Commentary

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.

On July 30, 2016, Ellicott City experienced one of the worst natural disasters in its history when flash floods brought on by an intense rainstorm poured down Main Street. The floodwaters destroyed businesses, swept away vehicles and took the lives of two people. This tragedy was considered a “1,000-year flood,” meaning a flood event so severe it has only a 0.1% chance of occurring in any given year. Just two years later, another 1,000-year flood struck, taking one more life.