Commentary

Last month when M&T Bank Stadium hosted the first AFC Championship Game, the Baltimore Ravens might have lost, but other records were set. It was the first conference championship game in M&T’s history, and the first in Baltimore since 1971, when the Colts were the home team. It also turned out to be the most-watched AFC Championship in television history, with CBS Sports reporting more than 55 million viewers.

More than 75% of Baltimore’s students rely on public transportation to get to school. The public transportation in Baltimore is a system that frequently necessitates traveling via one to three buses with commute times that range from 30 minutes to two hours. Reflecting on our own high school experience, commuting required a two-bus journey, demanding an hour in total for us to reach school, notwithstanding inconsistent bus times that would often extend this duration.

Katie O’Malley joins Sloane Brown to discuss her new role as executive director of the Women’s Law Center of Maryland; how her previous professional experiences taught her good leadership skills both at work and at home; and how growing up as the daughter of then-Maryland Attorney General Joe Curran affected her in both those arenas.

As a native Baltimorean, I long for a catalyst project and/or investment that jumpstarts the journey of Baltimore reaching her potential. History tells us that my beloved city once had a population of 949,000 in 1950, and has seen a precipitous drop in population over the last 70 years. Today, our population hovers around 575,000. Given this, we need big ideas to excite and entice prospective residents to call Baltimore home and legacy residents to decide to remain.

Late last week, the Alabama Supreme Court released a ruling that determined frozen embryos are children under state law, observing that those who destroyed them could be held liable for causing a wrongful death. The decision stemmed from two lawsuits brought by three couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed in a fertility clinic accident. The all-Republican court, in a majority opinion written by Justice Mitchell, made the sweeping claim that the embryos didn’t merely hold the potential to be children, but were children, regardless of their development stage, physical location or “other ancillary characteristics.”

Under former Gov. Parris Glendening’s 1999 Electric Choice and Competition Act, Maryland made the wise choice to join other states to restructure the market to address rising utility rates. Today, 13 states and the District of Columbia allow consumers to purchase their energy outside a single-choice, traditional monopoly utility model. Glendening recently published an op-ed, “Time to hold consumer retail energy suppliers accountable.”

If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. So goes the maxim in the street safety community, which is outraged by the light penalties imposed on drivers when they kill pedestrians and cyclists on roadways across America. I am outraged, too. Eighteen months ago, my wife, Sarah Debbink Langenkamp, a U.S. diplomat and the mother of our two boys, was crushed when a driver for Beacon Building Supply swung his 50,000 pound truck into his parking lot without seeing Sarah, who was riding her bike in a clearly marked bike lane.

We can all agree that our homes should be safe and healthy, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. They should all be well-insulated and equipped with up-to-date appliances and heating systems that don’t pollute our indoor or outdoor air or harm our health, and ensure our energy bills are affordable. But too many low-income families across Maryland are trapped in unhealthy homes that suffer from extreme heat and extreme cold, with old, inefficient, costly appliances and heating systems.