Pen-Elayne on the Web

The One Cool Thing About William Bennett...

...is that his wife spells her name correctly. :)

In speaking of the whole hypocritical-Bennett mess, one blogger (can't remember who at the moment, as I'm very sleep-deprived; Christian went somewhere in a taxi at 3:30 AM and Jenny got up at 6:45 AM and, as relatively quiet as they are compared with the idiots who lived upstairs before them, any movement in the wee hours will always wake me up) mentioned surprise that rich people even bother to play the slots. He shouldn't be astonished at all. My parents are fairly well off (not Bennett level, certainly, but retired in comfort), live in Vegas in the wintertime and near Atlantic City in the summertime so they're at the casinos fairly often, and it's almost exclusively nickel poker and cheap buffets for them. Now okay, they're not gambling addicts, they just do it for fun, so maybe it's unusual for a rich addict to indulge in the penny-ante stuff. But as someone who's been dragged to just about every different kind of nickel poker machine (okay, and a few quarter ones, but mind you only the ones that "pay well"), I can affirm that they don't just appeal to the lower-income bracket.