Commentary

If you own an electric car or truck, or drive a hybrid plug-in, congratulations: You’ve made it to the 1%. At the end of July, there were 52,966 EVs or hybrid plug-ins registered in Maryland. That’s just 1% of all motor vehicles across the state. It has been 25 years since the first generation of the Toyota Prius — albeit a hybrid, not a hybrid plug-in with a larger battery — came off the assembly line. Since then, there’s been immense progress in battery technology, along with greater political and cultural acceptance of the environmental need to move away from gas-powered automobiles.

It has long been clear that covid-19 school closures led to widespread learning loss, particularly in low-income communities. As some schools prepare for a new academic year, evidence is piling up that the harm was far more extensive, particularly the toll on students’ behavioral and mental health. The National Center for Education Statistics reported last month that more than 70 percent of public schools surveyed saw a rise in chronic absenteeism after the pandemic began. Nearly 60 percent experienced increased classroom disruption stemming from student misconduct, and about half found that students were more disrespectful toward teachers and staff.

On Aug. 7 the U.S. Senate passed the historic climate legislation package hammered out between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. The House followed suit on Friday, giving President Biden a huge win on one of his administration’s priorities and finally making good on his pledge to tackle climate change.

Maryland should reconsider rules that allow public universities to object to the creation of new education programs, according to a newly released report to the General Assembly. The report calls for a systemic overhaul of the Maryland Higher Education Commission. It also specifically highlighted the commission’s rules on allowing public institutions to essentially block proposals of other universities.

It took many accidents, catastrophes, misjudgments and mistakes for Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016. Two particularly important errors came from James Comey, then head of the FBI, who was excessively worried about what Trump’s supporters would think of the resolution of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. First, in July 2016, Mr. Comey broke protocol to give a news conference in which he criticized Ms. Clinton even while announcing that she’d committed no crime.

The ink is barely dry on the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates $80 billion over 10 years to help modernize IRS technology systems and provide more effective tax enforcement and collection. Yet already, Republican critics like Sen. John Thune of South Dakota are complaining that the needed funds will do little more than allow the IRS to “spend more time harassing taxpayers around this country.”

The term “long covid” came from early patients who called themselves “long-haulers” when their pandemic maladies lingered for months. It is now increasingly apparent that long covid presents a potential tidal wave of suffering — afflictions stemming from covid-19 that refuse to go away. The scope of the problem is still unknown. But a new study from the Netherlands offers important clues. In a paper published in the Lancet, Aranka Ballering and colleagues at the Lifelines Corona Research Initiative report on an effort to discover the nature and prevalence of post-covid conditions based on a large population sample.

I have never understood people who blow it — that is, people who appear to enjoy great success and have many reasons to be happy but fritter away their bliss on irrational choices and petty grievances. I have never understood the guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, then used it to dig himself into a hole. Or, to deploy a baseball metaphor — because I’m addressing the Angelos family feud today — consider the guy who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, and even then, takes too big of a lead off the bag and gets picked off. He blew it!