congress is "all in" with a rag hand

Tennessee is sort of on my mind this morning. My father died fifteen years ago today. My father was born in Tennessee and my relatives from my father’s side came from Tennessee. My ex-wife’s mother came from Tennessee, as did Chris Moneymaker, who won the 2003 World Series of Poker. Moneymaker has generally been given credit for the online poker boom and the popularity of the rebirth of poker in the world and especially in the United States. Moneymaker won his way into the WSOP by means of an online satellite poker tournament. Bill Frist, also of Tennessee, was instrumental on Friday of this week, attaching legislation to ban online poker to a bill in congress to improve port security.

I have two opinions about the legislation. First, if there really are any terrorists who are not in the employ of the Bush administration—and I believe there are—they will continue to try to attack us, and congressional legislation to stop them by safeguarding our ports five years after it should have been done won’t be effective. Second, I will continue to play poker, as will most of the people currently doing it.

I took a new job a couple of months ago and I have been putting in some extra hours, so I haven’t been playing much poker lately. I haven’t won anything significant since before the WSOP in July. I was somehow lucky enough to be sought out by a headhunter who placed me with the top company in the world in our industry. I’ve been putting in a few extra hours at work so I can learn a very complex new business and so I can do my job better. Consequently, I haven’t been able to spend as much time playing poker online as I used to and I haven’t actually stared someone down across the felt, in person, in over fifteen months. You may have noted also that I haven’t had time to update my blogsite as often, lately.

We’ll get the job down to forty hours a week someday, just like we took the last job we had from a fifty-hour-a-week, uncontrolled catastrophe to a state of almost transcendental calm in less than a year. That is, unless this job continues to be as much fun, and we may want to find reasons to stay longer each day.

I can’t help but feel that once the Bush administration and the Republicans in congress drained all the money from the treasury and put it in their pockets and there was none left, they saw that money was changing hands on the poker tables and wanted to get a cut. These grafters make us long for the good old days when the conservatives were respectable men like Barry Goldwater and Dwight Eisenhower. These were men with whom we would disagree on the fringes, but we would not be concerned they would try to steal our wallet.

And, on this sunny and warm day, not all that different than the one fifteen years ago today, I can’t help but remember that my father believed that the President and Congress were all rascals. I’m beginning to think he was right.

At least that’s our take here in Jimbo’s world.