Author Archives: MauriciEir

Casino Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Is Shocked—Shocked!—by Online Gambling

by MauriciEir Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Casino magnate and conservative megadonor Sheldon Adelson has been on a full-scale crusade against internet gambling. An advocacy group he launched and helps to bankroll is currently at the vanguard of a lobbying effort to pass a federal ban on online wagering. The billionaire, who says he’ll spend “whatever it takes” to support the ban, claims he opposes internet gambling on “moral” grounds, because it preys on the most vulnerable members of society. What he doesn’t say is that for years his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., tested the waters on getting into this business for itself.

Adelson’s pet cause got a boost in Congress earlier this month when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced (for the second time) the Restoration of America’s Wire Act. The bill aims to strengthen the Federal Wire Act of 1961, which prohibited phone and wire-based wagering, by applying it to internet gambling—effectively banning the practice. The Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, an Adelson-launched group whose chairs include former New York Gov. George Pataki (R) and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (D), is lobbying heavily for the bill and running ads online and in print in support of the cause. On its website, the group casts online gambling as an out-of-control phenomenon that “crosses the line of responsible gaming by bringing gambling into our living rooms and onto our smartphones” by “targeting the young, the poor, and the elderly where they live.”

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Casino Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Is Shocked—Shocked!—by Online Gambling

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Have We Reached Peak Kevin?

by MauriciEir Posted on August 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the Guardian today, Paula Cocozza writes about her effort to hunt down the origin of the phrase “peak X.” She turned to linguist Mark Liberman, who runs the Language Log blog, but he says it’s a hard idiom to track:

There is some good news, though. Liberman remembers the first time he noticed the phrase. It was in 2008, when the US writer John Cole blogged that “we may have hit and passed Peak Wingnut”, a derogatory term for rightwingers.

Cole’s post is nearly six years old, but can he recall what inspired the phrase? “I came up with ‘peak wingnut’ because I was shocked,” Cole says. “The Republicans seemed to get crazier and crazier. The source of it is US blogger Kevin Drum. At the Washington Monthly, one of the things he was always talking about was peak oil.”

This comes as news to Drum, who now writes for the web magazine Mother Jones. He was not the only person writing about peak oil, of course, but he was the one Cole read. “I’m very proud of that,” he says. “I had no idea that I had been so influential.”

So now I have three items for my future obituary: creator of Friday catblogging, popularizer of the lead-crime theory, and just possibly the kinda sorta inspiration for the Peak X meme. Not bad!

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Have We Reached Peak Kevin?

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