Commentary

While the dust isn’t quite settled from Maryland’s primary election, at least one outcome is abundantly clear: Gov. Larry Hogan, Maryland’s two-term Republican governor and an aspiring presidential candidate who continues to poll exceptionally well in his home state, just got thoroughly repudiated by voters from his own party. In the governor’s race, they rejected Mr. Hogan’s hand-picked successor, former Commerce Secretary Kelly Schulz, in favor of Dan Cox, the Donald Trump-backed, one-term delegate from Frederick County who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

As the shock wears off from the U.S. Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, many are rationally asking whether the five conservative judges warped the rule of law into the rule of the religious right. They didn’t. Why? Because Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Thomas Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett simply don’t have that much power. The Supreme Court cannot wreck our lives in a single ruling, let alone single-handedly replace the rule of law with brutalist right wing politics.

Thomas Jefferson famously declared: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Jefferson knew that local papers were vital to a thriving democracy, and that notion is as true today as it was at our nation’s beginning. Americans know it, too. They trust their local news outlets, even in this highly fractured and partisan time.

Thomas Jefferson famously declared: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Jefferson knew that local papers were vital to a thriving democracy, and that notion is as true today as it was at our nation’s beginning. Americans know it, too. They trust their local news outlets, even in this highly fractured and partisan time. Compared to national news, six in 10 Americans have more trust in local news to report on stories that affect their daily lives, and they are about twice as likely to trust local news to report on the information they need to vote in elections, like the primary held in Maryland on Tuesday.

For business owners and entrepreneurs, the world today feels particularly uncertain. We’re living in an environment, where volatile, external factors seem out of control. It is natural that business owners would primarily focus their efforts on directing what they know and what they can control — their operating company. But in a business owner’s efforts to pivot operating business, cut costs, or secure new sources of supply, there is risk they might be overlooking — the safety of their assets and ways to protect them.

About the only consolation pro-choice advocates could take in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case, removing federal protection of abortion access, is that politicians and establishment pro-life groups were almost universal in saying that women choosing to have abortions will not be prosecuted in states where the procedure is now illegal. Take the words of the anti-abortion governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, who told “ABC News” that when her state’s trigger law making abortions illegal takes effect she didn’t “believe that mothers in this situation [should] ever be prosecuted. Now doctors who knowingly violate the law, they should be prosecuted.”

Dear Maryland voters, Should you have confidence in casting your ballot and having it counted correctly when you go to the polls for Tuesday’s primary election – and in November? Yes! Storming State Capitols, a new study from the Democracy Initiative Education Fund, ranks Maryland as second out of 51 jurisdictions across a comprehensive set of indices which assess the voting experience. These include voter registration, early voting, absentee and in-person voting, ballot acceptance, election administration, and other measures.

Everyone deserves a safe place to live, work and play. But a recent decision has endangered that right in our Baltimore community. The Baltimore City Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals (BMZA) recently decided to allow a human crematorium to be built on the property of Vaughn Greene Funeral Home on York Road, importing bodies from around the region to be cremated, putting the health and safety of area residents at risk.