder of the runner trying to score, right to the catcher for an easy tag.   I say “most recent” because if Jefferson City had a league for fat old men over 75, I’d get my glove and buy some new spikes and I’d be out there smelling the dust mixed with lime, feeling and hearing the ball hit my glove, hearing more than feeling a solid contact with the bat, and going home sweaty with dust-gray socks except for the areas covered by my shoes which was still white.

I love the game.  And thank you, Mr. DeWitt, I will not be more “engaged” in the game because I can bet on it.

I tell you what would “engage” me more, sir—–

You need to call the casino company whose brand carries the television broadcasts of the Cardinals and Royals and tell that company to get the games back on Dish TV.  This will be the third season Nancy and I have had to fill our evenings binge-watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy instead of watching men play the boy’s game I’ve never outgrown.

What also would “engage” me more would be if The Game was made better.  Columnist George F. Will, whose writings I enjoy although he is a dyed-in-the-wool Cubs fan, wrote a column on March 16th, skewering what the game has become—-and frankly, what it has become can’t be fixed by letting somebody bet on whether one of our teams gets more than six hits tonight.

Will complained that games have gotten longer “but with fewer balls in play.”  He noted that more than one-third of all at-bats “result in strikeouts, walks or home runs, which are four seconds of flying ball followed by the batter’s jog.”

“Longer games with less action,” he says, are an atrocious recipe for an entertainment business.

He is correct.  Too much of the game involves only three players. The pitcher and catcher and the hitter.

Sometimes as I listen to my protégé John Rooney’s radio broadcasts of Cardinals games, I think there are only three players involved—the pitcher, catcher, and the batter who often doesn’t try to beat the shift by going the other way or laying down a bunt.

Will points out there were 1,070 fewer stolen bases last year than a decade earlier and suggests,  “If the MLB’s attendance is going to get back to its peak of 80 million fans in 2007, it must restore the energy of the game as it was….”

I once watched the Cardinals and the Phillies play a doubleheader. The two games lasted a TOTAL of four hours, two minutes.  Bob Gibson and Ray Culp plus two relievers in first game won by the Cardinals 5-1 in 2:08.  Ray Washburn and Jim Bunning plus a reliever in game two, won by the Cardinals 1-0 in 1:54.

Will cites what arguably was the greatest World Series game ever played, Pittsburgh’s 10-9 win over the Yankees in World Series game 7, in 1960.  That’s the Bill Mazerowski walk-off homer game played in 2:36. Nobody struck out.  By contrast, he says, the SHORTEST game in last year’s World Series, won by the Astros over the Braves 7-2, lasted three hours-11 minutes. The game had 23 strikeouts, “45 percent of all outs,” he noted.

Betting might increase involvement but if engagement is a goal, give the audience something more than seven guys standing around holding their gloves while two multi-millionaires play catch and a third one takes mighty swings or looks at pitches go by while waiting to see if he can hit the ball over the fence.

It’s The Game—not the bet—that will increase the engagement with fans. And those who love The Game as I do might be excused for worrying that DeWitt’s condescending attitude ignores the apparent hypocrisy of Hall of Fame bans for Pete Rose and Joe Jackson as baseball crawls deeper under the covers with gamblers.

Legal sports wagering is coming to Missouri. But pretentions of it making The Game in some way better are nothing more than misplaced, self-serving platitudes.