Free Republic

I wouldn't wax rhapsodic about the half centennial of the Jones Falls Expressway ("City's six-lane Main Street at 50," Dec. 16). It was the evacuation route for white flight at a time when the strictures of Jim Crow were in retreat under the Warren Court. How else to explain that the planned "transit line" down the center of the road was never built? Coupled with the dismantling of commuter rail and streetcars around the same time, the JFX could guarantee in and out privileges to white suburbanites but left urban blacks without cars with no way out. The irony is...

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is threatening to ram through a sweeping new land use plan that imposes an environmentalist agenda on the state’s sprawling rural populations — a move that could spark a tax revolt and mass exodus unless it is rewritten, county officials and state legislators told The Daily Caller on Monday. O’Malley has indicated that he intends to impose what some lawmakers are calling a draconian new environmentalist agenda, known as “Plan Maryland,” through executive order and regulation, rather than through the state legislature, even though his fellow Democrats dominate both chambers. Plan Maryland’s expensive new mandates for...