ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – A new poll finds most Americans oppose Internet and half oppose sports betting, but many have gambled themselves at a casino.
The Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll found two-thirds of those surveyed oppose changing the law to allow bets to be placed over the Internet, and 53 percent oppose allowing bets on the outcome of professional or college sporting events.
Yet the poll also found 62 percent of those surveyed have gambled at a casino at least once. One in three respondents said they or someone in their household had visited a casino within the past year, and one in five participated in an office betting pool.
“It’s fun, it’s sociable and it’s legal, so why not?” said Mauro Muro, a 33-year-old Atlantic City resident who regularly patronizes the city’s 11 casinos. “It’s good exercise for your brain when you start calculating. You watch your numbers, and you’re always thinking.”
The telephone poll surveyed more than 1,000 people randomly chosen across the country, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Fifty-four percent of those surveyed said legalized sports betting is a bad idea because it can promote excessive gambling and can corrupt sports. But 39 percent said that because so many people bet illegally on sports already, it should be allowed and taxed by the government.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents oppose legalizing Internet betting, echoing the opinion of Sam Baker, an 81-year-old who moved to Atlantic City from Las Vegas 20 years ago.
“You can go anywhere today to gamble, so why hit bottom with the Internet?” he asked. “I like to see my money come and go right in front of me.”
New Jersey is suing U.S. Justice Department to overturn a law that restricts sports betting to only four states — Nevada, where Las Vegas sports books determine the odds for sporting events across the country; Delaware; Montana; and Oregon. Only Nevada and Delaware currently offer it.
“I’m heavily in favor of sports betting,” Muro said. “You get more into the games, you follow them more closely, and you’re more in tune with all the statistics.”
The government carved out a special exemption for New Jersey in 1992, giving it a window to decide if it wanted legal sports betting, but the state failed to enact a law that would have done so.
Poll director Peter Woolley said public opinion on sports betting could change quickly.
“Keep your eye on these numbers,” he said. “If some states allow sports betting and profit by it, other states will want to follow.”
The poll found 46 percent think casinos have a negative effect on the surrounding community, while 38 percent said they have a positive effect.
It also found Las Vegas is the first place that comes to mind when people think of gambling, with 54 percent of respondents naming it first. Atlantic City was a distant second at just 7 percent, followed by Reno, Nev., and Connecticut at 2 percent each.
In terms of perception, most major gambling resorts in the U.S. got positive ratings. Las Vegas got 49 percent positive versus 23 percent negative; Atlantic City was ranked 46 percent positive and 26 percent negative; and New Orleans scored 43 percent positive and 25 percent negative.
Other gambling destinations scoring positively were St. Louis (35 percent); Biloxi, Miss. (31 percent); and Shreveport, La. (25 percent). Other smaller markets like Connecticut, where Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun operate; Tunica, Miss., and Chicagoland in Illinois were ranked about evenly in terms of positive and negative perception, with a majority of poll respondents having no opinion of them either way.
Only Detroit got a negative rating, with 32 percent of respondents viewing the Motor City and its three casinos negatively, compared with 17 percent who viewed the city positively.
It’s no secret that many think the fierce mood of partisanship is routinely crippling Washington. While most of the fur flies between the major parties in Congress — with the president weighing in occasionally to keep his party leaders on message — this week has seen an outbreak of hostilities in a less traditional venue: between the Supreme Court and the president.
In a controversy stretching back to January’s State of the Union Address, Chief Justice John Roberts told a group of law students at the University of Alabama that President Obama’s very public dissent from the Court’s Citizens United ruling, which effectively rolled back most existing restraints on corporate funding of political campaigns, was a provocation to the court’s cherished independence.
“On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances, and the decorum,” said Roberts. “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.”
It’s true that Obama pulled few punches in characterizing the Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down just prior to the State of the Union speech.
“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama said. “Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
Some of the lawmakers on hand interrupted Obama’s remarks with cheers of support. But television cameras panned the Court members in attendance and caught Justice Samuel Alito mouthing the words “not true.”
In Washington and in public debate, response to the dust-up split down partisan lines. Conservatives took issue with Obama’s criticism of the court, and liberals decried Alito’s breach of protocol. Outside of Washington, though, recent polling has shown that the decision is widely unpopular with Americans across the ideological spectrum.
Of course, Roberts wasn’t always so hands-off with the Supreme Court. When he worked for the Reagan administration, he was an aggressive public advocate pressuring the Court and was privately highly critical of how it organized its own business.
