Commentary

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.

The latest report from the United Way, explaining the financial hardships of people with disabilities in Frederick and in Maryland generally, was disheartening, but not especially surprising. If folks consider the lives of our disabled neighbors, they probably realize that being disabled brings financial challenges. The survey showed that half of all people with disabilities in Maryland are living in financial hardship. Here in Frederick, more city residents with disabilities are struggling than those in the rest of the county. The report also showed that disabled people of color are affected disproportionately.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan carries undeniable risks. Beijing could respond by harassing U.S. Navy ships and aircraft in the area, with a distinct potential for collision or confrontation. It could seize the (largely demilitarized) Taiwanese island of Kinmen — better known to aficionados of the Cold War as Quemoy — which lies just a few miles off the Fujian coast. It could lend Moscow a hand in the war in Ukraine, perhaps by selling it the kinds of precision munitions the Russian military is reportedly running low on.

The small yet critically important Marshyhope Creek on Maryland’s Eastern Shore has been targeted for a massive salmon farming facility that poses a serious threat to its water quality and its habitats. The state’s initial attempt to permit AquaCon’s massive Federalsburg facility is grossly deficient. The start-up Norwegian company’s promises about sustainable indoor salmon farming and the economic benefits it would bring to Maryland have not panned out elsewhere in this industry. Instead, the nascent indoor salmon farming industry has been plagued by mass die-offs of fish, lackluster consumer support, and in one case a catastrophic fire that destroyed an industrial salmon production facility in Demark.

Many Montgomery County residents pride themselves on living in a progressive place. Our county government has a Climate Action Plan that promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2027 and 100 percent by 2035. Looking around at the ever-bigger SUVs that dominate the roads, you’d think this seems an implausible goal. Because transportation is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in this country, you’d imagine Montgomery County must be engaged in a massive effort to encourage walking and biking for transportation. And in another ambitious initiative, the county government has promised zero pedestrian and biker fatalities by the end of 2030. But if anything, we seem to be going backward.

The last Republican state comptroller in Maryland was one Phillips Lee Goldsborough, who served from 1898 to 1900, when William McKinley was president of the United States. So the odds definitely favor Brooke Lierman (D), the Baltimore City delegate, in the general election for comptroller this fall. Not only does Lierman have history and party registration on her side, but she’s an indefatigable campaigner brimming with ideas for the office, who is poised to make history as the first woman elected independently to a statewide position in Maryland government. That fact alone gets a lot of people excited. Lierman’s Republican opponent, Harford County Executive Barry Glassman, is the most solid and qualified GOP nominee in several generations.

Speaking at Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty initiative in Rome, Justice Samuel Alito, the author of Dobbs v. Jackson, used the event to attack foreign leaders who criticized his decision. He did so by mocking them and cracking jokes. Specifically, he said he had the honor of writing a decision that had been lambasted by “a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law…”  He then cracked, “one of these was former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but he paid the price,” referencing Johnson’s resignation.