First, I was initially hesitant to support this bill — and for good reason. As a fiscal conservative, I raised concerns about its potential to add to the deficit. Those concerns were not just for show; I withheld support to ensure Maryland taxpayers wouldn’t be saddled with more Washington debt.

Because conservatives pushed back, major changes were secured before the final vote. Among the wins:

Stronger Medicaid integrity provisions were included to stop states from improperly paying benefits — including to illegal immigrants — while protecting care for truly needy Marylanders.

Green New Scam rollbacks, ensuring Maryland families and businesses aren’t burdened with radical energy mandates that drive up costs. This is especially essential as offshore wind adversely affects watermen, communities and constituents in my district.

Strengthening work requirements: The One Big Beautiful Bill strengthens common-sense work requirements for able-bodied adults receiving federal government assistance on the taxpayer dime — an important step toward restoring the dignity of work and ensuring taxpayer dollars aren’t used for those who choose not to work.

These changes are real, tangible victories for Marylanders who expect their representatives to fight for fiscal responsibility. The OBBB also contains wins that will make the lives of all Marylanders better:

No taxes on tips — more money in workers’ pockets

Maryland’s restaurant and hospitality workers work hard for every dollar they earn, and they shouldn’t have to share their tips with the IRS. Thanks to the OBBB, qualified tips are no longer taxed, putting more money directly into the hands of servers, bartenders and hotel staff across our state. This is especially meaningful for younger workers and single parents juggling multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

Relief for seniors — protecting retirement security

The bill also delivers meaningful tax relief for seniors, ensuring they keep more of their retirement income. At a time when many older Marylanders are living on fixed incomes while dealing with rising health care and energy costs, this is a major step forward. Seniors have spent their lives working and paying into the system; they deserve to keep more of what they’ve earned.

Tax relief for Americans

The One Big Beautiful Bill delivers real tax relief for hardworking middle-class Americans, putting more money back into the pockets of those who need it most.

No tax on overtime pay

The One Big Beautiful Bill delivers a major win for hardworking Americans by ensuring no tax on overtime pay. This means extra hours worked truly pay off, allowing workers to keep the money they earn when they put in the long hours to provide for their families.

Meanwhile, the media is busy telling a different story — painting the bill as some sort of attack on working families and suggesting conservatives “caved.” That’s simply false. No eligible Marylander is losing Medicaid coverage. No eligible person is losing SNAP benefits. Rural hospitals are not being “defunded.” And the Freedom Caucus didn’t “fold” — we fought, we negotiated and we secured major spending policy wins that would never have been in this bill without conservative leverage.

This is what responsible legislating looks like. We said “no” to reckless spending until the bill was improved. We worked with President Donald Trump and his team to make sure the final product delivered for taxpayers. And now, the One Big Beautiful Bill reflects conservative priorities Maryland families can feel good about — lower spending, stronger safeguards against waste and real accountability for Washington.

The bottom line is this: The One Big Beautiful Bill is a win for Maryland. It gives workers a break and provides real relief for seniors — all without raising taxes or adding new burdens on Maryland families.

The critics may keep shouting, but for Maryland’s seniors, service workers and hard-working taxpayers, the benefits of this bill will be felt every day — and that’s what really matters.

Andy Harris (X: @RepAndyHarrisMD) is a Republican representing Maryland in the U.S. House of Representatives.

When I sought public office, I called for serious, common-sense, community-driven solutions. I warned that failure to act boldly would lead to chaos — and now, in July 2025, we’re seeing exactly that.

In just one week, 27 people overdosed in a single Baltimore neighborhood — a horrifying figure that should shake every public official to their core. According to Baltimore Police, the first wave of overdoses occurred in Penn North on July 11, and then again on July 18, when officers responded around 8:55 a.m. to multiple 911 calls about suspected overdoses along West North Avenue. Five individuals were rushed to area hospitals in serious condition. Two others were revived with Narcan but refused further treatment. One simply walked away after on-site assistance.

This is unacceptable.

