Make Maryland

COLLEGE PARK -- Can the Maryland football team make it to a bowl for the first time since 1990?That was the key question as the Terps opened practice yesterday with fewer doubts than in coach Mark Duffner's previous four years at Maryland. The Terps return their kicker, seven starters on offense and eight on defense, and 10 of those 16 are seniors. They are coming off a 6-5 record, only their second winning mark in a decade, and have shown steady improvement the last two seasons.Will the progress continue?

Fresh from his victory last night in the New Hampshire presidential primary, Democratic candidate Paul E. Tsongas today strongly criticized President Bush at a rally in downtown Baltimore and said Maryland is "critical" to his strategy."

Wending their way into a crowded Maryland House of Delegates hearing room yesterday, the four 16-year-olds were worried they'd face tough questions from legislators. The bill the girls conceived and came to Annapolis to support would widen the pool of bone marrow donors by lowering the eligible age to 16, with parental consent. Minority patients have a particularly hard time finding donors and the girls, who are all African-American, are keenly aware of that. But it's a technical, medical subject, not a feel-good symbolic issue that politicians can support without much thought.

After protesting at a nearby coal plant in 2008 and becoming discouraged with his own dependence on unsustainable energy, Charles County Commissioner Ken Robinson decided to build a wind generator on his coastal property and get off the grid. He became the first individual in Southern Maryland to build one on his land. After Mr. Robinson made the rounds to neighbors, the community embraced his idea. "Only slightly taller than a flag pole," the 33-foot turbine produces 30 percent to 40 percent of Mr. Robinson's power.

I support marriage equality. Assuring that loving same-sex couples have the same rights my wife and I have to live our lives together is, quite simply, a matter of justice and core civil rights. But I have another reason for supporting Question 6 - less idealistic, perhaps, but just as real: Marriage equality is good for business. It certainly would be good for my organization, Johns Hopkins. Our most important assets, by far, are our people. We compete tooth-and-nail with universities around the world to attract the best scholars, teachers and researchers, and our faculty are the wellspring for all we do. Once they are here, we work very hard to support and nurture them so that they can do their best work - and so that other universities don't swoop in to snap up, say, a potential Nobel laureate.

Maryland's General Assembly adopted today a ban on arsenic additives in chicken feed, which if signed into law would make the state the first in the nation to take such a step to keep the toxic chemical out of food and the environment. By a vote of 101-31, the House of Delegates gave final approval to the bill , ending a lengthy debate over the issue that had pitted environmentalists and food safety advocates against the state's major poultry industry.  Similar measures had failed to pass since 2009.

State legislators often prioritize important legislation the way kindergartners rank vegetables among the food groups. They focus on media-friendly social legislation instead of structural reform requiring time and effort to understand and craft. Why, for example, did they pass gay marriage and a law regulating how long a child must face rearward in a car seat but not figure out the budget until the absolute last minute? And why didn't they spend time this year on how to pay the pensions of the 373,000 people in the state retirement system?

SOLOMONS -- As the wind whips at his back, Capt. Harry Huseman steers the Karen Bee to a spot in the Patuxent River just beyond the highway bridge connecting this Southern Maryland island to St. Mary's County. He uses a machine to lower rusty tongs into the murky water below. Within seconds, a pulley hoists up a whole lot of shells and muck - and within it, a batch of market-sized oysters. The 81-year-old oysterman says he's having a good year, and he's not the only one. So far, Maryland's oyster harvest is at 100,000 bushels - already the best season in the past five years, and it's not over until March 31. Those numbers are nowhere near historic levels, which were measured in millions.

Even as a proposal to legalize medical marijuana emerges in Maryland, a backlash over the burgeoning industry has developed in other states - and is likely to influence legislation here. Last week, the Los Angeles City Council tried to rein in the growth of marijuana dispensaries, limiting the number to 70 and imposing tight restrictions on where and how they can operate. And in Colorado, towns are trying to shutter some of the hundreds of dispensaries that have popped up. But supporters of the Maryland proposal say they have learned from problems in states that approved use of the drug without uniform regulations on the dispensaries providing it. The result, they say: Maryland's measure could be among the most stringent in the nation.

Wending their way into a crowded Maryland House of Delegates hearing room yesterday, the four 16-year-olds were worried they would face tough questions from legislators. The bill the girls conceived and came to Annapolis to support would widen the pool of bone marrow donors by lowering the eligible age to 16, with parental consent. Minority patients have a particularly hard time finding donors and the girls, who are African-American, are keenly aware of that. But it is a technical, medical subject, not a feel-good symbolic issue that politicians can support without much thought.