Leonard Pitts Jr.: Tribute to the TV remote control

Rachel Marsden: Are government's 'strategic communications' coming to America?

Did you hear about the new bill that would allow the U.S. government's official overseas information agency to rebroadcast its content onto American TV and radio? The bipartisan Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 was introduced in Congress last week by Reps. Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican,...

What Baltimore did for us

On the front page of the June 22, 1990, issue of The Evening Sun is an article with the headline "Flight from Saigon lands and family grows by 16." The article describes the emotional reunion of a sister with her 16 family members, who had spent the past 15 years in postwar Vietnam, waiting and...

Robert B. Reich: The commencement address that won't be given

Members of the Class of 2012,

Playing catchup with the minority birth rate

Pudgy, pink Gerber babies are no longer the typical children being born in the United States. According to theU.S. Census Bureau, moms who are Latino, Asian, African American or mixed race are now giving birth to just over 50 percent of American babies.

Preying on the poor

Individually, the poor are not all that tempting to thieves. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you'll be lucky to get bus fare to flee the crime scene. But the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a...

Good stewardship should be required of all farmers

Congress may soon finalize the 2012 Farm Bill, and that hefty document should concern all of us in Maryland — especially when it comes to clean water.

Super PACs: How did the Supreme Court not see this coming?

Maybe what this country needs on the Supreme Court is a real politician or at least a sensible political scientist or two. Perhaps they would help the court's majority understand how it has allowed unlimited big-donor money to contaminate and almost destroy our politics.

In East Baltimore, a safe haven

I am a Baltimore police officer in what is often termed the "hood" in the Eastern District. It is an impoverished, predominantly African-American neighborhood where children often don't have enough to eat or live in apartments where the lights have been turned off. Some are homeless.

Putin returns, and so does a Cold War mentality

Now that Vladimir Putin is Russia's president once again, the result of still another fraudulent election, we should expect ever more hostile relations with Moscow.

Bin Laden realized the truth: Terrorism doesn't work

Five weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden publicly commanded his foot-soldiers to ramp up the violence against American civilians. But five weeks before his death, he privately instructed his lieutenants to refrain from killing any civilians. Did the world's most notorious terrorist...

Generational nonsense at commencement time

This is the season of generational twaddle. At graduation ceremonies across the country, politicians, authors, actors and businessmen take to the stage to tell young people they are fantastic simply because they are young. This year, the ritual is more pathetic than usual because there's a...

Larry Simns' well-lived life on the water

It's 1943. First light colors the summer Chesapeake Bay off the fishing village of Rock Hall, revealing a 6-year-old boy rowing a wooden skiff, struggling to do it quietly, so not to scare the blue crabs his great-grandfather dips as they run their trotline.

Are Md. schools really No. 1?

Educators and politicians rave about Maryland's public schools. And why shouldn't they? After all, Education Week, the nation's most widely circulated education newspaper, has ranked Maryland public schools in first place for the past four years.

Leonard Pitts Jr.: Tough on crime, tough on justice

So the people got sick of it, all those criminals being coddled by all those bleeding heart liberal judges with all their soft-headed concern for rights and rehabilitation. And a wave swept this country in the Reagan years, a wave ridden by pundits and politicians seeking power, a wave that said, no...

The president's 'other gospel'

What downtown needs: More cops, fewer knuckleheads

During a stroll Thursday night from Little Italy to Harborplace, I bought jelly beans in The Best of Luck candy store, listened to a sidewalk trumpeter play the blues, noted several dead lights that left unappealing darkness along Pratt Street, and watched a Baltimore police officer train his...

Bush's pithy endorsement of Romney

Former President George W. Bush uttered his endorsement for president the other day as an elevator door was closing on him. To a question shouted by a reporter, he was said to have answered, simply, "I'm for Mitt Romney," and that was it.

Special tax deals unfair

The 15-year real estate tax abatement for the Superblock in West Baltimore raises important policy issues that need to be addressed. Specifically, should the city — and in certain cases, the state — grant economic incentives for real estate developments that 1) create competitive...

Don't leave hunger off the global agenda

When the leaders of the globe's biggest economies — the G8 — meet at Camp David in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains this weekend, they will have a plate full of problems: banking and liquidity and bonds and loan guarantees and such.