Penn North — located at the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenue — is infamous not just for the open-air drug market that has festered for years, but as the flashpoint of the 2015 Freddie Gray uprising. Yet despite the visible presence of mass transit police, a substation for the Baltimore Police Department and squad cars routinely stationed at this exact intersection, drug dealing continues in broad daylight. It’s as if this corner has been abandoned to destruction — as though it’s meant to stay broken.

We cannot allow this to continue.

Mayor Brandon Scott held a press conference following the most recent overdoses, promising expanded naloxone distribution, 24/7 treatment access and possibly mobile treatment centers. But while these efforts are well-intentioned, they fall short of the decisive action needed to end this crisis.

The truth is this: Baltimore doesn’t need more press conferences — it needs a cleanup. It needs enforcement, real-time intervention and full-on accountability for the dealers and traffickers poisoning our people. This isn’t about criminalizing addiction — it’s about stopping those who prey on the addicted and leave death in their wake.

At the federal level, we’ve seen real leadership work on this as well. President Donald Trump signed the HALT Fentanyl Act into law, permanently classifying fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. Surrounded by families whose lives were shattered by fentanyl, he called the bill “another defeat for savage drug smugglers and cartels.” That’s the kind of historic action we need to replicate here in Baltimore.

Let me be clear: The opioid epidemic is no longer a distant health issue — it’s a war zone in our own backyard. And we can’t afford more inaction. We need police accountability, community intervention, drug court reforms and neighborhood restoration plans backed by policy, not platitudes.

Penn North is more than a headline. It is a historic neighborhood that deserves to be remembered not for tragedy, but for triumph.

We need to clean up this corner. We need to restore its dignity. And we must act — now — before more lives are lost.

Christopher Anderson is a third-generation Baltimorean, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and a community advocate. He is chairman of the Maryland Black Republican Council and a member of the Baltimore City Republican Central Committee. He has run for Congress and the Baltimore City Council.

Turley says that Mamdani has said that he favors the government “seizing the means of production,” but he acknowledges that Mamdani does not propose this on his candidate for mayor website.

But Turley argues that Mamdani believes governments in the United States, presumably at the federal as well as state and local level, should seize the means of production.

It is important to distinguish what candidates believe from what policies they promote.

If Mamdani is not proposing that the City of New York seize the means of production — basically take over all business — then it does not make sense to call him a socialist because nationalization of the means of production is the defining feature of socialism.

It is still an interesting and important question if Mamdani thinks that New York City and the country overall should seize the means of production someday. For now, though, it really does not make sense for anyone to insist that Mamdani is a Marxist or for Mamdani himself to say that he is a socialist if none of his policies distinguish him from a progressive Democrat.

The same can be said of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist (as does Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but he really is not a socialist in any interesting sense of the term either. His views align more with social democracies in the Nordic countries, whose economies have core capitalist components.

The attention given to whether Mamdani is a socialist of some kind is a wake-up call to observers and citizens to look more carefully at questions about political economy and the language that is used by candidates, the media and pundits.

The media, in general, has for decades used cartoon language to identify our economy and the economy of other countries. For one, the nonstop identification of our economy as “capitalist” is a serious oversimplification.

For over one hundred years, the U.S. economy has involved considerable government intervention in the economy itself, starting in the Progressive Era and running through the New Deal Era and the Great Society Era.

There can be no doubt that we have a “mixed economy,” namely a society in which the government plays a major role regulating the economy and redistributing both wealth and income. Yet it is a rare day when a politician or a member of the media says that we have a “mixed economy,” even though middle school students learn about laissez-faire economies, mixed economies and socialist economies.

Calling ourselves capitalists just sets us up in opposition to communist states — of which there are very few in the post-Cold War world. Moreover, it creates the misleading impression that the two main economies in the world are traditional capitalism (which we had in 1890) and Marxist-Stalinist Russia and Maoist China from the 1950s and 1960s.

For years we have needed a debate between advocates of a progressive mixed economy and advocates of a conservative mixed economy. That is what we actually have now. But no one calls it that, and the capitalist and socialist labels generate extremist reactions on both sides.

