Best of the Web Today on Friday asked what I had been wondering, too. Namely, why the Powerball lottery, or any other lottery, is worth a jot ot a tittle opf news coverage:

A Lotto Nonsense
At least the clone story is more interesting than yesterday's big news. We refer, of course, to the lottery jackpot a West Virginia man won. This story was unavoidable if you were watching TV news yesterday; CNN even aired a press conference by the winner. Why is this news? It's not unusual for someone to win a lottery; indeed, the way lotteries are set up, it's a mathematical certainty that someone will eventually win. The jackpot the fellow won is a lot of money--a shade over $100 million--but it's not exactly of Bill Gates proportions. When someone becomes worth $100 million through a lifetime of honest work, that's not big national news. Why all the fuss over someone who got rich by indulging in a vice?

All this media attention to lottery winners serves only to glorify gambling. And the lottery is a bigger rip-off than any other form of legalized gambling. Innumeracy.com ran an experiment to see what would happened if it made 10,000 random selections and entered them in each of 479 drawings in the British lottery. Result: An "investment" of £4,790,000 returned just £1,375,082, which means that each £10,000 "invested" would have cost the player £7,129.

A lottery, Innumeracy.com notes, is "a tax on the poor and the stupid." The next time some liberal journalist complains about "tax cuts for the rich," consider how his colleagues in the media help enable the government to soak the poor.

Yep!