Commentary

Throughout the campaign season, Democrats across the state have proposed bold initiatives, such as building an east-west transit line in Baltimore, universal pre-K, investments in renewable energy and more. While these ideas have the potential to positively impact the state, they will need to include funding mechanisms in order to comply with the state’s balanced budget requirement. Fortunately, using other states as an example, Maryland still has room to raise significantly more revenue. A study from the Tax Foundation found that Maryland collects approximately $6,500 in state and local taxes per resident. Meanwhile, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and D.C. collect $7,000, $8,500, $9,800, and $11,300, respectively.

Former President Donald Trump’s reaction to the FBI’s execution of a search warrant Monday at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, was everything one would expect from him. That is to say, it was mostly an effort to cast himself as the innocent victim of a grand conspiracy by political opponents without a shred of corroborating evidence. He then sat back and watched his message echo across right-wing media platforms and stir the faithful. Say, where have we seen this behavior before? Just about every day since he lost reelection.

The citizens of Abingdon first learned about the Abingdon Business Park in January 2019 when a barely legible public notice appeared in the brush along Abingdon Road. We have been vehemently opposing the project ever since. We learned that the 326 wooded acres known as Abingdon Woods were zoned CI (Commercial/Industrial) in 1982. Abingdon Woods has non-tidal wetlands, a 100-year flood plain and the Ha-Ha Branch, which feeds Otter Point Creek, which feeds the Bush River, which feeds the Chesapeake Bay.

As Republicans whipped themselves up into new levels of fury on Tuesday over the execution of a search warrant at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Democrats were taking victory laps and spelling out their midterm message. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has remained unflappably upbeat about the midterms, now has good reason to tout Democrats’ prospects. Even when other issues have popped up (e.g., impeachment of Trump for inciting an attack on the U.S. Capitol), Pelosi has consistently been an advocate for running on “kitchen table” issues, as she regularly put its, such as lowering the cost of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs.

Olivia Newton-John just died. I feel like I honestly loved her, like the famous lyrics to her song. Soon enough, her sweet, innocent face will be added to the grand montage scattered across the screen when the Oscar’s present “In Memoriam,” a digital obituary showing a snippet of creative achievement. But what about when the real celebrities in our lives leave this earth — our parents? As a Gen Xer, I and the majority of my peers are sadly at a stage in our lives where the inevitable is happening — our guardians are dying.

A faddish phrase on the right is something called “the administrative state,” which refers to the federal workforce deputized by Congress to craft and enforce rules over the environment, banking, health care, product safety, mass communications, the power grid, etc. A recent profile of the Claremont Institute — which has the unenviable task of stitching together an intellectual fig leaf for Trumpism — noted that scholars there view our nation’s bureaucrats as a “fourth branch,” effectively overturning the Constitution. For some years, the right has been dressing up this vision of government as a scary horror show.