Saturday, April 26, 2025 | Baltimore, MD
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Commentary

Opinion: Washington Gas loves its customers too much for their own good

With winter coming on, Washington Gas is offering its Maryland customers rebates if they buy new gas appliances, including home heating equipment (up to $805) and water heaters (up to $460). What they don’t tell you is that this is a terrible deal. Customers will be able to get far bigger incentives if they wait until January and buy electric equipment instead. Under the just-passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Uncle Sam will provide tax credits of up to $2,000 per year for electric heat pumps that provide both heating and air conditioning as well as heat pump water heaters. For lower-income customers, the incentives are even greater — up to $8,000 for a heat pump — and will be available as up-front rebates.

Bunch: Yes, the museums honoring women and Latinos belong on the National Mall

Since the red sandstone “Castle” was completed in 1855, the Smithsonian has been a fixture on the National Mall. First envisioned by Pierre L’Enfant, the Mall has come to embody both the nation’s character and ideals. What started as a marshy lowland has become the most-visited place in the National Park System, inviting people from across the country and around the world to better understand American democracy, and to experience the history and culture of this richly diverse nation. The challenge ahead is to reimagine a Mall that tells the full American story.

Nancy Pelosi might represent California but she’s always Baltimore’s Italian auntie to me

It’s always tickled me whenever media folks characterized Nancy Pelosi as some champagne-sipping Northern California limousine liberal. You can take the girl out of Baltimore, but you can never take the stretched-voweled, in-your-face, proudly extra Baltimore out of the girl. And make no mistake — Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi is, as the ladies down the street might say, super-duper Bawlmer, hon.

Dan Rodricks: Bridges, clean water, two bay islands and Highway to Nowhere on Maryland’s infrastructure to-do list

I promise not to mention Donald Trump in this column. I’ll refer to him as “Florida man,” as the New York Post did the other day, after he claimed that he will again run for president. (I say “claimed” because it’s hard to believe anything Florida man says.) A point the pundits have missed in discussing Florida man’s waning influence: It really started a year ago, when he failed to get Republicans in Congress to kill the $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill.

Read More: Baltimore Sun
Silver and Red: Can Baltimore ever catch up with D.C. on public transit?

People living in the Baltimore area can only marvel at this month’s opening of the Silver Line, the $3 billion, 11.5-mile extension of the Washington, D.C., Metrorail from Reston to Dulles International Airport and beyond to Ashburn. The project was four years delayed and substantially over budget, but the boost to already-affluent Loudon County is unmistakable.

Read More: Baltimore Sun
Nancy Pelosi conquered the male-dominated world of politics

Certain images from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s nearly two decades of leading House Democrats stand out. There is Ms. Pelosi beaming as she called up to the dais all the children who had accompanied their parents to the House chamber, having them stand with her as she reclaimed the speaker’s gavel in 2019. There is Ms. Pelosi in the White House surrounded by male congressional leaders and top military officials as she stood up across the table and pointed her finger toward a stunned President Donald Trump. But the image that perhaps best sums up Ms. Pelosi is the footage of her on Jan. 6, 2021

We argue over the right to end pregnancy, but who’s fighting for the right to begin pregnancy?

My fifth time going through a fertility surgery was when it hit me that I might never have children. I was 39, and each cycle was the same: unsuccessful. My eggs — which I was told were both low quality and quantity — never even made it to the stage where they could be implanted back into me as the beginning of life. I’d wanted children for years, less as a concrete goal than as a theoretical desire, something that I thought would happen once I found a partner I loved and managed my career.

Read More: Baltimore Sun
Sorry, kids, I shouldn’t have doubted your turning out to vote

Dear Millennials and Generation Z-ers: I’m sorry. I should have believed in you. Ever since I started writing children’s books on civics more than 20 years ago, I’ve talked with you in schools, in libraries, and at book fairs. I’ve taken your questions about government and tried to answer them. I’ve known that you want to learn how government works and why. If something doesn’t seem right or fair, you want to know why not and try to fix it.

Read More: Baltimore Sun
Charles M. Blow: Ode to Stacey Abrams

As the Bible tells the story, Moses delivers his people from bondage and to the “promised land,” but even with all his efforts, he is not allowed to enter. He must gaze upon it from a distance. This, I fear, is the story of Stacey Abrams. She built the huge voter registration and turnout machine that helped Joe Biden carry Georgia in 2020 and helped the state elect its first Jewish and Black senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, giving Democrats control of the Senate.

Read More: Baltimore Sun
Extending the student loan moratorium (again) is a terrible idea

Allowing 35 million Americans to delay paying their federal student loans was a questionable policy when it began in March 2020 in the depth of the pandemic crisis. It’s a terrible idea now. The White House should not extend the student-loan moratorium, as The Post has reported it is considering doing when it expires at the end of the year. Such a move would be the eighth time the debt freeze has been prolonged.

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