A Muggy Sunday, Nearly August

It's an overcast, quiet morning in Rockville. The family is sleeping, even the dog is trying to stretch this night out. It's been a big week, and I'm going to do something I've done before, which is to go through the open tabs in my browser and tell you what's caught my eye that I haven't mentioned here.

First, I thought you would find it interesting to see this AP story that says that the US is winning the war in Iraq.

BAGHDAD - The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government. Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost

I'm not going to say anything about that. The story doesn't really say who lost the war, who we beat.

Oh, and here was an interesting story. In California, you know, there will be a referendum to overturn a law that lets gay people marry each other. The Secretary of State there yesterday changed the wording that will go on the ballot.

When Californians get their ballot pamphlets in the mail, they'll see a new description of the proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage.

Proposition 8 on the November ballot had been described as a measure to limit marriage between a man and a woman.

But the Secretary of State's office says that description was changed to reflect a May 15 California Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

The ballot title and summary now describe the initiative as a constitutional change to eliminate the right of same sex couples to marry.

The revised language also says California could lose several tens of millions of dollars in sales taxes if same-sex marriage were banned.

Critics of the measure say the change accurately shows the initiative would take away a current right of Californians. Title for Calif. gay marriage ban changed

The nuts are howling, of course. You can read the new wording HERE.

This one caught my eye. A local MoCo Gypsy is suing the county because they won't let him tell fortunes in Bethesda.

A fortuneteller is suing Montgomery County after he learned he would not be allowed to open a shop in Bethesda because the county bans the business of forecasting the future.

Attorneys for Nick Nefedro, previously of Key West, Fla., say county officials violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and discriminated against his “Roma,” or Gypsy, culture when they refused to give him a business license. Montgomery code dating back to the early 1950s prohibits collecting cash for predicting the future.

“The underlying purpose is to prevent people from being taken advantage of, because it’s a scam,” Clifford Royalty, a lawyer in the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office, said. Fortuneteller suing to overturn Montgomery ban on forecasting

Luckily no other businesses in our county are scams. All stores sell good quality products at reasonable prices.

Skipping down...

Council Members Nancy Floreen and Marc Elrich, who both sit on the economic development committee, said there did not seem to be support for repealing the measure.

“There are a lot more important things for us to worry about,” Floreen said. Elrich said the county should not encourage businesses “that take advantage of people.”

Seems to me there is a big difference between encouraging a business and having a law that says somebody can't do something harmless. Fortune-telling is legal in all the jurisdictions around us, only Montgomery County residents are so helpless they need protection from palm-reading Gypsies taking advantage of them.

Here's a story you might miss, with some interesting implications. The LA Times (I'm skipping the first part):

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center. In study, evidence of liberal-bias bias

I saw one of McCain's tear-stained campaign emails this week, and that isn't what he's saying.

In other election news, something you might want to hear about. From The Post:

Campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Sen. John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling.

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month -- three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban -- compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May. Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling

Our Republican readers will see that as good news.

What else ... the people who live on the island of Lesbos filed a lawsuit to stop calling lesbians "lesbians." They lost.

Oh, I almost forgot this one. P.Z. Myers is a biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, and one of the current crop of strident atheists. He did something this week that caused a lot of people to grit their teeth, but I guess he made his point. He had somebody steal a consecrated Catholic communion wafer, and then broke it up using a rusty nail and threw it in the trash along with a copy of the Koran and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who is another strident atheist arguing that belief in God is delusional. Myers' point was that these are merely inanimate objects. I guess if you're trying to pick a fight with religious people this is the way to do it! BTW, I am not expressing an opinion about his acts, just relaying it to you as a significant event in the culture wars that we are part of.

Something else you might have missed -- girls do just as well as boys in math, at all ages: No Gender Differences In Math Performance.

This week, as you know, the court ruled that the referendum on the new nondiscrimination law can go forward. The judge ruled that the Citizens for a Responsible Whatever did not gather a sufficient number of signatures, but that doesn't matter because the paperwork complaining about this was not filed on time. I'm sure an appeal is being considered, but don't know what the decision will be on that. It seems to me that the legal fees for an appeal are peanuts compared to the cost of a countywide publicity campaign, and if you can stop it in court it would save everybody a lot of hassle. I think the appeal would have to focus on demonstrating that the law is not clear about when the deadline for filing is. And it's not. A ten-day deadline is specified, but nothing that says when the ten days start.

While I wrote this the clouds cleared away, it is one of those intensely muggy summer days out there. Could be thunderstorms, might hit ninety or close to it. Well, now I can x out of some of these tabs on my browser and start surfing the blogosphere all over again.