Ambiguous, unintelligent, oppressive and absurd…remember when was the last time you heard those terms all together? Yes, it’s the online gambling and poker prohibition that the U.S Government featured, a non sense witch hunt that finally seems to come to an end. While nothing has yet been decided, it seems as though the tides may be changing.

Both democrats and republicans have recently talked about improving an online gambling regulation and taxation instead of just a prohibition that affects hundreds of thousands of online players as well as poker fans and aficionados. US Representatives Steve Israel (Democrat) and Pete King (Republican) of New Jersey recently published a compelling editorial in the New York Post which outlines why they are staunch supporters of efforts to regulate and tax online gambling, instead of prohibiting it. The article, entitled "Web Gambling: Tax, Don't Ban", explains their reasoning for supporting such measures.

Banning online gambling will never stop a person from doing it, which complicates things for all the online books or poker users. People will gamble no matter what else the Government prohibits, but now they'll be participating in an activity that lacks of any legal protections that could potentially protect the customers against fraud and ensure age-verification. What it’s really doing is pushing the business off-shores, into the hands of less than savory businesses with shady practices, using the money for who-knows-what.

One of the most logical arguments that they present is that the Treasury Department simply has bigger fish to fry. The Treasury is charged with more than a few crucial jobs, including investigating counterfeit money, tracking terrorist financing, and even protecting the President. With the ban on online gambling in place, they've been forced to take on the additional burden of handling something much more trivial - people who play card games online for money at home.

With both a Democrat and a Republican co-sponsoring the bill, it really has a chance of getting pushed through - especially if votes are on the line, as they will be in 2008. Come next year, we could really see the state of US online gambling make a huge shift.