And for all the hubbub, it’s worth recalling that smack-downs between the two branches of government, while rare, are not unheard of. In his memoir, President Clinton was critical of the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision that ended that year’s election; Nixon fumed about the Burger Court’s ruling that he couldn’t protect himself during Watergate with “executive privilege;” and way back in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt proposed an additional three justices to the Court so that he could appoint them himself and skew the Court’s decisions in favor of his New Deal proposals.
But it is somewhat rare that these battles are as public or intense as this one appears to be getting. That may be because the Court’s decision was an historic one justifying intense debate, or it may be because politics are getting more conflict-driven across the board.
Atlanta – The Obama administration has proposed using United Nations-guided principles to expand a type of zoning to coastal and even some inland waters. That’s raising concerns among fishermen that their favorite fishing holes may soon be off-limits for bait-casting. In the battle of incremental change that epitomizes the American conservation movement, many weekend anglers fear that the Obama administration’s promise to “fundamentally change” water management in the US will erode what they call the public’s “right to fish,” in turn creating economic losses for the $82 billion recreational fishing industry and a further deterioration of the American outdoorsman’s legacy. Proponents say the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force established by President Obama last June will ultimately benefit the fishing public by managing ecosystems in their entirety rather than by individual uses such as fishing, shipping, or oil exploration. “It’s not an environmentalist manifesto,” says Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in North Carolina. “It’s multiple-use planning for the environment, and making sure various uses … are sustainable.” (Amateur outdoorsmen have been fighting for their rights for years, as the Monitor reports here.)
New way to manage marine resourcesFaced with the prospect of further industrialization along America’s coasts and the Great Lakes (wind turbines and natural-gas exploration, for example), the task force is charged with putting in place a new ecosystem management process called marine spatial planning. Marine spatial planning (MSP), according to the United Nations, is “a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic, and social objectives that usually have been specified through a political process.” That kind of government-speak scares Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs at the reel-and-rod maker Shimano. Mr. Morlock points to references by the ocean task force to “one global sea” as evidence that what’s really being proposed are broad changes to America’s user-funded conservation strategy, potentially affecting even inland waters. “I suggest that the task force recommend our model to the United Nations rather than us adopting the United Nations model,” he says in a phone interview. “The American model is the best in the world, so our question is: Why seek the lowest common denominator?”
Protections for recreational fishermenMr. Obama has said he will not override protections put in place by Presidents Clinton and Bush that established recreational fishermen as a special class.
But critics still worry about the Obama administration’s ties to environmental groups that espouse “anti-use” policies that put some habitats out of reach even for rod and reel fishermen, who take only 3 percent of America’s landed catch every year. “Angling advocates point out that senior policy officials on the task force seem inclined to ally themselves with preservationists and environmental extremists who want to create ‘no fishing’ preserves, with no scientific justification,” writes ESPN.com’s Robert Montgomery. On the other hand, nonpartisan experts say the task force has already made strides in better recognizing various stakeholder groups, including recreational fishermen, and that it doesn’t intend to undermine the ability of states to manage their natural resources, as many fishermen fear. “There’s been huge progress by the task force in terms of being more inclusive in thinking about economic, ecological, social, and political concerns,” says Mr. Crowder at Duke. “The paranoia – and there is paranoia on all sides – is that the process will be captured. My hope is that mutual concern gets people to the table.” The final report of the task force is expected in late March. Congress will decide its fate, unless Obama issues an executive order establishing MSP as the law of the water.
Walmart Says Lower Sales of Ballerina Theresa Barbie Prompted the Price Cut
Walmart is raising eyebrows after cutting the price of a black Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll’s white counterpart at one store and possibly others.
A photo first posted to the humor Web site FunnyJunk.com and later to the Latino Web site Guanabee.com shows packages of Mattel’s Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Theresa dolls hanging side by side at an unidentified store. The Theresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are marked as being on sale at $3.00. The Barbies to the right of the Theresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The dolls look identical aside from their color.
Editors at Guanabee.com said the person responsible for the photo told the Web site that it was taken at a Louisiana Walmart store. The person did not return e-mails from ABCNews.com.
A Walmart spokeswoman, who could not verify the exact store shown in the photo, said that the price change on the Theresa doll was part of the chain’s efforts to clear shelf space for its new spring inventory.
“To prepare for (s)pring inventory, a number of items are marked for clearance, ” spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien said in an e-mail. “… Both are great dolls. The red price sticker indicates that this particular doll was on clearance when the photo was taken, and though both dolls were priced the same to start, one was marked down due to its lower sales to hopefully increase purchase from customers.”
“Pricing like items differently is a part of inventory management in retailing,” O’Brien said.
