American Dream

Kwaku Atta Poku, father of three, owner of a small taxi company and Columbia homeowner, was living the American dream - until, through a bizarre but legal injustice, his house ended up in foreclosure and was auctioned off. Bizarre? Mr. Atta Poku was current in his mortgage payments. Legal? A court ruled the foreclosure was proper. Injustice? Mr. Atta Poku lost the house in 2005 not because of anything he did wrong. He lost his house because the mortgage company couldn't find the documents that would prove his initial loan had been paid, a bank didn't have its paperwork in order and the title company that handled Mr. Atta Poku's refinancing is now out of business.

Let's say you're under the illusion that you have a great singing voice, OK? So one day you get up in front of an audience and belt out a tune, and the reaction is pure death. Some people are wincing. Others are smirking and looking down at their shoes. Still others are getting up and leaving the room, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads. Wouldn't you get the hint here? Wouldn't it dawn on you that you, um, stink as a singer? Apparently not. I say this because after a column last week about American Idol, in which I said all these horrible singers on the hit Fox show know they're horrible, a number of readers e-mailed to say I was wrong.

MARYLAND Mid dies in car accident A Naval Academy midshipman was killed yesterday morning when the car he was riding in lost control and crashed near Davidsonville in an accident that police suspect might have involved alcohol, authorities said. Second class Midshipman Charles B. Carr, 20, was declared dead at the scene. pg 1B Methadone clinic plans opening As the Baltimore County government appeals a ruling preventing it from enforcing a law designed to keep drug treatment centers out of neighborhoods, a methadone clinic might open in Dundalk.

Margaret Spellings isn't just the U.S. education secretary. She's also the mother of a college student, which explains her interest in simplifying the process by which students (or their parents) apply for federal financial aid. Anyone who has ever wrestled with the notorious FAFSA paperwork knows it makes filing income tax forms look like a piece of cake. Streamlining that process is just one of the generally sensible recommendations in a report released recently by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

DENVER -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, has gone to great lengths to create a distinctive political footprint, but she declared yesterday that ideas championed by the Clinton White House offer the best chance for Democrats to win back their majority. "To paraphrase the historic 1992 campaign," Clinton said with a wry smile, "It's the American Dream, stupid." In a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group that propelled her husband to the presidency on his own riff of "It's the economy, stupid," she unveiled a 20-page "American Dream Initiative."

In Baltimore for barely two days, Felipe Carrasquillo was once-and-for-all convinced yesterday that he's ready to leave Puerto Rico to work as a police officer on the city's toughest streets. In his eyes, the city is clean, the Police Department is well-organized and the people - at least the few he has met - are nice. And then there's the chance to earn more money and better benefits, compared to what he has been earning in law enforcement on the Caribbean island. "It's the true American dream," Carrasquillo said.

Washington -- Four years ago, Hilda Flores and her three small children ran across the Mexican border in Arizona at night, then boarded a plane headed to Baltimore. Flores doesn't remember much about her first ride in an airplane, just that the children cried and asked what their father - who had left to work in the U.S. seven years earlier - looked like. Yesterday, with her only child born in this country, 2-year-old Jorge, in her arms, Flores went on another journey. Along with almost 200 parishioners from Baltimore's Our Lady of Pompeii Roman Catholic Church, she traveled to the National Mall to join tens of thousands of people, most of them Latinos, to protest a bill that would make it a felony to enter the country illegally.

Smear campaigns against public officials accomplish little but to deter well-meaning people from entering public service. Careless attempts to destroy reputations - such as the one last year against Mayor Martin O'Malley and an earlier one against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele - will not bring new jobs to Maryland, will not make Baltimore City and Prince George's County safer or make the school your children attend a better place. Because these smears don't affect our lives concretely, we tend to dismiss them as political nonsense that is meaningless.

In Rockville yesterday morning, hours before he would officially announce for governor, Mayor Martin O'Malley was already in full campaign mode. He spoke of hope, opportunity and faith in the future. He said he wanted a state "in which no one is left behind." He said the people of Maryland "can do great things together." So far, so good. But then O'Malley detoured into the bizarre. He closed his speech by saying, "I leave you with the words of the poet who was from Rockville: And `so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I SEE ASMA NAEEM, 7, on the front page of The Sun, and read how her family came from Pakistan to Howard County for the American Dream - one drop in an immigrant tide that fuels much of Maryland's and America's population growth. And I'm torn. Instead of thinking, "Welcome aboard, neighbors," I'm thinking we must sharply restrict people like them from coming here. By "people like them," I don't mean brown people, people from different cultures or religions - and I certainly don't mean the Naeems personally.