SEATTLE — This morning I watched as President Bush took the pulpit to instill fear into Americans by comparing Hitler's Nazi Germany and Lenin's Communist Soviet Union to the religious zealot turned terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

Apparently the president doesn't understand what the difference is between political ideologies and religious dogma; that terrorists blow themselves up to go to heaven, not to Camp David.

Personally though, I think this is great for us gamblers because all afternoon Senators from both sides of the aisle were clamoring about the speech, and defending or attacking it. This will probably keep them busy for a week of the remaining three weeks left in this session before they must break and go out to campaign for reelection. I really don't think they'll have time left to debate the Anti-gambling bill after attempting to address the many real problems facing our nation; it will more than likely whither on the vine.

The bill submitted by the House was written in a language that allowed for carve-outs for state lotteries, and the NTRA's Online Horseracing, but the Senate rewrote the language to exclude Horseracing's immunity. At this point, Senator Jon Kyl, who co-sponsors the bill with Rep. Jim Leach, began a scramble to instead launch a counter-offensive trying to redefine the thrust of the bill to disallow US citizens from being able to make deposits into Offshore accounts via credit/debit cards and the various payment solutions available today.

That approach appears to be short lived however, because last week representatives from over 5,000 small banking institutions, whose members range from New York's Metropolitan National Bank to Colorado's First National Bank, delivered a round-house punch to Senator Kyl's aspirations by outlining how it would be totally unrealistic to block electronic transactions since they'd never put the necessary tools into place when their systems were designed (Wall Street Journal article).

This news made me so happy that I decided to visit my favorite football betting spot, Sportsbook.com, and look into what the Lines were for the first week of NFL. Wow! What a difference one year makes! Sportsbook.com has completely redone their appearance and format, actually, for the first time in seven years.

Colors and designs of websites are of course all personal preferences to the individual users, but I believe that people using Sportsbook.com are going to find that the presentation is far more simplified and user-friendly than it used to be. This is true for myself, as I have used the older version and found it somewhat cluttered, and difficult to navigate, but the new Sportsbook.com is wide open and easy to use with individual category boxes for Sportsbook, Casino, Horsees, and Poker.

When I wrote Alex Czajkowski at Sportsbook.com, and asked him what prompted the change, he wrote back saying, "Sportsbook.com's website had remained relatively unchanged for the past several years, but we've got so much going on in every product category now, such as the FREE $100,000 contests and juiceless college games in the sportsbook, freerolls and tournaments in the poker room and comps flying out of the casino, that we needed a way to more effectively communicate that to customers and prospects, hence the new design."

Will I be betting at Sportsbook.com this NFL season? Well, you're probably going to have to check with your odds-maker, but I am willing to bet that the Anti-gambling bill is not going to see the light of day in the Senate this year. What I am hoping, is that recent legislation introduced by Rep. John Conyers and Rep. Christopher Cannon to create a commission that would recommend ways that the federal and state governments could potentially regulate Internet gambling comes to fruition, and the House takes a serious look at Regulation & Taxation of iGaming (Proposals to Regulate Illegal Internet Gambling).

This is what really needs to happen, and if it does, I imagine a totally new landscape for Online Gaming by 2009. At that time, Las Vegas will step up to the plate, and the Brick & Mortar Casinos will dominate the Online panorama.

Organizations that are actively campaigning to persuade the Senate not to pass the recent Anti-gambling legislation are:

The National Right For Online Gaming (NROG) - www.nrog.org

The Poker Players Alliance (PPA) - www.pokerplayersalliance.org

They both make it very easy for you to contact your Senator, so please do!

Good luck, and happy gaming.

Kurt

Editors Note: Kurt Stine is the publisher and editor of the ComKings network, which includes: PokerNewsweb, PokerAllstar, and GamingInvesting.