Commentary

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!

Does Baltimore care about squeegee kids? That’s the most important question after a driver attacked one of them and was shot dead in return last month. Everyone in cities like Baltimore knows these kids, who live in terrible poverty and stand at stoplights and street corners and wipe the windshields of passing cars. Sadly, in the wake of this tragedy, the risk is that Baltimore will double down on failed approaches that trap squeegee kids in poverty, instead of helping them escape it. This heartbreaking incident has generally divided people along two lines. The first is the most obvious: Crack down on these kids — or even lock ’em up.

With his degree from Regent University School of Law — currently ranked 142nd in the nation by U.S. News & World Report — and his claim of being a “constitutional attorney,” you’d think Dan Cox, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Maryland governor, would know about the supremacy clause. And I don’t mean “white supremacy clause” — just “supremacy clause,” as in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. It says the Constitution and constitutional laws that flow from it “shall be the supreme law of the land.” In other words, federal law trumps state law.