How many strikes?

If Brad Jerbic set the betting lines at a local sports book, he would have been fired years ago.

Fortunately for Mr. Jerbic, he's city attorney for Las Vegas municipal government. The City Council not only has a high tolerance for ignoring trends, it actually encourages it.

Over the years, Mr. Jerbic has brought to the council too many unconstitutional ordinances to count. Most of them have attempted to regulate protected expression at the Fremont Street Experience by cracking down on soliciting, leafleting, loitering, street entertainment and any other activity businesses under the downtown canopy find undesirable.

Every single one of those ordinances has been challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada and thrown out. Federal courts have held, time and again, that the Fremont Street Experience is a public forum, and as such, those who enter it enjoy First Amendment protections.

Mr. Jerbic's latest ordinance, forwarded out of a council subcommittee Tuesday, establishes blatantly unconstitutional "free expression zones" next to the pedestrian mall. As we pointed out July 7: If engaging in protected speech on one side of a painted line is deemed OK by the government, but doing the same thing on the other side of the line is a crime, then speech really isn't free at all, is it?

But one of the more mind-boggling provisions of the ordinance bans -- get this -- Hula-Hooping. Mr. Jerbic says someone was renting Hula-Hoops to Fremont Street visitors, and tourists engaged in the eye-catching exercise created obstacles for other patrons.

But Maggie McLetchie, an ACLU staff attorney, correctly points out that blocking traffic and aggressive soliciting are already illegal. "This case, in some iteration, has been litigated for a decade and a half," Ms. McLetchie said. "We've been around the block so many times," with the ACLU collecting more than $250,000 in legal fees from the Fremont Street Experience in winning all its challenges.

Give it up, Mr. Jerbic. This latest ordinance is a loser, too.