Commentary

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.

I felt terrified entering the McDonald’s. An armed guard in full military gear stood at the door, holding an Uzi — a fully automatic machine gun. It was 2004, in Tel Aviv, Israel. The second intifada, or uprising, was ongoing and there had been a recent bombing at a restaurant popular with Americans. The guard was hired to make patrons feel safer, but his presence had the opposite effect. It felt like a war zone. Empty tables told me I was not alone in this feeling. I just left.

Every Sunday morning, Dennis Slaughter’s cousin sets him up to sell copies of The Baltimore Sun on a concrete median near a traffic light in Southwest Baltimore. Neither Slaughter nor his cousin, an independent contractor, work for the newspaper; the choice of sales location is theirs. In Slaughter’s case, it’s the four-foot-wide median on the stretch of U.S. 40 known as Edmondson Avenue.