Our weekend roundup of interesting reads, including a report from the Maryland Association of Counties' annual get-together, black women's pay gap, health care policy choices and more...

Progressive Maryland’s Weekend Reader – interesting progressive articles inside and outside Maryland that you may have missed.

 Josh Kurtz, the showrunner for the blog and aggregator Center Maryland, went to Ocean City over last weekend, not for the surf and sand but for the Maryland Association of Counties annual politifest, a “sweatfest and a schmoozefest and a boozefest” that illuminates how local and state politics might be intersecting now and in the next year. He reports back to us like Ishmael here.

Just to note here that one of our favorite sources for Weekend Reader, the Baltimore Brew indie-news website, is taking a summer break. So this Weekend Reader is lacking their feisty take on things Baltimore and beyond.

Friday was “Black Women’s Equal Pay Day,” taking non-joyous note of the gap between black women’s pay and that of their white male counterparts. What you knew was true in your everyday life is also a matter of record, as the authors tell us. It’s from the Center for American Progress via the progressive aggregator Portside.

Robert Reich’s blog post has a headline that says it all: “Why a Single-Payer Health Care system is Inevitable.” In part it’s because large health care corporations not only shouldn’t, but can’t, make the kind of excessive profits off the sufferings of average people that are the only kind of profits they are willing to accept. This one was also aggregated by Portside.

Last week’s Weekend Reader, which came out a little late, is here.