Commentary

If there are any readers who were surprised at the news that the Baltimore County Council voted unanimously Monday to condemn the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP), the controversial 70-mile power line connecting northern Baltimore, Carroll and Frederick counties, we would recommend new prescription lenses.

Most of my childhood was spent in nearby Silver Spring. While there is much about Silver Spring that I remember most fondly, when I was a child, I thought it was a rather bland community. I wished then that I could have lived in someplace interesting, someplace people went to as a destination, not by default. Ah, the ignorance of youth.

I was waiting in a fancy chair in a dark, exquisitely decorated room in Baltimore’s historic Clifton Mansion, taking a last-minute glance at the questions I had prepared for a VIP. I had been going back and forth with press people for months for an interview and credentialing and now it was finally happening. I knew I probably only had 10 minutes or so to talk, a limited time I’d usually protest.

When it comes to transportation — like most policy issues of importance — elected officials have basically two options moving forward: They can take the easy road or the hard one. The former requires no difficult decisions; often it just requires kvetching about how you’ve been shortchanged. The latter means challenging your supporters to make meaningful choices — cutting projects or raising taxes and fees.

Earlier this year, Gov. Wes Moore proudly announced that Maryland has raked in record tax receipts from legalized medical and recreational use marijuana sales. “Our new adult-use cannabis market isn’t only generating extraordinary economic activity — it’s also helping us build new pathways to work, wages, and wealth for all,” Moore said, according to the upbeat press release issued in July by his office.

In the next few weeks, Maryland officials are expected to deliver comprehensive plans for how state agencies will tackle the growing climate crisis and deliver on Gov. Wes Moore’s promise to achieve zero emissions across all of the state’s key sectors in the next two decades. In June, Moore issued an executive order that set a Nov. 1 deadline for these detailed implementation plans as the next phase of a 2023 report called the Climate Pollution and Reduction Plan (CPRP).

You could hear the spittle fly as the Heritage Foundation shouted out its latest intellectual assault on the Naval Academy. All over Ruth Ben-Ghiat and a lecture the midshipmen likely will never hear. She’s a New York University historian with a book on what happens to the military when authoritarians take power. She shows up as a commentator on MSNBC, connecting former President Donald Trump to some of the dictators she’s studied.