Even the Big Beautiful Bill is nothing close to a defense of a laissez-faire capitalist economy. The cut to Medicaid is about 10% a year over the course of 10 years — namely $1 trillion. It is nothing close to a cut of the entire program, which would inch us closer to a laissez-faire economy.

With Medicare and Social Security barely touched — and that is about $2.5 trillion of our annual $7 trillion federal budget — the point stands that the Ds and Rs are fighting over what kind of mixed economy to have and not whether to have a socialist economy or a laissez-faire capitalist economy.

Pundits and the media in general and certainly our education system need to work with politicians to get us to a space where we stop using language to distort both the left and the right and, in the process, a reasonable centrist middle position.

The debates we are having today in New York City and around the country are about very important issues, but they are not about fundamentally moving outside of the mixed economy framework.

Dave Anderson (dmamaryland@gmail.com) has taught political philosophy at five colleges and universities, is editor of the interdisciplinary volume “Leveraging,” and ran for Congress as a Democrat in Maryland in 2016. 

It wasn’t the first time such a complaint had been made against an American university. For almost a century, conservatives have accused them of being hostile to their views. But their real target has always been the students. Conservatives believe universities indoctrinate young people to reject conservative ideas. The complaint has been raised by many prominent conservatives from William F. Buckley in the ‘50s, to Lewis Powell in the ’70s, to Vice President JD Vance today. Each time they suggest that increasing the number of conservative voices on campus will fix the problem. It hasn’t, and it won’t.

When it comes to swaying the opinions of the young, conservatives don’t have an access problem, or even a messenger problem — they have a message problem. The conservative message is failing because it conflicts with how young people think.

The influential child psychologist Erik Erikson described the psychosocial developmental stage of young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 as a period defined by the need to shape identity through connection. During this period, a hunger for belonging fuels the young person’s moral sensitivity, and they tend to respond most strongly to frameworks that emphasize fairness and inclusion — moral values that align more closely with progressive politics than traditional conservatism.

What’s often overlooked is how this developmental trajectory is reflected in the brain. Neuroscientists have found that the region of the brain responsible for long-term reasoning and impulse control doesn’t fully mature until around age 25. As a result, college-aged adults are especially attuned to emotional and moral messages, particularly those centered on harm and justice. They’re also more reactive to authority-based reasoning, which can make conservative appeals grounded in hierarchy or tradition feel threatening.

Instead of shaping a message that meets young people where they are emotionally and developmentally, conservatives accuse universities of indoctrinating them. Buckley, the father of American conservatism, was the first to suggest this in his 1951 book, “God and Man at Yale” — a foundational text for conservatives. Buckley offered few practical solutions for addressing the problem, but his complaint inspired other conservatives to seek solutions, including Lewis Powell, the future Supreme Court Justice.

In what would become known as the Powell Memo, a highly influential 1970s blueprint advising conservatives on how to push back against the social advances of the Civil Rights Movement, Powell suggested that one key reason conservatives were failing to reach college students was that conservatives were comparatively poor communicators. He thought more charismatic, dynamic speakers were the answer. He proposed pressuring universities to invite conservative speakers to campus who were “attractive, articulate and well-informed,” hoping they would attract young followers.

A similarly false assumption underlies the Trump antisemitism task force’s suggestion that Harvard increase the number of conservative voices on campus. “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.” This strategy did not work in the 1950s when Buckley proposed it, nor in the 1970s when Powell did.

Greater access and better spokesmen alone will not make conservative ideas more attractive to young people. Views that don’t match the emotional and relational priorities of emerging adults whose brains are still forming the very circuits that govern moral judgment will always struggle on campus. Not because these views are being deliberately silenced, but because they are out of sync — with psychology, with neuroscience and with what it means to grow into adulthood.

