Commentary

It’s hard to get anyone to read a story about budgets. Gotta have ‘em, of course. There are plenty of analyses showing that robust local journalism prevents wasteful spending and keeps taxes low. But, oh my God, covering a budget can be boring. Painfully earnest town hall meetings are underway now, a parade of people explaining why their cause needs more money and how shortchanging them will rain damnation on us all.

I know of few politicians who openly admitted they were wrong, unless you count the ones who were the subject of presentencing reports. Pardon the generality, but I believe it’s true. Rather than express regrets, elected officials — as well as a certain member of the Angelos family of Baltimore — are more likely to double down and fight, even if the fight seems stupid. With hyper partisanship in abundance and shamelessness in short supply, admitting a mistake in public is considered weakness. A politician who reflects on a defeat and says he learned something from it? That’s rare.

Not long after all the banners, red carpeting and other trappings related to Inauguration Day in Annapolis were put away, Gov. Wes Moore and state lawmakers were quickly turning to crisis management. In the House of Delegates, legislators were grilling top officials from Maryland 529, the independent state agency that is struggling to fix the broken Maryland Prepaid College Trust, which shortchanged hundreds of families of their college savings (and whose chair would resign a day after the hearing).

The criminal culpability of Donald Trump and the sloppiness of the staffs of both Joe Biden and Mike Pence have combined to create a crisis over the handling of classified materials. The former involved Trump’s intentionally keeping large amounts of classified material at Mar-a-Lago; the latter led to small amounts of intelligence at Biden’s former office and his home, as well as in Pence’s home. Since I held high-level security clearances for more than four decades while in the U.S. Army, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State and the Department of Defense, I have something to offer on the issue of secrets and secrecy.

In Cameron Crowe’s 1992 Gen X rom-com “Singles,” winsome waitress Janet (Bridget Fonda) says she’s looking for a man who will say “bless you” when she sneezes. Instead, her boneheaded boyfriend Cliff (Matt Dillon) shoves a box of tissues at her and tells her not to get him sick. Just like that, she has a revelation. “Wait a minute. What am I doing?” Janet thinks, in voiceover. “I don’t have to be here. I could just break up with him!”

Arnita Owens-Phillips had always promised herself one thing: She would hold onto her simple brick rowhome in East Baltimore. Her son Corey used to tell her when he was young that one day he’d buy her a big house in the city. “Cause I’m your boy,” she recalled him saying. “I’m going to take care of you.” Corey died at 17 when he was struck by a car, and yet his mother always felt he had fulfilled his promise: She used money received from a settlement in his death to buy the home just south of Baltimore Cemetery.

Chester Finn, Jr., a preeminent policy expert and former member of the Kirwan Commission and the Maryland State Board of Education, once observed: “Perhaps no challenge in American schooling is as perplexing and under-examined as special education … change is desperately needed in this corner of the K-12 world.” Maryland’s more than 105,000 students in special education are shamefully under-served and under-performing. But Maryland is now positioned to change that. The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future sets the stage, and the Blueprint Accountability and Implementation Board has superbly charted a course for reform of special education that can be a model for the nation.

I’ve watched the rancor flag unfurl over Annapolis since I wrote about plans by an environmental group to put up an office building at a popular park. On Sunday night, the Chesapeake Conservancy capitulated. “In consultation with the Earl family, we have decided against building the proposed structure that we had hoped would serve as the Earl Conservation Center at Quiet Waters Park,” the Annapolis-based nonprofit said in a 9:44 p.m. statement. It’s not a surprise. The conservancy and the Earl family made the expansion of this popular park possible, orchestrating the $8 million sale to Anne Arundel County using state, federal, local and private funds.