This isn't right. Today's pitching tomorrow and Tomorrow's pitching today.

"And in that opinion, Justice Kennedy said...and I have to say this is a really masterful turn of phrase...it really just sings..."

I see lots of people saying "That's right he can do that". So presumably, since the first amendment covers free exercise of religion, a POTUS could revoke a visa and order a tourist removed for attending a worship service at a church the POTUS didn't approve of.

I'm sure Aung San Suu Kyi would have love to have seen an uprising overthrow the SLORC/SPDC back in the day. Nicolas Maduro is a disgusting thug and Maria Machado has shown great personal courage in protesting him, which is why she's a great Peace Prize recipient.

And people who resist governments are often going to want to see them overthrown. Mandela ultimately made a deal with the Apartheid government, but he was going to shed no tears if they had been overthrown in the 1970's or early 1980's.

And BTW, I'm not even THAT critical of the Left for doing it. It's a Batista-Castro or Shah-Ayatollah situation- prior governments were also terrible, just a different kind of terrible. All options are often bad options when your country careens from one bad government to another

First, the entire resistance to Maduro/Chavez is probably going to be right-coded and of course many resistors will be members or former members of the Right, but that's another way of saying the Left basically got in bed with Chavez and Maduro.

This is... a truly weird take.

Very interesting thread. You don't have to like bookies, but this did change my mind on why it makes sense to be able to ban sharps from bettingon sports.

Every time I randomly hear a Pointer Sisters record, any Pointer Sisters record, on the radio or in a public place, I am reminded that they were/are massively underrated. They never missed.

And the way to get at that is NOT to require that bookies take a bath to the smartest and most connected bettors.

In fact, a good regulator should simply not care whether anyone gets to "beat" the game. If the house always wins, that's fine. What's not fine is: 1. Problem gambling, and sites that encourage it. 2. Match fixing and insider trading.

Bottom line, I think the thinking behind this is muddled. I think people have a certain moral outrage that folks who are good enough to "beat" the games aren't allowed to do it, and they confuse that with the actual regulatory impluse here.

Second, if the sports books have to take a hit paying off big bets to insiders and sharpies, they will want to make that money back, and that means giving up whatever scrupules they currently have and going full on after compulsive gamblers to maximize "dumb" money in the pools.

First, and most obviously, it will create a massive market for insider information and insider trading. This will become an easy way for insiders to make a lot of money (probably through middlemen). The markets will be rife with sharpies and fixing will be on the increase.

Alternatively, maybe the worry is overstated and the sports books can still make money even if they have to take the sharpies' action. But that scenario is ALSO bad. For 2 reasons.

They always did that, after all, and nobody paid attention to this as this great unfairness because it was all illegal anyway and nobody thought there was a "right to beat" the illegal bookie. So this won't actually work.

The problem is backdoor Prohibition doesn't work any better the front door Prohibition. What's actually going to happen when those pools shut down? That's right, we'll just go back to massive ILLEGAL bookmaking. And the illegal bookies will of course back off winning players.

Now we finally come full circle. If that's true, why not use that as the mechanism to regulate sports bets. Make them take all comers! Make them not back off winning players! They'll just have to shut down the pools because they can't make money.

Again, this seems unfair to normies. Why shouldn't someone be able to "beat the house". But the blackjack logic takes hold at this point-- in order for the bet to be offered, the house needs to be able to win.