K. Ward Cummings is an essayist and social critic. He lives in Baltimore. Anne Tapp Jaksa is a professor of education at Saginaw Valley State University. She also chairs the board of directors of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

For many of us — especially those raised in the brittle tension between survival and aspiration, masculinity and vulnerability — “The Cosby Show” wasn’t just a sitcom. It was sacred. And for Black America, the character of Theo Huxtable, played with warmth and complexity by Malcolm-Jamal Warner, offered something deeper than laughs. He gave us a mirror. He gave us a way to see ourselves as whole.

Theo wasn’t a perfect brother. He was something better: real. And in a culture that often flattens Black boys into caricatures — thugs, geniuses, athletes, victims — Theo was textured. He was funny, vulnerable, confused, proud. He struggled in school, wrestled with his ego, made mistakes and, most importantly, kept showing up with love. That mattered. In the 1980s and ’90s, when structural violence and institutional indifference surrounded many Black communities like a moat, here was a young Black man being raised in love — secure, seen, and believed in.

We often discuss representation, but rarely explore the emotional architecture that characters like Theo have provided us. Malcolm-Jamal Warner, in all his quiet brilliance, constructed a blueprint for a different kind of Black masculinity. Not the masculinity born of rage or repression. But one anchored in warmth, play, siblinghood and grace.

In many ways, Theo Huxtable raised us — not because our fathers were necessarily absent, but because the world we inhabited often was. It gave us metal detectors, not mentors. Hyper-discipline instead of gentleness. And for those of us Black boys growing up without the reliable presence of a father, or worse, with a model of fatherhood distorted by systemic failure, Theo offered something radical: permission to be soft.

I grew up navigating a world that saw Black boys like me through the cracked lens of pathology. Emotion was a weakness. Vulnerability was a risk. Love was conditional. In school and the neighborhood, the message was clear: Be hard or be hurt. But every Thursday night, I saw another way. I saw a father, Cliff Huxtable, who cherished his son not because he was perfect, but because he was his. And I saw Theo, trying, failing, laughing, loving — and being loved anyway.

Yes, Bill Cosby, the actor, would later fall from grace in one of the most devastating reckonings in American cultural history. But even as we properly account for those harms, we should not allow them to erase the truth of what “The Cosby Show” offered at its core: a vision of Black familial joy, and specifically, a template for Black male tenderness.

Theo’s character taught us how to love our siblings, how to disagree with our parents without fear, how to fail with dignity, and — most importantly — how to imagine ourselves not as statistics or stereotypes, but as full participants in the American human story.

That matters. Because to this day, Black fathers and sons live in a country that too often greets them with suspicion before grace. The psychic tax of navigating a world where your love is doubted before it’s felt, where your fatherhood is questioned before it’s lived, where your childhood is cut short by fear — that tax is real, and it is heavy.

And yet, we still plant gardens. We still sing lullabies. We still carry our sons on our shoulders and tell them they are loved. We still raise Theos.

This opinion piece isn’t about longing for an idealized past. It’s about remembering the emotional scaffolding that characters like Theo provided to a generation of Black boys learning how to be men. Not men as the world demanded us to be — hardened, closed, armored — but men as we hoped we could be: open, kind, flawed and free.

So here’s to Malcolm-Jamal Warner. Not just for playing a character, but for helping a generation grow up. For showing us what Black love looks like — silly, smart, soulful — and for reminding us, even now, that the most radical thing a young Black boy can do is be himself.

Jack Hill is a Baltimore native who works as a writer and diversity consultant.

Let’s start with the good. Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, visited the overwhelmingly Republican affected areas in the immediate aftermath of the flood and promised that the state would be there to help local communities recover and rebuild. In two important ways, he’s come through. First, his administration has provided close to $1.5 million in relief, giving homeowners and businesses a lifeline at a desperate time, even if the amounts provided aren’t enough to meet the area’s vast needs. Second, his administration was quick to apply for federal disaster funds with the expectation that the federal government would augment the state’s efforts.

