Commentary

Benjamin Cardin, Maryland’s senior U.S. senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he expects aggressive retaliation by Israel against Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip following the deadly surprise attacks by Palestinian militants on Israelis over the weekend. In an interview Monday, the Democratic senator, long engaged in foreign affairs and U.S.-Israel relations, expressed outrage at the killing of civilians and predicted Israeli solidarity in response to the attacks.

Whatever our differences with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and they are considerable — there was no reasonable justification for the surprise attack launched Saturday from the Gaza Strip against the Jewish homeland. More than 700 Israelis have been confirmed dead, and thousands more have been wounded in the brutal and coordinated strike by the Islamist militant group Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territory wedged between Israel and Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea.

With the slavery debate raging, Thomas Smallwood, a free Black shoemaker living in the 19th-century borderlands between the North and South, had a mission: free as many enslaved people as possible and rub their former enslavers’ faces in his success. In an 1842 dispatch to a New York newspaper, he noted that a slaveholder’s “walking property walked off.”

We had almost completely forgotten that sound — the skull-rattling roar of 46,450 men, women and children inside Oriole Park when one of our guys gets a base hit or one of theirs strikes out. And it’s a bigger, brighter sound in October than in any other baseball month. We had almost forgotten what that’s like. The Orioles were last in the American League Division Series in 2014, but it feels longer-ago than that.

Recreational cannabis sales show no signs of slowing down in Maryland. They reached $92 million in August, up from the previous month, and state officials believe they will continue to increase in excess of a billion dollars by 2025. This trajectory shows cannabis has tremendous potential to help drive the state’s economy through job creation and by injecting revenue into neighborhoods. Also, as we’ve seen in other states, the tax revenue from cannabis can be immensely beneficial for community investment, education programs, and social services.

Montgomery County is ground zero in the education culture wars. However, the incursion by conservative activists has been so subtle that people may not see it. The battle is happening in the courts and in attempts by nationally-funded conservative groups to influence local public opinion in advance of the 2024 Board of Education elections. In 2023, three families filed suit against MCPS over a list of approved supplemental texts featuring LGBTQ+ characters.