But critics say Walmart should have been more sensitive in its pricing choice.
“The implication of the lowering of the price is that’s devaluing the black doll,” said Thelma Dye, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem, N.Y. organization founded by pioneering psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark.
“While it’s clear that’s not what was intended, sometimes these things have collateral damage,” Dye said.
Other experts agree. Walmart could have decided “that it’s really important that we as a company don’t send a message that we value blackness less than whiteness,” said Lisa Wade, an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founder of the blog Sociological Images.
Last year, Wade posted a blog entry on another case where a black doll was apparently priced less than its white counterpart at an unidentified store. Wade said that when white dolls outsell black dolls, it’s usually because black parents are more likely than white parents to buy their children dolls of a different race.
“Most white parents wouldn’t think to buy a black doll for their child, even if they believe in equality and all those things,” she said.
Overcoming ‘Decades of Racial and Economic Subordination’
Decades after segregation and the civil rights movement, studies show Americans — both black and white — continue to internalize the heirarchical notion that lighter skin tone is considered “better than” darker, Wade said.
One landmark study revealing color hierarchies among black children took place in the 1940s. Run by the Clarks, Northside’s founders, the study asked a group of black children to choose between playing with white dolls and black dolls; 63 percent chose the white dolls.
Last year, following the inauguration of the country’s first black president, “Good Morning America” revisited the experiment. This time, at least some of the results were markedly different: of the 19 black children surveyed, 42 percent said they’d rather play with a black doll compared with 32 percent for the white doll. But when asked which doll was prettier, nearly half of the girls in the group chose the white doll.Walmart priced a dark-skinned Barbie cheaper than a light-skinned Barbie
“Black children develop perceptions about their race very early. They are not oblivious to this. There’s still that residue. There’s still the problem, the overcoming years, decades of racial and economic subordination,” Harvard University professor William Julius Wilson told “Good Morning America.”
Wade said that Walmart could have chosen to keep the dolls at equal prices in an effort not to “reproduce whatever ugly inequalities are out there.”
But Sociological Images co-author Gwen Sharp, a sociology professor at Nevada State College, said that inequality might not necessarily be what’s behind Ballerina Theresa’s lagging sales.
Black parents, she said, may simply choose black dolls whose physical features hew more closely to those of themselves and their children. Barbie has weathered critcism in the past for producing dolls that bear little resemblance to the ethnicities they represent.
“Maybe for both parents and kids, it seems more real and less symbolic of a change to have a doll that actually presents a range of attractive features rather than ‘Oh we’ve changed the skin tone slightly,’” Sharp said.
A Better Line of Black Barbies?
Last year, Barbie manufacturer Mattel debuted a new line of African American dolls, “So In Style,” designed to better resemble black women’s facial features with wider cheeks, broader noses and fuller lips.
“I wanted to make sure that the makeup and face and skin tone was true to girls in my community,” doll designer Stacey McBride-Irby said in a video on the So In Style Web site.
A Mattel spokeswoman said that the So In Style dolls have met with a “great response” and are part of the toymaker’s 2010 catalogue.
Whatever Ballerina Thesesa’s lagging sales may say about society, retail analyst Lori Wachs said Walmart may ultimately regret their pricing choice. The discount giant, which reported a quarterly profit of $4.7 billion last month, could have absorbed whatever loss it might have suffered had it kept Ballerina Theresa’s price the same as that of Ballerina Barbie.
“I fully respect retailers rights to mark things down as they see fit but I also think they need to look at the bigger picture,” Wachs said. “I think there are certain things companies have to be sensitive about and clearly this was one of them.”
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – A new poll finds most Americans oppose Internet and half oppose sports betting, but many have gambled themselves at a casino.
Atlanta – The Obama administration has proposed using United Nations-guided principles to expand a type of zoning to coastal and even some inland waters. That’s raising concerns among fishermen that their favorite fishing holes may soon be off-limits for bait-casting. In the battle of incremental change that epitomizes the American conservation movement, many weekend anglers fear that the Obama administration’s promise to “fundamentally change” water management in the US will erode what they call the public’s “right to fish,” in turn creating economic losses for the $82 billion recreational fishing industry and a further deterioration of the American outdoorsman’s legacy. Proponents say the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force established by President Obama last June will ultimately benefit the fishing public by managing ecosystems in their entirety rather than by individual uses such as fishing, shipping, or oil exploration. “It’s not an environmentalist manifesto,” says Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in North Carolina. “It’s multiple-use planning for the environment, and making sure various uses … are sustainable.” (Amateur outdoorsmen have been fighting for their rights for years, as the Monitor reports here.)
