The American Spectator

Three cheers for Ms. Fabrizio for her timely insight and candor. She is simply stating what many of us unwashed lost in the outback are beginning to actually understand, but it goes far beyond the issue of the nanny state. Many of us truly believe the federal government now exists only for two reasons — first to make everything against the law and then to use those laws to take everything we have.

Lest one wants to automatically label me a whack job for believing this, I give you as an example of this the recent U.S. Supreme Court rule giving local governments the right to take by eminent domain any property they wished for any reason.

The credit card law is just another step in the process to outlaw something else we like, and choose of our own free will, to do — and that is to gamble on line, with our own money, on our own time and from the friendly confines of our home.

But the credit card ban is only a small part of the ends to which the federal government will go to stop us from betting. The next chapter in this story was written at the Dallas airport on Monday when the FBI grabbed a citizen of the United Kingdom as he was changing planes on his way from London to San Jose, Costa Rica.

I am not a lawyer but neither am I stupid and my limited knowledge of the world is ruled by my personal understanding of right and wrong — and both do exist, contrary to the political correct view that everything floats around in an area colored gray. And something is dreadfully wrong when the federal government can grab the citizen of another company as he changes planes and lock him up on charges related to offshore bookmaking.

On Monday David Carruthers, the chief executive officer of the off-shore sports book, BetOnSports, and his wife were detained by the FBI. Carruthers was then arrested on an indictment handed down by a group of well-intentioned, but air-headed and mislead hillbillies serving on a grand jury in Missouri.

Carruthers was given a 10-minute hearing in Fort Worth before a federal magistrate who ordered him held in jail until Friday when a detention hearing will be held.

BetOnSports is based in England and is traded there on the stock exchange. This is a legitimate company, and its financial report for the fiscal year ending February 5 showed it handled $1.77 billion in bets for the last year and had a profit of $20.1 million.

The indictment of Carruthers and ten others connected to the firm were brought on the grounds that BetOnSports accepted wagers from bettors in the United States, which this grand jury was told is against the law. Oh, yes, BetOnSports also claimed to be “legal and licensed,” also labeled a crime.

But there is far more to this story.

The federal government brought this case for only one reason — because it could and that’s it. The guy who said any D.A. worth his salt could get a ham sandwich indicted knew about what he spoke.

There are so many legal issues involved here that one hardly knows where to begin, and the most important of them is that of jurisdiction, i.e. what jurisdiction does the United States government have over a legal and licensed English firm operating out of Costa Rica?

Then, there is the shaky position of the federal government, which contends that all on-line wagering is a violation of the so-called Wire Act that went on the books back in the 1950s. The Wire Act, which prohibits gambling activities across state lines, was written for one basic purpose — to stop organized crime layoff betting. It was never intended to address any other issue.