US House votes to kill Internet gamblingPrevious TopicNext Topic

There are petitions for recall for most elected officials.... senators and congressmen .... state legislators an locals.... appointed ones such as Federal Judges have to be impeached. Most Executive Branch appointees have to be fired by someone. If they're low enough on the totem pole to qualify as Civil Servants they're easier to kick upstairs or send to Nowheresville than to fire.

For what all that's worth. It ain't happening, and it ain't going to happen.

A grandstanding politician wanting to start a war on poverty, or drugs, or gambling is always going to have all the usual suspects backing him up wanting to help by sharing some of the spotlight. Preachers, do-gooders, newsmen.

This country started a war with itself over booze early last century, killed off and imprisoned thousands of people who wanted to drink, and got a lot of cops killed trying to do their jobs. Booze, a relatively clean, well lighted business, when into the hands of mobsters.

Do gooders to be thanked.

Used to be a whorehouse in LaGrange, Texas.... half the young men of central Texas had their first taste of the carnal side of things in the old Chicken Ranch. The cops turned a blind eye to it for half a century. Then Governor Dolph Briscoe decided it was an abomination on the landscape, shut it down. So now all those ladies of the night are on the street corners waving down cars in every city of Texas, doing the same thing they were doing at the Chicken Ranch, but at the cost of safety, health, tax income, and cleanliness.

Do gooders and grandstanding politicians riding the wave. Hugging themselves with the warm red glow of driving the vices underground and into the pit of drugs and disease and pimps and physical abuse. But it felt good, and now the women prisons are full of women who were street prostitutes, and will go back to being street prostitutes when they get out of a couple of years of being fed and housed at public expense.

Today it's online gambling. Maybe it will die, maybe it will become another sanctimonius war on drugs, or booze, or prostitution. Once a train gets rolling ain't any telling where it's going to reach the bottom, nor what it's going to roll through getting there.

Jack

zz top made a song about that in 1973.song is la grange off the tres hombres album.....

Rumour spreadin' a-'round in that Texas town
'bout that shack outside La Grange
and you know what I'm talkin' about.
Just let me know if you wanna go
to that home out on the range.
They gotta lotta nice girls ah.

Have mercy.
A haw, haw, haw, haw, a haw.
A haw, haw, haw.

Well, I hear it's fine if you got the time
and the ten to get yourself in.
A hmm, hmm.
And I hear it's tight most ev'ry night,
but now I might be mistaken.
hmm, hmm, hmm.

Ah have mercy.

- Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill & Frank Beard

In 1970, I wrote a feature story about that place for a national magazine.  First time anything had ever been published about it, so far as I could tell at the time.

The mag made a cover story of it.  Re-named it, "THE HALF-MILLION DOLLAR SEX-SALON THE TEXAS RANGERS 'CAN'T FIND".  Threw in a phony staged pic on the cover of a half-dressed girl picking the pocket of a john.  I'd sold all rights to the story to the mag, so I had no say in how they presented it.

Houston television commentator Norman Zindler picked up the story and made a side-show out of it... that was the beginning of the long fight that finally got the Chicken Ranch shut down, the movie and musical made.

I've always regretted that story.  I made $250 bucks on it and planted the seed that destroyed an institution.

Jack

Interesting side-bar to the above anecdote:

While I was researching that story I got to know Sheriff Jim Flournoy middling well (the guy Burt Reynolds played in the movie).  He was cooperative and helpful to me providing a lot of information.  At that point we had an understanding the piece was going to be handled in a way that was informational, truthful, non-judgemental.  Which it was when I sold it.

After it was published, Sheriff Jim was livid.  I tried to explain what happened, but he was having none of it.  Then Norman Zindler began running a series of spots about the place on Houston television.... Jim told him to get out of LaGrange and not come back.

Zindler came back a week or so later, camera rolling Sheriff Jim pistol-whipped him up-side the head and turned to the camera, "I TOLD him not to come back."

The moral to this story is you gotta be careful what you say to feature writers.  Never cooperate with them, no matter what they say they're doing, no matter how they claim they're doing it.

J

HAPPY SATURDAY.....7/15

YES, MY DEAR....the good ole boys voted themselves a very nice pay raise, using what else "taxpayers money" must be nice to stroke ones self with pay raises, year after year after year. And do it with the " hard earned money" of the  American Voter....But deny the same American Voter, a decent minimum wage increase...."the one we currently have on the books is a joke." 

And they expect to be re-elected in November 2006.....GO FIGURE

(btw) ....I'm sorry to be so late to reply, been working at the ole grind stone too hard

HAPPY SATURDAY "MY FRIEND CPS10".....

