Commentary

Here’s a bold idea. Greenbury Point, 250 acres owned by the Navy that juts into the Chesapeake Bay, should be a centerpiece of a new national park. And more, it should be part of a local network of recreational, environmental and cultural treasures covering more than 1,000 acres from Annapolis to the Bay Bridge. Ridiculous, you say? Hear me out.

The Washington region has three major airports, but only one of them–BWI–is hard to get to by transit from DC. The B30 bus route used to serve BWI, and WMATA’s ongoing Better Bus network update is a great chance to bring it back better than ever. Passengers use all three of our airports at similar rates: each airport serves around 11 million passengers every year, and DCA, BWI, and IAD are the nation’s 23rd, 25th, and 28th-busiest airports in the country, respectively.

The most selfish Americans are those who finance the endless lawsuits of the National Rifle Association and other organizations that want all guns at all times at all costs. In Maryland, they have gone to federal court to try to overturn the state’s gun licensing law and our ban on assault-style rifles. And the gun extremists fight even modest attempts to address our national public health crisis, the common good be damned.

The long and winding road to electing a president in 2024 has a most interesting, unpredictable curve. The curve is No Labels, a national movement whose organizers have branded themselves as concerned citizens working to bring America’s leaders together to develop common-sense two-party solutions to America’s biggest problems. While No Labels does not identify itself as a third political party, it may nominate a No Labels candidate for president in 2024.

The educational and emotional harm done to our children during the pandemic is still being tabulated, but the statistics in both realms continue to tell a terribly sad story. In a world with little good information and many justifiable fears, radical steps were taken in the spring of 2020 to protect the lives of our children and our school staffers and teachers.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is moving to finalize a proposed rule to ban menthol cigarettes, according to agency officials and news reports. For a variety of reasons, implementation of this decision will carry significant ramifications for policing. Responding to concerns from some law enforcement officials and civil rights activists, the FDA has stated it will enforce the prohibition only against menthol cigarette manufacturers and distributors, not individual smokers.

In the South and Southwest, and most intensely from Southern California to South Florida, a dangerous heat wave has gripped the nation, with 104 million Americans under a heat warning advisory. Records are being broken right and left: The first full week of July was recorded as the Earth’s hottest on record, and it followed the hottest June on record.

Maryland was about to settle into a nice, quiet Fourth of July weekend. And while among the chattering classes there was some anticipation for the candidate filing deadline to come on July 6, Maryland political leaders were settling in for a quiet weekend as well. This was in 1998. What followed was anything but quiet or orderly. And it’s easy to see that the chaotic events of that oft-forgotten weekend and the days that followed are still reverberating in Maryland politics today.