Caesars Interactive sent Michael Cohen to Harrisburg, to educate Pennsylvania lawmakers in online gambling and demonstrate the safety features whereby underage players can be thwarted. Cohen’s presentation pleased lawmakers on both sides of the aisle but drew a squawk of protest from Mike Barley, of the Coalition Against Online Gambling, which looks suspiciously like a Sheldon Adelson stalking horse.
“When is enough enough,” Barley wailed, although we’ve never known Adelson to think there was too much gambling unless he wasn’t profiting from it. After all, this is the man who once said, “If the market sees a way into 
expanding in electronic gaming, we’ll be in it” and told the SEC, “the company is actively pursuing the possibility of developing and operating an Internet gaming site.” In fact, Las Vegas Sands ran such a site out of Alderney from 2003 to 2005, so Sheldon’s hands are far from clean on this issue.
Meanwhile, yet another online-gambling bill found its way into the Lege’s hopper. It would permit existing casinos to operate Web-gaming 
sites. It would also eliminate the requirement that patrons of Keystone State resort casinos also spend money elsewhere on-property. Larger casinos like Harrah’s Philadelphia, which paid 10 times as much for its license as did nearby Valley Forge Casino Resort, oppose this for obvious reasons, although there is a corresponding disparity in scale of what each casino can offer.
There are other provisions to the bill, as yet unknown as its full text has not been disseminated. Its authors conclude, “This proposed legislation is meant to ensure a healthy and vibrant business atmosphere for Pennsylvania’s gaming industry, while maximizing gaming revenue and the positive economic impact of gaming in the Commonwealth.”
* Now that the gaming-expansion genie is out of the bottle in the New Jersey state house, seemingly everyone is weighing in with a variant of the basic idea: one casino in northern New Jersey, three casinos and now a bipartisan proposal to put one casino in the northern tier and one in the central part of the state, bringing Monmouth Park back into contention.
“Our part of New Jersey is one of the richest areas in America,” state 
Sen. Bob Smith (D) said of his central-Jersey constituency. As for putting three casinos in the northern part of the state, Smith opined “It would be a disaster. They would out-compete each other. It’s not about a favored location; it’s about treating different regions of the state fairly.” However, first the Legislature must reach a consensus about putting a question on the November ballot; until that happens how many casinos are built and where is all so much window dressing.
* When it comes to sycophancy in Las Vegas, nobody outdoes Robin Leach — but that has not stopped a certain Michael Shulman from trying. His prose is not quite as purple as Leach’s but Shulman compensates with a persistent undercurrent of homoeroticism, if that’s your fancy.
