Five yrs ago, @GovLarryHogan killed the new east-west transit line for Baltimore while approving a new line in the DC burbs. That project is now in chaos--the builders have walked away from it. To keep it going, MD will take $$ from...transit in Baltimore. washingtonpost.com/local/traffica…
Flashback to 2015 Washington Post editorial cheering the approval of the DC Purple Line: "Simultaneously, Mr. Hogan made another good call by killing a major transit project in Baltimore, the Red Line, which never made transportation or financial sense." washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-gre…
Wow, from normally pro-Hogan WaPo: "Rarely are failures of public planning, administration & good sense as glaringly visible as what is unfolding now in the suburbs of DC, where a $5.6 billion, 3-decade partnership to build a 16-mile light rail line is on the verge of collapse."
"...miles of ripped-up roadways and half-finished bridges and tunnels — a tableau of dysfunction and a fiasco for all to see. Amid this blight, there is radio silence from Gov. Larry Hogan." washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-p…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
After Anthony Barksdale became deputy police commissioner in Baltimore, homicides plummeted, falling under 200/year for the first time in decades in 2011. Arrests fell sharply too, as the dep't targeted the most violent offenders.
He left the job for health reasons.
After Freddie Gray's death and ensuing unrest in 2015, homicides surged to over 300, year after year.
Barksdale returned as deputy mayor for public safety, in 2022. Homicides have since plummeted again, with 113 so far this year.
Correlation is not causation. But Tony Barksdale's impact in Baltimore is undeniable.
"At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms." And at other parks:
"As we emerge from our most restrictive covid precautions, the tables have turned: I find myself in a world in which many have become more introverted. And I hate it." Great column by @rebeccamakkai: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
Key graf:
"I reconnected with a large group of friends at an outdoor restaurant...At the end of dinner, [two] announced that although they’d had a wonderful time, they wouldn’t make it to another planned gathering three weeks later; they needed at least a month to recover.
This is a v sharp Janan Ganesh column noting how similar Britain and France have come to be: same size, same hyper-dominant capital region, same post-imperial wistfulness. Some quotes follow. ft.com/content/beff18…
"Each nation has a monstrously dominant capital. Politics, media, finance and culture are concentrated in one city. No European nation of comparable size--not Spain, not Italy, not Germany--does that. Nor does the US, Australia or Canada..."
"...The result is two similarly distorted countries. Lots of democracies have angry hinterlands but in few is the populist rage so focused against one place...."
Hospitals are closing at disprortionately high rates in Mississippi and the other nine red states that have refused to accept Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, even though the fed gov't picks up 90 pct of the cost and has further sweetened the pot recently. nytimes.com/2023/03/28/us/…
"Expanding Medicaid would uncork $1.35 billion a year in federal funds to [Mississippi] hospitals and health care providers...And it would guarantee coverage to 100,000 uninsured adults making less than $20,120 in a state whose death rates are at or near the nation’s highest..."
Of the "close to two million other [uninsured] Americans who live in the states that have not expanded Medicaid, three in five are adults of color, according to a 2021 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities...In Mississippi, more than half are Black."
Wow. Boeing is arguing that it is not liable for victim suffering claims in Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash because "victims died painlessly because the airplane crashed into the ground so fast that their brains didn’t have time to process pain signals." wsj.com/articles/boein…