State Sen. Mike McKay, a Republican who represents the flood-affected areas, has given our Democratic governor credit for his strong and thoughtful response. His partnership with the Moore administration on this issue seems productive and strong. This is reminiscent of another bipartisan moment in recent history when, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, then-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie embraced President Barack Obama in the middle of a presidential campaign and thanked him for his strong leadership and for helping the people of his state. Christie was criticized at the time for complimenting a Democratic president who was locked in a close election fight, but he did and said what was right regardless of the politics.

Just as Maryland’s 2026 gubernatorial race gets underway, McKay has followed Christie’s lead and shown us all what it looks like to transcend partisan politics. No doubt the senator will often disagree with Gov. Moore in the future, and when he does, we’ll have a strong reason to believe his disagreements are honest and not informed entirely by a political calculus.

Now the bad. President Donald Trump suggested he’s not interested in helping Democratic states when he upended plans to move the FBI headquarters to Maryland in part because it was a “liberal state.” That position casts suspicion on a White House statement explaining the rationale for withholding disaster funds from Maryland. The statement mentions that states should invest in their own resilience for disaster preparedness. This might be a legitimate position if the president were guided by that idea in every case. Instead, his administration is pouring money into relief operations in Texas following that state’s tragic flooding in early July.

The president’s position on the self-reliance of states rings hollow given the support his administration is providing to Texas. What unfolded there was a human tragedy, and the state’s people deserve federal assistance as they mourn their losses and begin the process of recovery. Expecting Texans to shoulder this burden on their own while the rest of the country stood idly by would be morally indefensible and undermine the idea of our country as a group of states united. The scope of the tragedies in Texas and Maryland is vastly different, but so are the needs. Maryland is asking for much less than the amount of money being sent to Texas, and we shouldn’t be expected to stand alone.

Finally, the feckless. Maryland Congressman Andy Harris is chair of the House Freedom Caucus in a closely divided Congress. That should matter to Maryland because his influence should help make our case to President Trump about disaster relief. In reality, Harris has ceded whatever influence he might have had by demonstrating his propensity to acquiesce to the president’s demands and cave under pressure from the administration. Even after he expressed reservations about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s impact on our national debt, he meekly voted “present” rather than vote against the bill and then voted for it when the bill was sent back to the House by the Senate. Being the chair of the Freedom Caucus isn’t worth anything to Maryland if Harris doesn’t have the fortitude to stand up to the president, especially when Marylanders need help.

Contemporary American politics is a study in dysfunction and partisanship, but the aftermath of the Western Maryland floods reminds us that hope for a better future isn’t lost. Our Democratic governor helped Republican counties, and a Republican state senator gave credit for those efforts. Maryland has a tradition of this type of politics, and it’s heartening to remember that Republican Governor Larry Hogan left office with an 81% approval rating among Democrats. America needs more of that and less of the empty rhetoric and feckless politics of Andy Harris.

Colin Pascal (colinjpascal@outlook.com) is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a graduate student in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. He lives in Annapolis.

She’d grown up on Barclay Street at 26th, gone to the nearby Margaret Brent School, and raised her family in the suburbs. Her family’s roots in the Greenmount Avenue, Barclay and Boone streets area were where her heart was. She had aunts, uncles and cousins living all over the 21218 ZIP code. And she had those memories.

While looking for a home, she spotted the restored and renovated houses coming on the market in the 400 block of East 22nd Street.

About five years ago, she moved to this block, which is now officially listed as part of the Barclay-Greenmount Historic District, a sort of urban village anchored by the Gothic Revival architecture and tall spire of St. Ann’s Catholic Church. Though St. Ann’s was officially closed by the Archdiocese of Baltimore, it retains its school, Mother Seton Academy.

“My house is amazing. I have three bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths,” said Boyd, an M&T Bank auditor. “People who visit my house are amazed to see how it looks on the inside.”

Her longtime neighbor, Grace Willis, who keeps a beautiful home and garden at Barclay and 22nd, says the block’s transformation is real and convincing.

“It’s beginning to look as it did when I moved here — and I was in middle school then,” she said of her family’s settling on 22nd Street in the 1950s.