Tea party victories in Ind., Neb., are no boon to the Democrats

If it has accomplished nothing else, the tea party insurgency has made Republicans vastly more newsworthy than Democrats. While the party of the left plods along performing the boring old tasks of governing, the party of the right is engaged in high drama worthy of Shakespeare.

Rachel Marsden on Waiting for a European Santa Claus

While your co-workers hover around the water cooler debating whether it matters if Mitt Romney bullied some kid in his youth, a formerly First World nation called Greece is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Why, you might ask, should Middle America pry its overworked eyes away from Jennifer...

Same-sex marriage seals Obama's fate as a one-term president

Barack Obama made himself a one-term president last week by telling ABC, "I think that same-sex couples should be able to get married."

Water bills and government's fragile reputation

I want to thank Ms. Nina Platt of Homeland for providing me with a copy of her outrageous water bill — and her neighbor's — because, until this happened, I was feeling left out of the Great Baltimore Water Bill Commiseration. It seems like everybody in the city but me has a goofy and...

Surveillance state saps freedom

The surveillance state expands. The Patriot Act allows our phones to be wiretapped. Our email and Internet transactions leave a trail for some to follow. The police can access our GPS location data through our smartphones without a warrant. Retailers record our purchasing habits with painstaking...

Robert B. Reich: Of bedrooms and boardrooms

Some want the 2012 election to be about regulating America's bedrooms. But it really ought to be about regulating the nation's boardrooms.

Rolling into summer

This weekend marks the beginning of summer vacation season for many Marylanders. From graduating students to young families, singles and seniors, the preferred place to be over Memorial Day weekend is generally Ocean City or the nearby...

No 'courtesy' for Wegmans

Baltimore County Councilwoman Vicki Almond faces the kind of decision that makes a job like hers tough. She is being asked whether to allow the rezoning of an empty industrial site in Owings Mills to allow a major retail development anchored by a Wegmans. Depending on which of the hundreds of...

Egypt's new beginning

For the first time in some 5,000 years of Egyptian civilization, voters went to the polls this week to select a leader in a contest where the outcome was uncertain. Given Egypt's crucial role in maintaining order and stability in the Middle East and the wide range of candidates, from secular to...

Rape and prison

The prospect of spending years behind bars in a tiny cell is sufficiently chilling to deter most people from ever committing a crime. Those who willfully break the law anyway and get caught have no one to blame but themselves when a judge sentences them to prison. But even convicted felons shouldn't...

Pensions, bonuses and county budgets

This is the season when local governments finalize their budgets for the next fiscal year, and the grousing about their penurious circumstances is in full swing. Some are even complaining that the state's revised budget and tax plan — signed into law by Gov.Martin O'Malleythis week — has...

The Bain of Romney's candidacy

Newark Mayor Cory Booker was wrong and President Barack Obama is right: Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital deserves closer scrutiny by voters. Whether a brief television ad accomplishes this is another matter.

O'Malley's slots gamble

Our biggest concerns about the push to expand gambling at the end of this spring's regular session of the General Assembly were that there had been insufficient public debate about all of the changes slots boosters wanted to institute and that there was too little reliable information about the...

Citizens United II

"While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

SpaceX pushes back the final frontier

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another...

Another boost for same-sex marriage

How ironic that a divorce will be remembered for strengthening the rights of all Marylanders to be married regardless of sexual orientation.

Standing between fortune and chaos

Reducing the threat of Armageddon

President Obama achieved a major foreign policy goal in 2010 when he concluded the New START Treaty committing the U.S. and Russia to reduce the size of their long-range nuclear arsenals by a third within six years, to 1,550 warheads on each side. But as the president made clear in remarks at the...

Baltimore and bigotry

It is always tempting to ignore the bluster and bombast emanating from the vicinity of Patrick L. McDonough, the Baltimore County delegate and radio talk show host who considers himself a man of the people but mostly is a self-promoting bomb-thrower. His is a career built on angry sound bites and...

At Preakness time, a new optimism

The Preakness Stakes arrives at Pimlico Race Course on Saturday absent one of the event's hallowed traditions. Sure, there will be sundresses and hats, black-eyed Susans, drunken infield revelry and,...

We need a war on lead poisoning

The reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut its threshold for lead poisoning from 10 micrograms per deciliter to 5 micrograms were something of a simplification. What the CDC said, after years of study and discussion, was that no level of lead exposure for children...