So Michael Jordan owns the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats now. This is exciting for the people of Charlotte because if all of the team owners got together for a pick-up game, theirs would definitely win. The move hasn’t been without criticism, though, with the main one being that Jordan didn’t make a ton of great decisions as GM of the Washington Wizards (including his bad idea to come out of retirement and play for them). There has also been a rather muted protest about the NBA letting a known compulsive gambler own a team.

I think the NBA should let anyone own a team who is willing to pay for it, since America is a free country, but it does bring up an interesting question. Major League Baseball banned Pete Rose from the league for life because of his gambling habits when he was managing the Reds, though it was never proved that he bet on any of his team’s games. He is not even allowed in the Hall of Fame, despite his accomplishments as a player. Now that the world knows of Jordan’s compulsive gambling habits, which was largely kept quiet during his playing days, how does the NBA feel about him owning a team?

There are a lot of reasons to be for or against sports betting, but the biggest concern among most people is the integrity of the game. People worry that if enough money is involved, the games could be fixed. We’ve all seen the movies where a gangster walks up to a boxer and informs him that he’s going to take a dive. If you don’t think that organized crime has its hands all over the boxing profession, then you’re naïve.

But while many people don’t see boxing as legitimate for that reason, look at the other sports. Baseball had the Black Sox Scandal, when Chicago threw the 1919 World Series, resulting in eight players being banned for life. The NBA for years had endured conspiracy theories that the powers that be made sure certain teams (especially the Bulls and Lakers) made it to the championship games and certain players (such as Jordan) always got special treatment from the refs. And then came Tim Donaghy, the NBA referee who was convicted in a gambling scandal that involved, you guessed it, organized crime. I’m fairly certain that if Donaghy one day wanted to own an NBA team, the league would say no. So why does Jordan get a pass? No one has ever proved that he bet on his own team, though the same can be said for Rose.

And I guess the bigger question is this: Should sports betting be allowed or not? For the aforementioned reasons, many sports fans support a ban on sports betting, though doesn’t everyone love those Super Bowl office pools and filling out your Tournament brackets? In Europe, sports betting is common for their major sports, including soccer, and to my knowledge there has been no cheating scandal (someone please correct me if I’m wrong). And in the United States, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 makes sports betting illegal, with the exception of jai alai and horse and dog racing. The pari-mutuel racing, of course, would be pointless without betting, but the jai alai exemption seems a bit strange.

What is stranger, though, is that the law also doesn’t apply to sports lotteries in Delaware and Oregon and sports pools in Nevada. Las Vegas has a thriving sports betting industry. So is sports betting wrong and dangerous unless it’s done in Nevada? Maybe we’re supposed to think that sports betting is wrong and dangerous if it’s not being regulated by the government, so they can “protect” us, but if you think that government involvement in an industry reduces corruption, then you have way too much faith in the government (and you probably haven’t paid attention to any other their dealings with unions and lobbyists). So if government involvement doesn’t give it more integrity than involvement with the Corleone family (some would say that the federal government is actually organized crime), that brings us back to the original question: Is sports betting okay or not?

You can only keep Americans in the dark for so long. Sure, you can fool us with propaganda and lies for a while, but Americans are resourceful people with access to a wealth of information from the internet, newspapers, online blogs (*ahem*), talk radio, Youtube, and more.

For that reason, only 6% of Americans still believe that President Obama’s “stimulus” bill has helped the economy. Only 19% of Americans believe that Bigfoot exists and only 6% of Americans believe that the moon landing was faked. People are resourceful and they eventually figure things out.

What about online gambling? Despite campaigning by the Department of Justice and other groups to convince people otherwise, there is no federal ban on online gambling. Neither the Wire Act nor the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) bans online gambling, with the exception of sports betting.

Until recently, however, the common belief among Americans was that online gambling in any form was illegal. The number people who feel that way, though, is dropping. In 2007, it was as low as 41% and earlier this year it was only 37%, according to a survey by Canadian group Ipsos Reid.

