Midday

Early voting in Maryland begins tomorrow.

The Elections Project at the University of Florida reports that in states where early voting has already started, turnout is high. What will that mean in key battleground states like Georgia, Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania?

What does it portend here in Maryland, in statewide races for Governor, Attorney General and Comptroller?

A little later in the program, Tom's guest will be Aruna Miller, a former Delegate and Democratic running mate for Lt. Governor with her party's gubernatorial nominee, Wes Moore.

But we begin today with Pamela Wood, a colleague at our partner news organization, The Baltimore Banner, where she covers Maryland politics and government.

Pamela Wood joins us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today, we continue our series of Conversations with the Candidates: 2022 with the Democratic nominee for Maryland Attorney General.

Brian Frosh, the Democratic incumbent, will retire in January.

Tom had planned to speak with Republican nominee Michael Peroutka during the first half of the program today, but the candidate's office called to cancel his appearance an hour before our broadcast.

As a result, Tom's sole guest today is the Democratic nominee for MD Attorney General, Congressman Anthony Brown. He served in the Maryland General Assembly and then as Lt. Governor in the Martin O’Malley administration, from 2007-2015. He ran unsuccessfully for Governor in 2014, and he was elected to Congress in 2016.

He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is a decorated military veteran with more than 2 years of military service.

Congressman Brown is 60 years old. He and his wife are the parents of three adult children.

Rep. Anthony Brown joins us on Zoom at half-past the hour (the interview begins at 21:25 into the posted audio file), following Tom's reflections on the Michael Peroutka candidacy and the upcoming elections.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

We continue now with Midday's series of Conversations with the Candidates: 2022, with the Republican nominee for Maryland's third congressional district.

Joining Tom is Yuripzy Morgan, a lawyer and former WBAL talk show host, who is running against the Democratic incumbent, Rep. John Sarbanes.

This is the Republican's second try for public office. She ran for Congress in the 2nd district in 2016, losing in the primary to Pat McDonough.

Yuripzy Morgan is a graduate of the University of Texas, Arlington, and the University of Maryland Law School. She runs a private law practice. She is 38 years old, married, and the mother of two children. She and her family live in Severna Park.

Yuripzy Morgan joins us on Zoom.

Early voting in Maryland begins this Thursday, October 27.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Early voting in Maryland begins this Thursday.

Today, we continue our series of Conversations with the Candidates: 2022, Tom's guests are the Democratic and Republican nominees for Maryland's 3rd congressional district.

The district includes Howard and most of Anne Arundel Counties, plus a slice of Carroll County. It used to include parts of Baltimore City and Montgomery County, but the lines were re-drawn this year.

In the second half of the today's program, Tom speaks with Yuripzy Morgan, the Republican nominee.

But we begin with Congressman John Sarbanes, a Democrat who is running for re-election. Rep. Sarbanes has served in the House since 2007. He serves on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and the House Oversight and Reform Committee. He also chairs the Democracy Reform Task Force, which was the driving force behind HR1, the For The People Act.

John Sarbanes is 60 years old. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He lives in Towson. He and his wife are the parents of three adult children.

John Sarbanes joins us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today, a conversation about the media and the Big Lie.

Former President Donald Trump’s repeated false assertions about the results of the 2020 election — that it was rigged by Democrats and that he, not Joe Biden, was the actual winner — have been ingrained in the public psyche for more than two years. Trump began making his outrageous claims even before the election was called for Joe Biden.

It wasn’t Trump’s first lie, of course. The Washington Post kept a running tally of the false or misleading statements made by the former President during his four years in office. The ignominious total: 30,573.

Trump made 492 suspect claims in his first 100 days in the White House. On the day before the 2020 election, the Post reports he made 503 false or misleading claims on that one day alone.

In her new book, Confidence Man, journalist Maggie Haberman makes the point that the media wasn’t prepared to cover a candidate or a President who lied so frequently, or so brazenly. If that’s true, are we prepared now?

Trump’s propensity for malicious fiction predated his time in politics by decades. But his Big Lie about the election is without doubt the most pernicious of the many falsehoods he has uttered throughout his career. It led to a riot at the US Capitol and the deaths of five people. Has it also brought democracy to the brink of collapse?

There is ample evidence that it has. The Big Lie has been picked up and embraced by a slew of Trump’s fellow Republicans, as many as 370 across the country who are on the ballot next month.

Here in Maryland, two candidates for statewide office, Dan Cox, who is running for Governor, and Michael Peroutka, who is running for Attorney General, are election deniers. Five candidates for the House of Representatives, one candidate for the US Senate, and Cox’s running mate are also election deniers.