The block has 48 houses, many of them with fancy Victorian wooden embellishments (they look like tiny porches) off the third floor. They are outfitted with beautiful white marble — actually Baltimore County limestone — steps. The original builders added a nice feature: white marble curbing around what would be a tiny front lawn, except these lawns are all paved.

Michael Mazepink, a community housing strategist, began championing the block more than two decades ago, when its vacancy rate was over 40%. A Baltimore Sun article published several years later said, “Turnaround elusive for gritty Greenmount.”

“This block was basically being saved by a group of elderly widows who lived here,” said Mazepink, who founded the People’s Homesteading Group in 1983. “As houses went vacant, the ladies took wooden barrels and filled the tubs with flowers. They, of course, had flowers outside their own homes, so the block appeared OK and pretty. But it was not.”

Years of rain and snow tortured the roofs of the vacant houses. “The houses pancaked — the roofs collapsed downward and took the floors with them,” Mazepink said. “In some cases, all that was salvageable was a front wall. After the earthquake of 2011 and the rains that fall, one house bowed forward and was condemned by the city. It had to be taken apart brick by brick and then rebuilt.”

Mazepink became a one-person developer-housing dynamo, applying for grants and mastering the fine print of government housing assistance programs. “Michael is tenacious and detail-oriented,” said Charles Duff, who headed Jubilee Housing for many years. Duff’s group was his development lender.

“It’s an amazing block,” said Duff. “Architecturally it’s interesting and almost unique.”

Jake Wittenberg, whose Edgemont Builders recently finished nine home restorations on 22nd Street, said, “It’s a pleasure to work with passionate, mission-driven people.”

“The work is the result of years of fundraising and collaborations,” said Ellen Janes of the Central Baltimore Partnership. “It’s grassroots community revitalization at its best.”

“It offers homebuyers with modest incomes an opportunity to live in some of Baltimore’s most beautiful homes,” Janes said.

Janes also feels the strength of the 400 block of 22nd Street will mean that adjacent blocks — east of Greenmount Avenue and above Green Mount Cemetery — will be on a similar upswing.

“I saw the vacant houses as an opportunity,” Mazepink said. “Now we are getting appraisals for a three-story, renovated house with historic exterior features at $400,000. And it’s now a block with all income levels, from Section 8 housing to middle-class purchasers and everything in between.”

The refurbishment of 22nd Street is not isolated in this part of Baltimore near Green Mount Cemetery, St. Ann’s Church and other landmarks. Years of housing reinvestment are transforming Barclay, Old Goucher, Greenmount West and Johnston Square.

Asked about his 24 years focused on this block, Mazepink said, “I could have used some of those years back, but that doesn’t happen.”

Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at jacques.kelly@baltsun.com and 410-332-6570.

Well, they do until you quickly review your notes and recognize that A, President Trump has an urgent need for distraction given his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and the administration’s failure to — despite big promises to the conspiracy-hungry during the presidential campaign — release details of the investigation into the late American financier and sex offender. And B, this is a subject that has been investigated to death with no fewer than four official inquiries, including a 2020 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report (written while the GOP had Senate control) and the special report authored by Trump-appointed special counsel John Durham that came out in 2023. And what did they find? There was ample reason to worry about Russian interference in the 2016 race, and it was clear the Kremlin didn’t want Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.

Was then-candidate Trump complicit in these efforts? Nope, not in a manner those various investigators could prove. But Russian interference? There was ample evidence of computer hacking, of digging through emails and of using intermediaries to undermine Clinton (remember WikiLeaks?). Or how about simply remembering Robert S. Mueller III? The special counsel indicted a dozen Russians, none of whom has ever stood trial because they could not be extradited. Even then-U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (now Trump’s U.S. secretary of state) observed that interference signing off on that 2020 report, which concluded “the Russian government inappropriately meddled in our 2016 general election in many ways but then-Candidate Trump was not complicit.”

