Commentary

The recent ruling by the Maryland Supreme Court on the state’s digital advertising tax is not the victory that some politicians in Annapolis would like Marylanders to believe. In reality, our highest court’s refusal to consider the merit of a law that has already been ruled unconstitutional is much more likely a harbinger of the law’s coming defeat.

For more than fifty years, public policy has influenced the behavior of procurement programs in both the public and private sectors. Laws and regulations guide the behavior and ensure proper consideration of diversity, equity and accessibility with various contracting sources. Public policy is the foundation for business creation, growth and economic prosperity.

Nobody asked me, but if the Pepsi sign is going to continue to be a landmark on the Jones Falls Expressway, the Pepsi people should fix it. The sign is a tattered mess. While the billion-dollar business that once bottled Pepsi is long gone from below the curvaceous JFX corridor, Baltimoreans and traffic reporters still use the sign as a reference point.

The Frederick Classical Charter School is an educational conundrum for our community — but one definitely worth solving. Students at public charter school excel academically, consistently outperforming students at the county’s public schools. Families frequently praise the teachers at the school and curriculum. That is great.

It’s somewhat of an understatement to say that the current TV landscape is a bit … anticlimactic. A lot of shows are up in the air because of the Writers Guild of America strike, as filming has shut down while the people whose words are the baseline of all the stuff you like try to get paid properly for those words.

When Michael S. Harrison was sworn in as Baltimore police commissioner in 2019 by then-Mayor Catherine Pugh, he pledged to achieve at least two things. He said he would make the city safe, while helping it meet the requirements of a court-ordered consent decree. In short, fewer murders and more constitutional policing. Four years and three months later, it was announced Thursday that he would be stepping down before the end of his five-year contract in March 2024.

These words came to me exactly 55 years from the day I first heard them: “As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and those who sought to touch him: ‘Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream things that never were and say, “Why not?”’” Those were the last words of Ted Kennedy’s elegy for his slain brother Bobby, delivered June 8, 1968, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.