Welcome to the Gambler's Channel.
Through your television set, you can bet on 12 races an hour, day and night. Just punch in your wager on the remote-control keypad and watch your money disappear as your choice trails the pack. If you get bored, we have other ways to separate you from your cash. Stay tuned for our 24-hour, in-home keno TV game. Soon to come: In-home blackjack, craps and roulette.
Remember our motto -- We'll take your money any way we can get it.
Fact is proving stranger than fiction. We haven't yet reached the stage of a Gambling Channel piped into our homes, but interactive communications has now reached the point where the Maryland Racing Commission wants to set up experimental in-home wagering and a horse-racing channel. It is a plan fraught with dangers. It also raises serious legal, ethical and moral concerns.
Even Attorney General J. Joseph Curran, who failed to intercede when the Schaefer administration arbitrarily expand state-sanctioned gambling to include keno, says in-home racing goes too far, too fast. It could be illegal, he says, going way beyond what the General Assembly contemplated when it permitted "telephone betting."
And, Attorney General Curran noted, "Accessibility via the mere flicking of a switch in one's living room or den, together with the instantaneous visual gratification provided to a prospective better, suggests the wholesale proliferation of state sanctioned gambling with all of the hazards and detriments attendant. . ."
Indeed, the racing commission could be harming the racing industry. Interactive betting from home would weaken incentives to come to the track. It would also set the stage for more exotic forms of in-home gambling, leaving racing in the dust.
It raises serious policy concerns about the purpose of the racing commission. Is it to stimulate gambling, day and night, in bars and in homes? Or is the purpose to improve the horse-racing industry in Maryland by ensuring the quality of on-site racing and wagering at designated tracks?
Gov.-elect Parris N. Glendening should waste no time expressing his strong opposition to this misconceived plan. So should legislative leaders, who should insist on General Assembly approval of such an ambitious extension of legalized gambling. If the racing commission wants to put another nail in the coffin of live racing at Laurel and Pimlico, wagering via the home television is the way to go.