Hopefully, most people aren’t taking these claims of treason seriously. They serve only to diminish Trump and Gabbard. Think those criminal referrals Gabbard has sent to the U.S. Department of Justice will result in a successful prosecution? Even Las Vegas will surely refuse wagers on that long shot. Those who still harbor doubts can go peruse those various reports (and their thousands of pages of findings). The rest of us will just have to be content to recognize that the current president and his cronies lie like rugs when it serves their purpose.

Peter Jensen is an editorial writer at The Baltimore Sun; he can be reached at pejensen@baltsun.com.

To hear some tell it, there is nothing in the federal government’s budget that can be cut. Every dime spent is absolutely critical, and if anything is cut, “people will die!”

Even National Public Radio.

NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher warned, “defunding [NPR] is a real risk to the public safety of the country.”

Maher said advocates for NPR are “devastated that the Senate voted to eliminate federal funding to the local public television stations throughout this country that provide essential lifesaving public safety services, proven educational services and community connections to their communities every day for free.”

If she really believes what she says is true, NPR will now prioritize its spending to ensure the continuation of its life-sustaining functions. Of course, that might mean it will have to eliminate other essential reporting, such as this review of a “teenager friendly” book: “What ‘Queer Ducks’ can teach teenagers about sexuality in the animal kingdom.”

Did you catch the “for free” part at the end of Maher’s statement? If NPR’s programming was really “free,” there would be no need to cut funding, would there?

The truth is, nothing is free. Just because the government is paying for it doesn’t mean it’s free. Anyone who pays taxes is paying for it.

NPR is seriously biased, but it is not free.

It’s like those “free courses” Maryland public school students are now able to take at community colleges. Students may not have to pay to attend the classes, but taxpayers certainly have to pick up the tab.

That’s a concept progressives have a real hard time wrapping their heads around.

Socialists, like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, are all about free. “Free” public transportation. “No-cost” child care. It’s all a lie.

A wise man once said, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

And George Bernard Shaw once quipped, “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

I don’t really blame progressives for being so deceitful. If the public is too naive to recognize what they’re up to and continues to vote progressive lawmakers into office, then the public gets what it deserves.

The good news is, all across the country, Americans appear to be waking up to the lie. Then again, we live in Maryland — one of the bluest of blue states — where robbing Peter to pay Paul is the state sport.

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is a great example. The Blueprint prioritizes one demographic group over another. Counties like Carroll now receive less taxpayer money so that the state will have more money to give to other counties like Prince George’s County.

Worse, Carroll County has been forced to adopt the same educational “reform” plan every other county in the state has been forced to adopt. Only a bureaucrat or politician would think the same reforms will work in two jurisdictions as different from one another as Carroll is from Prince George’s County, but that’s what we’ve got going on here in Maryland — a one-size-fits-all government-mandated initiative that treats all Maryland counties the same.

And it will only cost taxpayers $10 billion.

Worse still, state legislators have not allocated enough money to pay for their “reforms,” so they are expecting local governments to make up the difference by raising local taxes.

This is how Maryland Governor Wes Moore is able to run campaign ads in his bid to become president, in which he claims to have fixed the state’s budget woes. He didn’t. He just shifted the tax burden to local governments.

The Blueprint even goes so far as to blackmail the counties. If they refuse to rollover and raise local taxes to pay for the state’s unfunded mandates, they will lose their state education funding altogether.

I’d like to see that. I’d like to see candidate Moore explaining why he cut off education funding to students in his state.

There is very little Democrats will not do or say in pursuit of political power. They have proven this many times, especially since President Donald Trump’s first term, but America is souring on progressive policies — and tactics — and Democrats are trapped. They were perfectly happy to embrace the radical left when they saw it as being in their political self-interest to do so, but they created a monster, and that monster is now feeding on its own.

That progressive policy positions are growing increasingly unpopular with the American public is the reason Democrats are looking for a presidential candidate with “aura.”

Elijah Templeton wrote in The Herald, “Politics have long been more about the candidate presenting the policies than the actual policies themselves and this is nowhere more apparent than America in 2025. This reality has led us to a second Donald Trump term and a Democratic party in complete disarray for one reason and one reason only: the Democrats do not have a candidate with aura.”

