this is one of the best overviews on the history of gambling in the US and it takes it right through the fundies and Abramoff and the GOP. Since casinos are still springing up all over the countryside, you might want to take a look:
Sin Cities on a Hill
How legalized gambling moved from the Strip to Main Street.
Greg Beato
Frank Wolf, a 13-term Republican congressman from Virginia, is angry at President Bush, at Republicans in general, and at his fellow mainline Presbyterians. None of them, he charges, is doing enough to combat the proliferation of state-sanctioned gambling in America. As Wolf delivers his speech at the annual conference of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the 200 or so concerned citizens in the audience murmur their assent.
Outside the Sheraton Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, rain is pouring in nearly biblical quantities. Inside, Wolf is accusing gambling of “tearing families apart.” It’s exploiting the poor, he says. Preying on the elderly. Corrupting the young. Unduly influencing elected officials. As he speaks, he punches at the air with his right fist. He’s exasperated by President Bush’s refusal to place a moratorium on the expansion of Indian gambling. He’s disgusted by once-honorable D.C. law firms that proudly list gambling interests among their clients. He can’t believe that the casinos destroyed by Hurricane Katrina may qualify for millions of dollars in tax breaks as part of the Bush administration’s plan to spur redevelopment on the Gulf Coast.
Wolf isn’t telling the people assembled here anything they don’t already know, but they hang on his words nonetheless. He’s a congressman, after all, and he gets it. He believes, like they believe, that legalized gambling, pushed on the public by cash-starved states, is a major threat to America.
Outside this room, that belief is less common. Nearly a decade ago, Congress funded the National Gambling Impact Study Commission to determine the economic and social consequences of legal gambling, and in 1999, after two years of study, the commission concluded that it was time “to consider a pause in the expansion of gambling.” And perhaps for a moment somewhere, such a pause was considered. But only for a moment. Then four more states introduced lotteries, and the number of Indian casinos in the country rose from around 160 to approximately 400. Annual visits to commercial casinos nearly doubled, jumping from 162.4 million in 1999 to 319 million in 2004. Seventeen U.S. casino markets, covering every region of the country, recorded more than $500 million in gross gaming revenues. Today Utah and Hawaii are the only states where no form of gambling is legal.
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http://www.reason.com/0605/fe.gb.sin.shtml