A UM student writing in The Diamondback takes the pandemic-hobbled College Park campus administration to task for leaving a critical stakeholder out of planning participants, and exposing campus workers to hazardous conditions as students return to an uncertain semester.

In the Memo -- planning to vote, rescuing the census, take care of each other (mental health too), and getting the General Assembly to do its job. All that plus events and doings of progressives around the state.

"Many people who support labor unions in principle, who view them as a countervailing force against the power of employers, have only recently come to view police unions as problematic – as entities that perpetuate a culture of racism and violence," says a scholar of the union movement. How can that be? "...police unions differ fundamentally from almost all trade unions in America." As issues of police brutality and criminal justice reform are sparked around the nation by protests, a Labor Day consideration published Sept. 4  by Maryland Matters.

Happy Labor Day! Maryland ranks with Kansas (Kansas!) in the strength of our labor protections for public employees, a roundup by the Economic Policy Institute shows. A little better than a right-to-work state like Virginia, but that is not a high bar.

Message One: Where are our legislators when we really, really need them?

Message Two: Don’t let all this official incompetence get between you and your vote – make your move, and vote in time to be counted.

Read on.

Can voting be even more important this week than it was last week? Yep. Check out our how-to on mail-in voting, for which YOU control the timeline as long as you act in good time. Also: the General Assembly needs to get back to work because the ball is being dropped by the governor on so, so many fronts. One of those is on our schools, which are getting underway even as the Governor and state school superintendent muddle the message. Info on evictions and how to contest them. Short answer: make your court date. And still more, in the Weekly Memo.

The knives come out, more than a little, as a House of Delegates committee explores the latest Hogan personnel scandal and the long memories of Maryland Matters founder Josh Kurtz and others are tapped. Is this the precursor of a full-bore inquiry into not just misbehavior but wrongdoing, as personnel and big money bounce around pinball-style in Hoganland? The hearing yesterday, Kurtz says, “can only be described as one of the political low points of [Hogan’s] 5-1/2-year tenure.”

Eastern Shore progressive activist Jared Schablein salutes the Maryland PSC move to approve turbine specs and placement for offshore wind development well over the horizon near Ocean City. He also laments the increasing and very expensive lobbying effort to stop the project by Ocean City’s oligarchs and their partners in government (a quarter-million bucks to Bereano over four years?). As we see in the gratuitous notes below Schablein’s opinion article in Maryland Matters, the race between Maryland and Virginia to be slowest in achieving offshore wind reality is still neck and neck.

As Maryland struggles with the effects of COVID-19 and state officials' responses  -- some better than others -- issues of national and state relief packages and promises, flattening the infection curve, education practices as schools open, getting a good census count for the future and making sure our voters make a plan to vote and get theirs counted are on our minds. Find issue analysis and resources in the Progressive Maryland Weekly Memo, along with our events calendar and blog posts.

Activists around Maryland are planning events Saturday (Aug. 22) in support of the embattled US Postal Service and its key role in mail-in voting as the pandemic makes in-person voting risky for some. Find where they are here.