These days, the term “aura” is used as a compliment, essentially calling someone cool or suave, so what Templeton is saying is Democrats need a candidate with charisma, not substance; a slick politician, someone people will vote for because they are good-looking and charming rather than on how they will govern.

You know, someone like Wes Moore.

Zohran Mandami and California Governor Gavin Newsom also fit the bill. Fast-talking, silver-tongued politicians who have a lot in common with the average used car salesman.

With socialism becoming a common theme among Democratic politicians these days, a candidate with “aura” is all Democrats have left if they hope to win another national election.

But if the party cannot even disavow a Marxist, antisemitic candidate running to become mayor of the financial capital of the world, it has surrendered the right to be supported by anyone.

And they know it.

Chris Roemer resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com.

The Dershowitz theory, outlined in his new book “The Preventive State,” is simple. Forward-looking government policies or actions should be informed by balancing the risks of harm from false positives against the risk of harm from false negatives. Consider preemptive wars. They are professedly based on hunches that the enemy will attack, occupy or conquer at some future time unless the enemy is obliterated.

Preemptive wars risk false positives. It may lead to gratuitous wars because the enemy would not have attacked even if not obliterated. It also risks false negatives. Preemptive wars may be foregone by understating the risk of an enemy attack that occurs. Dershowitz argues that the risk of harm from false positives should be balanced against the risk of harm from false negatives in deciding whether to initiate preemptive warfare. He assumes the balancing would be a simple and speedy AI calculation.

The Dershowitz theory does not compute because the government invariably manipulates projections about future harm for ulterior partisan or personal motives. Manipulation is shielded from public or congressional scrutiny by routine bogus claims of executive privilege or state secrets. Truth surfaces, if at all, decades later, when secrets may be declassified too late to redress the stupendous harm in the interim.

National security lies are the norm, not the exception. President Harry Truman dismissed the Korean War as a “police action” but argued the war was necessary to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. The Korean War risked a nuclear attack on China, urged by General Douglas MacArthur. There is no evidence that the Soviet Union planned an invasion of Western Europe.

The Vietnam War was fueled by the government’s fanciful “domino theory” that if Vietnam fell into the communist sphere, then communism would spread worldwide to crush Western civilization, and lies about a second torpedo attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Pentagon Papers revealed serial government lies about the progress of the Vietnam War. It endured not because it was winnable but because President Lyndon B. Johnson was politically adamant about not losing a war on his watch like President Truman’s alleged loss of China, which was politically crippling.

“I am not going to lose Vietnam,” President Johnson told the ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., two days after assuming office. “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

The Vietnam War was lost after squandering more than $1 trillion in current dollars, and suffering more than 55,000 American military deaths, millions of Vietnamese casualties, the My Lai massacre, napalm girl and countless other atrocities. The world did not fall to communism. Indeed, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Vietnam is now a semi-ally of the United States against China.

It would seem the Dershowitz thesis would clearly have militated against the Vietnam War. But not so fast. Advocates can postulate that, absent the resolve of the United States to fight in Vietnam, even in a losing cause, the Soviet Union and China would have been emboldened to invade and conquer America, Western Europe and Japan, writing an epitaph for freedom. Such fevered speculation cannot be disproved like a mathematical theorem.

Abraham Lincoln exposed the uselessness of the Dershowitz theory to check gratuitous, calamitous, preemptive wars in a letter to law partner William H. Herndon explaining his opposition to the Mexican-American War born of President James K. Polk’s lies:

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us;’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.'”

The Dershowitz theory of preventive harm presumes intellectual integrity in the corridors of powers that has long passed from the scene — assuming it ever existed. It is divorced from the lamp of experience. In politics, everything is subordinated to power. Truth is a handicap. Remember President Donald Trump to Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 1, 2021: “You’re too honest.” Mr. Trump is in the White House. Mr. Pence is nowhere.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.