Tom's two guests today have done yeomen’s work in helping voters discern between that which is false and that which is true, and we're delighted they have joined us today to talk about how the media should approach coverage of people who deny the truth, for whatever reason.

Jonathan Lemire is the host of Way Too Early on MSNBC and the White House Bureau Chief for POLITICO. He’s the author of The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020.  He joins us on Zoom from New York.

David Folkenflik covers the media for NPR, and contributes to the NPR Web series called Untangling Disinformation.  He is the author of Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires. He joins us on Zoom from Montclair, NJ.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Next on Midday, a visit with our peripatetic theater critic, J. Wynn Rousuck, who joins us each week with her reviews of Maryland's regional stage. Today she's back, just in time for Halloween, to tell us about Edgar Allan Poe's 'Blood Sweat and Fears,' the first live stage production by the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre. The non-profit company produces Poe's works for educational and mass media presentations, including a series of podcasts for WYPR called Poe Theater on the Air.

The new show, directed by Jay Brock, features dramatizations of three of the master of macabre's well-known short stories: “Berenice,” “A Predicament,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It's being presented on stage through FPX Events at the Flagship Cinema multiplex in Dundalk, which is located at 7938 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224.

Click the theater or FPX links for more details.

Parental advisory: The show contains some adult themes, including murder. Not recommended for children under 13.

J. Wynn Rousuck joins us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Much of the conversation about crime tends to fixate on the perpetrators, and how or even if they are prosecuted. So much of the discussion about public safety is centered around getting criminals off the streets and incarcerated to keep them away from the rest of us.The victims of crimes are often left out of the conversation.

Today on Midday, we are going to center them. What do we owe victims of crime? What is our legal and moral obligation to people whose lives have been upended by violence?Tom's guests today argue that not only is taking care of crime victims the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing to do as part of a strategy to reduce violence.

In the summer of 2021, the National Public Safety Partnership published a report that was focused on under-served survivors, particularly boys and men of color. The report assessed what services various agencies in the City of Baltimore were providing to survivors of violent crime, and how those services should be improved and expanded.How best can cities like ours implement a trauma-informed approach that increases access to services for victims and promotes healing between communities of color and the police?

Heather Warnken is the Executive Director of the Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and the lead author of the above-mentioned report by the National Public Safety Partnership.

Lydia Watts is the Executive Director of ROAR, “Rebuild, Overcome and Rise,” a victims services organization at the University of MD, Baltimore…

Heather Warnken and Lydia Watts join Tom on zoom. 

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

We're focusing on Baltimore County today on Midday. 

Tom's next guest is Kristen Griffith, a former Carroll County Times reporter who currently covers education in Baltimore County for WYPR's partner news organization, The Baltimore Banner. 

She helps us size up the roster of candidates for the Baltimore County School Board, and discusses some of the key issues facing the county school system, from transit to student safety.

Kristen Griffith joins us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today on Midday, our focus is on Baltimore County.

We begin with another installment in our series of Conversations with the Candidates: 2022. Tom's guest is Johnny Olszewski, Jr., the Democratic Baltimore County Executive who is running for a second term against Republican challenger, former Delegate Pat McDonough.

After a close primary contest in 2018, Olszewski cruised to victory in the General Election, beating Insurance Commissioner Al Redmer by 15 points.

Mr. Olszewski is 40 years old. He holds an undergraduate degree from Goucher College, a master’s degree from the George Washington University and a PhD from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Before taking office as County Executive in 2018, he represented the county in the Maryland House of Delegates, from 2006-2015.

We invited former Del. McDonough to appear on today’s program and he declined our invitation.

County Executive Olszewski joins us on Zoom. 

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's guest for the hour today is one of the most distinctive and fascinating voices in contemporary literature, whose new book is being published today. George Saunders won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, the acclaimed book that told a terrific story about a grieving Abraham Lincoln, with a wholly original approach to its structure and narrative arc.

Before the success of Lincoln, Saunders secured his reputation among the top rank of writers as a master of the short story. His 2013 collection, The Tenth of December, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and proclaimed one of the 10 best books of the decade by the New York Times Book Review.

In his last book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a non-fiction masterclass in analysis of Russian short stories, Saunders observed, “To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can’t do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can’t be done.”In his new book, Saunders proves, repeatedly, that in his hands, it absolutely can be done.

This collection of nine stories is called Liberation Day.  The stories surprise and delight, and they challenge readers to abandon basic assumptions about reality and fantasy, and to re-imagine fundamental tenets of the short story form itself. These are stories that are not only thought-provoking; they create an occasion to understand the readers’ relationship to the writer in a different way.

George Saunders has been a guest on our show several times, and we're delighted to welcome him back to Midday to talk about this new collection.

He joins us on Zoom from New York.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.