Commentary

The most critical pending project to avert traffic Armageddon for the Washington region got a reprieve last week from what looked like a death sentence. Yet that highway expansion plan, advanced by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), remains in jeopardy, owing to local officials and activists who seem indifferent to overwhelming evidence that pervasive highway gridlock is inevitable unless the region acts now.

Today marks the final edition of the Bowie Blade-News. I learned about the paper’s fate on June 24, just a few days before the third anniversary of the Capital Gazette shooting, and while the trial of the shooter was underway. The announcement was not unexpected, but I was profoundly saddened by the news and by the ongoing assault on community journalism. Some will say that the Blade won’t be missed or that it just hasn’t been the same paper that it was 10, 20, or 40 years ago. I know it has been a long time since we enjoyed the “On the Road” feature showed us how well-traveled Bowieites were or there were entertaining extended debates in the letters to the editor. It has not been a 3-section paper, completely devoted to the Bowie for a while, but I will be sorry to see it go.

The hint of an education on race and racism I received in medical school involved a historical overview of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and retired eugenics practices. As I rotated on the wards, race came up again as a vague tool to help narrow a diagnosis. New Black patient with severe headache, blurry vision? Think hypertensive crisis. I wasn’t taught why hypertension might be more prevalent in the Black American population. (Hint: Genetics is not the answer.) I was never taught that Black newborns delivered by a white doctor are more likely to die than those delivered by a Black doctor, either

We’ve come long way from the all-white, all-male judiciary that looms large in portraits on the walls of Baltimore County’s ceremonial courtroom, where the investiture ceremony was recently held for Susan Chambers Zellweger to the District Court for Baltimore County. A hundred lawyers and judges, a dozen family members or so, and a couple of politician types attended to watch Ms. Zellweger, a longtime public defender, be sworn in.

Some 50 current members of the Baltimore police force have applied to join a new Group Violence Reduction Unit, formed at Mayor Brandon Scott’s direction. Here’s what I take from that: A good number of sworn officers believe a new approach to law enforcement can reduce crime, change lives and build public confidence in their profession. That’s probably too precious an outlook for people who think police are thoroughly awful. They will interpret the interest in the still-developing GVRU as cops looking for an opportunity to crack heads.

Maryland employers are desperate for new employees. Our state now has the highest number of available jobs it has seen in the past five years. And yet the unemployment rate for June went up slightly, to 6.2 percent, up by 0.1 percentage points from a month earlier. More than 250,000 jobs are listed on the Maryland Workforce Exchange, according to Maryland Department of Labor Secretary Tiffany P. Robinson.

We’ve come long way from the all-white, all-male judiciary that looms large in portraits on the walls of Baltimore County’s ceremonial courtroom, where the investiture ceremony was recently held for Susan Chambers Zellweger to the District Court for Baltimore County. A hundred lawyers and judges, a dozen family members or so, and a couple of politician types attended to watch Ms. Zellweger, a longtime public defender, be sworn in.

Employers can play a vital role in ending the pandemic once and for all – if they take the initiative. In June, a federal court in Texas dismissed a suit brought by employees challenging the right of their employer, a hospital, to require vaccination against COVID-19 as a condition of continued employment. The judge held that no federal law protected the employees, who cited no valid medical necessity or religious justification for their refusal.

Both 2018 and 2020 were record-breaking years of women running for and being elected to political office. In fact, my mom was among those women, running for the Democratic Central Committee in my district. Seeing headlines that celebrated the record-breaking success of women and hearing stories about the women who ran, it’s understandable to think that women are being represented, or at least we are going in the right direction. But then I look at Maryland, where the representatives, the senators and the governor are men.