Before the month of May closes out let's touch one more time on that big celebrity fundraiser George Clooney held for candidate Obama on May 10. You'll recall that it was an elite Hollywood invitation only affair, however some commoners were given a chance to buy a lottery ticket with an invitation as the prize.
LA Times says 2/3 of the fundraiser money was expected to be from purchasers of the lottery ticket buyers who bought a chance to attend. However, Andrew Malcolm says it was more like half. In either circumstance, one thing was clear, there were a lot of people willing to gamble for the prize.
Furthermore, it's telling that Obama supporters are so willing to buy a chance at a glimpse of the famous.
There's an old saying that the lottery is a stupid tax. More accurately, it's a tax on people who don't understand mathematical probabilities. And most likely, those people who took the chance that they might be one of the two people selected to go to the Clooney/Obama party also regularly buy lottery tickets with fingers crossed, hoping that maybe, just this once they might get lucky. That's the hope Obama promised in 2008.
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