YOU just say whatever you like, I won't get "pizzed at you".....I understand. I think the whole issue should be placed on our NOVEMBER 2006 BALLOTTS.....Lets Vote on it. After all, as another LP Member stated earlier, they just voted themselves a nice pay raise.....I wonder how many of them will be around long enough to enjoy it, after we finish voting in NOVEMBER.....LOLOLOOL

PS......Sorry to be soooo longggg to respond....I can't always find the time to post ...

HAPPY SATURDAY..."ORANGE"....7/15

I like your color, especially on candy......and I say that as a compliment/w/all due respect.....

Now, that aside.....having read your postings....while I do not know your "true politics" let me say that we currently have a "KING GEORGE" in the White House who is picking up where the English King George III left off.....and #3 is probably laughing in his grave at the whole scenario.

In fact, he waisted his time and a lot of innocent lives fighting against the Colonist. If only he knew that King George Bush would carry the Torch for him, w/all the mess we are in now...#3 needn't have bothered to fight the American Revolution at all.......

HAPPY SATURDAY.....7/15

I am sorry to say I didn't see this POLL.....I would have loved to vote....after all I have been an avid voter since I was 18 years old.......

hey.....TODD.....5/17

I just had to respond to your POST...This is the absolute 1st time, since I've been a member that YOU AND I ABSOLUTELY AGREE.......on  topic...politicially....You are reading my mind on this issue and thensome.....The Politicos here in Washington under the BUSH REGIME...have let the heat and humidity melt down what little bit of intelligence they had left.As if we as Ameri Voters/Citizens haven't lost enough privacy, and rights under his control....

As I wrote earlier, this whole issue needs to go on the NOVEMBER BALLOTTS...2006. GAMBLER OR NO GAMLBER, there is too much riding on this bill, which, if passed could expand much deeper and wider, into areas of privacy we cannot or haven't even imagined.

One quick example......Those among us who as a group of co-workers play the lotteries from our jobs....think about it...the day could come when your Management could terminate all employees who pull monetary funds together in the "office kitty" to play POWERBALL, MEGAMILLIONS, or any gaming, even the FOOTBALL/BASKETBALL office gambling......Just think what "Hornets Nest" this "Bill "could blow wide open........

the republicans are trying take away everybody rights to do as they wish.this is a free country.

When you say something like that you are proving two things:

1. You have no idea what Republicans are.  Republicans stand for more freedom, not less.
2. You think Republicans drove this bill.  Yes, Republicans did vote for it.  But so did Democrats.  Everybody is equally to blame for this idiotic bill.

Anyone who is in their thirties or later did not grow up with the Internet when they were in grade school and high school.  These people, me included, literally had no way to get honest, truthful information, if you think about it, because the major source of information, besides their parents, were teachers, newspapers, news magazines, and TV news.  Every one of those sources of information is biased in a liberal way.

I do not blame anyone for having underlying tendencies to think that Republicans are racist, evil, greedy people who want only to help big businesses, because people have been basically brainwashed by all of these sources of information to believe that.

Thank God for the Internet, because there is finally a place where truthful information can finally be disseminated to people who want to learn the truth.

Democrat is the party of liberals.  Republican is the party of conservatives.  Conservative means some basic things:

1. Lower taxes -- keep more of the money you earn.
2. Smaller government -- for the basics of protecting the citizens against foreign attack and creating reasonable legislation, but not for running people's lives and not for solving every problem in society.
3. Freedom -- the God-given right to be free, and to not let others take that freedom away.

That's really it.  Everything stems from those principles.

I just thought I'd set the record straight, because those are the things that I believe our founders had in mind, and although Republicans do let us down from time to time, I believe they come the closest to embodying those principles.

.....because those are the things that I believe our founders had in mind

Freedom -- the God-given right to be free, and to not let others take that freedom away.

Yes, those are two quotes from my post.  I'm not sure why "our founders" is in huge letters, maybe because you agree?

Our history books does not tell us that our founding fathers gave every man freedom.  Were certain people excluded or were you speaking of a different kind of freedom.  Like the freedom to learn to read?

Tenaj,

I know your feelings on this race issue, but all I can say is that our wise founding fathers provided the framework to establish the only country in the world where everyone is free.  Which is a pretty remarkable achievement, considering that there did not exist a single country they could use as a template at the time.

When it comes to race I have learned that many people will not change their perspective, even if they are exposed to knowledge that what they were thinking was wrong.  I think you'd agree with me. 

And it works both ways -- those who were/are prejudiced against others, and those who were/are feeling they are being oppressed by others because of their race.  Both types thought that they were right at one time, and both types have those who refuse to see that things have changed.

How does this apply to what you said?  I believe that you are not seeing that given the way people thought at the time, they still established a history-making framework that years later would be used to liberate every soul in America.

We are the shining beacon of freedom to the rest of the world, and thanks to our founding fathers our country has provided the model of freedom for the rest of the world.  We each see, live, and breathe that concept every day, and it would not be possible, if not for the world's most courageous and brilliant men -- those who established America.