Commentary

In all the grousing and near-hysteria about the young Baltimoreans who do the squeegee thing on the streets of our city, there’s been a woeful lack of listening. Talk radio listens to the squeegee haters. With its ongoing “City In Crisis” reports, Fox 45 listens to any motorist who tells of being accosted by squeegee workers. There has been some, but not much, listening to the boys and young men who wash windshields for money at busy intersections. I’ve done some, but not enough. It was after July’s fatal shooting of Timothy Reynolds, the bat-wielding motorist who went after squeegee workers in downtown Baltimore, that someone thought it time to listen to the squeegee kids, and not just a few of them.

Since that day in 1941 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that a new building to house a consolidated U.S. War Department would make the most sense situated across the river from Washington, D.C., in Virginia (and which would later be named the Pentagon), the federal government has regularly looked to the suburbs to provide space for an expanding federal government.

Colons and Cosmopolitans don’t usually go together, but a line from the “Sex and the City 2” movie popped into my mind last week while trying to coordinate the indelicate procedure of a colonoscopy. It’s in a scene where Miranda and Charlotte are in their obscenely huge Abu Dhabi vacation villa commiserating over cocktails about how hard parenting is, and how, for their sanity, they needed a break from their kids. “How do the women without help do it?” a flabbergasted Charlotte asks, and they raise a toast to those hapless, less-supported mothers before going back to their materialistic holiday of being judgmental about local customs and singing ancient Helen Reddy lyrics at unsuspecting Middle Eastern women.

It’s always safe to assume that when elected leaders have something happy to report, they proudly announce it themselves. And when the news is not so great, or potentially controversial, the duty is handed down to an underling. That was the first clue that last week’s decision to hand over State Center to the city of Baltimore for redevelopment — as revealed by Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford at the Aug. 31 Board of Public Works meeting — was not all lemon drops and sunshine. The cancellation of the $1.5 billion State Center redevelopment project, along with the abrupt discontinuation of Baltimore’s $2.9 billion Red Line light rail project in Gov. Larry Hogan’s first term, are his chief legacy to Maryland’s largest city.

When Fox News canceled Sarah Palin’s contributor contract in 2013, I wrote that it was “the end of an era.” I was, of course, wrong about that. Not only did Fox give her another contract six months later, her divisive brand of insults and misrepresentations became the template for Donald Trump and his flock of imitators in Congress, state governments and legislatures nationwide. This year, she figured she could easily get back into the game. But Alaskans, in a state that Mr. Trump won by 10 points in 2020, threw her over. Last Wednesday, in her first attempt to revive the political career she walked away from 13 years ago, Ms. Palin lost a special election to finish the late Don Young’s term in the House.