Gambling

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to bury the notion of Governing. It has been suffering the ravages of age for some time now, so it perhaps would not be surprised that people gather to bury rather than praise it. And yet the site of its recent demise, Annapolis, is the real surprise. If Governing is used to being maligned in certain places — the offices of the Cato Institute perhaps, or the kind of tea parties that are more Rush Limbaugh than Earl Grey — it tended to find haven amid the red brick and marble halls of Maryland's capitol.

What's the rush? For years, gambling was so important to legislators from Maryland's majority party that it was better to spite a Republican governor than to allow it. Now delegates and senators will likely be asked to modify, in a few days of a special session next month, what took years of political infighting, bad policy and a constitutional amendment to give us: the crony capitalist disaster that is Maryland gaming law. Shouldn't amending a...

Here is an editorial from the Boston Globe, which was published Sunday.A NEW national report on gambling has sound advice, making it hard to ignore gambling's many problems, from addiction and youth gambling to the industry's financial hold on elected officials. We hope the findings will not go unheeded.Issued by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, the report observes that too many governments make patchwork decisions about gambling. Instead of hasty action, the commission suggests, there should be a moratorium on any expansion of gambling so policy makers can take time to think.

As the new year begins, you can make a bet on one thing: Nineteen ninety-five will be the Year of the Gambler in Maryland. Everywhere you look, folks are trying to expand legalized gambling.Many of the state's biggest lobbyists have signed up high-powered gambling companies interested in getting permission to line the Chesapeake Bay and all its tributary shoreline with casinos containing roulette wheels, craps games, blackjack and halls filled with slot machines. They are expected to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to win over the legislature and the governor.

Baltimore County vice detectives are having a tough time making gambling convictions stick to the owner of a vending company whose video poker machines were the source of illegal payoffs at two Woodlawn taverns.So far, Anthony Raymond Paskiewicz, the owner of Columbia Vending, is 2-0 vs. the police. Twice in the past two weeks, he has successfully appealed guilty findings from District Court to Circuit Court, although his company has been convicted several times.Mr. Paskiewicz's latest legal gambit paid off Tuesday.

The whole country is giddy over gambling. More than 20 states have casinos, 37 states offer lotteries and five have started riverboat gambling. The mayors of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., want to join the parade. Texas is eyeing casinos on the Gulf of Mexico.Native Americans have been especially adept at capitalizing on this craze. More than half the nation's Indian reservations have legalized gaming, bringing in $6 billion in business each year. The Mashantucket Pequot tribe, with a scant 200 members, raked in profits of $20 million in June from one Connecticut casino.

Maryland is getting hooked on gambling. This state's addiction to games of chance is becoming so ingrained that it's scary. Off-track betting parlors springing up. Lotto machines in over 1,000 locations. Casino gambling throughout Prince George's County. Tip jars in Western Maryland. Slots on the Eastern Shore. And the ubiquitous -- and usually illegal -- electronic poker machines in taverns and food stores.Yet senators and delegates in Annapolis are eager to close their eyes to the possible corruption and misdeeds taking place.

Good for Sen. Dick Lugar. While other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are competing with one another in fervency on the abortion issue, the right-to-life, anti-abortion Indiana senator has assailed the nation's gambling craze as a phenomenon that undermines "Cal Ripken values of hard work, patience, human achievement and personal responsibility."Mr. Lugar's message should hit home in Maryland because he attacked both state-sponsored lotteries which proclaim that "wealth is only a play away" and casinos that lead to "sharp increases in organized crime activities, prostitution, illegal drugs, family abuse, personal bankruptcy, divorce, pathological gambling and suicide."

Harper's Ferry, W.Va. -- IN DEADWOOD, S.D., where in 1876 Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back during a poker game while holding a hand of aces and eights, gambling was re-introduced in 1989. Despite a betting limit of $5, the amount wagered by tourists and other suckers in the once-moribund town has already passed a third of a billion dollars.That's only for openers. South Dakota's state lottery, reaching for the youth market, has also invested in video games, the modern equivalent of state-sponsored slot machines.