Commentary

With the extreme heat of summer upon us, Governor Hogan’s recent veto of an energy efficiency bill failed to put in place measures to protect Maryland’s most vulnerable citizens. House Bill 108 and Senate Bill 524, which passed the General Assembly this year with broad support from Democrats and Republicans, sought to lower the disproportionately high energy burden borne by low-income Marylanders. Nearly one out of every five Maryland households qualifies as low income. Many of these residents live in buildings with inadequate weatherization and moldy or dusty air.

Health care bills are about to become far less threatening to the financial well-being of millions of Americans. The three major credit bureaus are erasing most medical debts from people’s credit reports, and the Biden administration is reducing or eliminating medical debt as a factor in government lending decisions. Here’s what you need to know about medical debt now.

Our Maryland, RCV Maryland and FairVote recently co-sponsored an online straw poll of the candidates in the Maryland Democratic primary for governor. The straw poll was open to all Marylanders, with voting taking place from June 1 to 15. Ranked choice voting (RCV) was used to yield a majority — as opposed to plurality — winner and to allow voters to rank their favorite candidates without fear of playing a spoiler role. We are now prepared to publicly report the results and lessons learned from the straw poll.

I’m fascinated by mass hysterias. To me, their histories are both mysterious and incredibly revelatory about how human beings can lose themselves, dangerously so, in groupthink, a sort of psychotic contagion. There were relatively limited and brief hysterias, like the dancing plague of 1518, when hundreds of people in the European city of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire, but now part of France) joined in a seemingly inexplicable “dancing epidemic” that lasted for weeks, as people fell dead of strokes and heart attacks.

The world sure can seem like a mess lately. At times, it can start to feel as if an unavoidable ill fate is upon us all. A great place to ponder all of this is Maryland Doom Fest, which offers an outlet from the world’s madness by taking the doom and obliterating it with bombastic hard rock and shredding metal riffs from a variety of heralded national and local acts.

Our Maryland, RCV Maryland and FairVote recently co-sponsored an online straw poll of the candidates in the Maryland Democratic primary for governor. The straw poll was open to all Marylanders, with voting taking place from June 1 to 15. Ranked choice voting (RCV) was used to yield a majority — as opposed to plurality — winner and to allow voters to rank their favorite candidates without fear of playing a spoiler role. We are now prepared to publicly report the results and lessons learned from the straw poll. There was a total of 1,121 voters.

The shrill call earlier this month by Gov. Larry Hogan (R) for a criminal investigation into grading practices in Baltimore City schools is a new low in his political grandstanding on public education in general and city schools in particular. It is legitimate to call attention to laxity and confusion in the grading policies, as laid out in a report by Maryland’s Inspector General for Education. And heaven knows the Baltimore City school system has terrible problems — some of their own making and many caused by lack of national and state support. Still, the governor’s outburst is far out of proportion and not constructive.