So what does this mean? It means that people are waking up and learning about their rights. They are learning what they are allowed to do and what they are not allowed to do. Americans don’t like the government or anyone else telling them what to do and by educating themselves, they are empowering themselves.

The same survey shows that 55% of Americans would like a federal regulation of online casinos to ensure their safety while 45% would prefer the regulation be done by each individual state.

Those lovable lunatics at the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are now going after Mike Tyson. It’s not for anything you might think, like operating an underground pigeon fighting ring or biting their heads off. They’re mad because he races pigeons.

Seriously. Mike Tyson is a brute well known for sexual assault, biting the ears off his opponents, threatening to cannibalize his opponents’ children and getting a weird tribal tattoo on his face, so I wouldn’t put anything past him, but from all reports I’ve heard the man is a genuine animal-lover who owns and cares for hundreds of pigeons. That’s why he has a new show on Animal Planet called Take on Tyson, where he will race pigeons, which Tyson claims is his first love, before beating the pulp out of people for money.

So what’s PETA’s problem? According to those crazy critter-lovers, “Tyson’s claim to care about pigeons is rather incredulous given that he chooses to tout using them in a ‘sport’ that – like horseracing — exposes them to danger and death.” In case you’re wondering, PETA released that in a statement, so they actually had time to plan out that response rather than being cornered with a question about pigeons.

So the reality-challenged folks at PETA think that pigeon racing is bad because it exposes them to danger and death? For the uninitiated, this is basically what pigeon racing entails: releasing pigeons and letting them fly through the air. Basically, it’s exactly what pigeons do in their regular, day-to-day life, except that they’re competing against others, even if they don’t know it. If flying is too dangerous for pigeons, does PETA suggest a massive campaign to clip all of their wings? Something tells me they’d be against that.

The fur-hating fruitcakes were unable to block Tyson’s televised pigeon race, so now they have a new tactic. They want Tyson and everyone involved arrested. On what charge, you ask? Illegal gambling, of course. This was naturally a surprise to Tyson and the folks at Animal Planet, since there was no betting on the pigeon races.

PETA, however, has always had a distorted view of reality. According to their crackpot team of legal experts, because Tyson is being paid for the show, he is profiting from gambling on the pigeons. Betting on animal racing is illegal in New York state, where Tyson lives and the series is being shot, but getting paid to appear on a show where you race pigeons isn’t the same as profiting off of pigeon gambling. Where PETA’s case loses its credibility is in the fact that no one is betting on any outcomes of the races. Instead, Tyson is simply being paid to appear on a TV show and is paid the same no matter what happens with the birds. Regardless, the charge is currently being investigated by Brooklyn’s District Attorney.

Two Republican senators have spoken out against attempts to legalize online sports betting in New Jersey and Delaware. Senators Orrin Hatch from Utah and Jon Kyl from Arizona sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder expressing their concerns about both states making sports betting more widespread. New Jersey and Delaware, seeking more revenue in a struggling economy, are seeking to overturn the Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1991 (PASPA).

In the letter to Holder, the senators wrote that the efforts of both states “threaten to greatly expand sports gambling and undermine the integrity of our national pastimes.” The senators urged the Department of Justice to enforce the current prohibition against sports betting and protect the integrity of the sports.

Joe Brennan, chairman of the Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association (iMEGA), which is challenging the ban on sports betting, disagrees with the senators, as you might expect. He stated that while he respected their desire to uphold the integrity of the nation’s sports, not legalizing and regulating sports betting leaves a lot of money on the table. He added that the current sports betting market is “unprotected, with no oversight, and at the mercy of criminal elements that are far more able to affect the outcome of a game than if the state stepped in and took the business away from them.”

While his argument makes sense on the surface, saying that the government getting involved with sports betting would rid it of corruption and the criminal element is laughable. Anyone who has been at odds with the government, especially the Obama administration, would probably rather deal with the mafia. In fact, some would consider the Social Security Administration, the Department of Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service and more to be nothing more than legal forms of organized crime. In other words, handing sports betting over from shady bookies to the government would only be trading low-level criminals for more powerful criminals with state and federal backing. So who would you rather deal with?