Commentary

The COVID-19 recession has been devastating for countless small businesses. Walk down Main Street in most American cities and you’ll find shuttered stores. And many of the businesses that have survived so far are struggling with withering financials and permanent layoffs. That’s why the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan — proposed by President Joe Biden in March — is so important to the thousands of small businesses we represent. As a source of loans, technical assistance, 100% clean electricity and more, we see the proposal as vital to the full and sustainable recovery of America’s small businesses.

A recent article by Kaiser Health News and reprinted in The Baltimore Sun and other newspapers, (“Some dentists push unnecessary procedures” June 7), sadly cherry-picked a select few dentists performing unnecessary procedures across the country to boost profits for their practice, some as many as 30 years ago, while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of honest, hard-working dentists providing oral health care to their patients. It was as if the reporter simply searched “nightmare dental cases” in Google.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Larry Hogan signed a statewide order shutting down all “nonessential businesses” on March 23, 2020. If not designated an essential business by the order, a business had either severely restricted operations or was unable to operate altogether. While affected by the order, many businesses have looked to their leases to determine what contractual rights are available to tenants to avoid paying rent while unable to operate at full capacity.

The commentary “Legislature Must Act to Save the Bay in Light of Conowingo Dam Decision” [Maryland Matters, June 10] was misleading and inaccurate. As an Exelon Generation employee and environmental advocate, I’d like to set the record straight. The Waterkeepers Chesapeake organization claims Exelon Generation and the dam have caused pollution in the Bay when, in fact, the opposite is true.

This week, many people throughout Baltimore and beyond are celebrating Juneteenth, which commemorates the moment enslaved people in Texas received the news that they were free. It marks the end of the institution of slavery and the beginning of the generational pursuit of freedom. Though the war had already been won and their emancipation proclaimed, the arrival of the news caused great celebration, and today, we celebrate Juneteenth with reflection, celebration and education.

Summer 2021 is a great time for marketing organizations to review, renew or revise their somewhat costly (in terms of time and/or dollars) social media strategies. There are almost too many to count emerging social media platforms, so anticipate that this process will be a necessary, ongoing, and time-consuming challenge. There are several emerging platforms to literally keep an eye and ear on. Let’s begin with TikTok.

Councilman Nathan Volke began his recent guest column with, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time” (The Capital, Jan. 12). But as the former county auditor and former assistant county auditor with, collectively, more than 60 years of government budget and accounting experience, the quote that comes to mind when reading Volke’s column is H.L. Mencken’s: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Opportunity for parole should be based on two factors: meeting terms of punishment and rehabilitation. The Court of Appeals is considering amending Maryland Rule 4-345 to provide a reasonable path to release for those who were convicted of crimes committed when they were younger than 25, when science tells us they had not reached the level of culpability that we ascribe to adult decision-making.