In miniature, April 17

• Not just active duty servicemembers: “MD: Lower the Drinking Age to ALL Those 18 years and Older” [Brooke Winn]
• “Baltimore Police Admit Thousands of Stingray Uses” [Adam Bates, Cato; related on Buffalo]
• Washington Post features the legal ordeal of Randy and Karen Sowers’s South Mountain Creamery as fuel for forfeiture/structuring reform, quotes me [more]
• In race for Democratic nomination to succeed Mikulski, both Chris Van Hollen, Donna Edwards ranked as “hard core liberals,” and it’s not as if Elijah Cummings would provide any contrast on that [Glynis Kazanjian, Maryland Reporter]
• My coverage of the latest round of MoCo police and CPS’s war on the free-range Meitiv family of Silver Spring [Cato, Overlawyered and more] Councilman at large Hans Riemer embarrasses himself [Lenore Skenazy, some of my Twitter contributions] More: Thomas Firey, MPPI.
• Plans go forward nonetheless for subsidized Frederick convention hotel: “City-owned Hilton Baltimore lost nearly $11.2 million in 2012, audit shows.” [Steve Kilar, Baltimore Sun]

In miniature, March 21

• “Maryland legislature mulls new SWAT transparency bill” [Radley Balko, earlier here, here, and here] More: Jason Boisvert;
• With conservative support, legislature moving to give Child Protective Services more power to keep kids away from parents. What could go wrong? [Frederick News-Post, more about laws named after victims]
• State should give scandal-plagued Baltimore jail back to city [Van Smith, earlier]
• “Living rent-free in a $600,000 house is a ‘plight’ only in the sense that at some point you may have to stop.” [Arnold Kling on the Washington Post’s naive Prince George’s County foreclosure series; coverage of Maryland’s unusually lender-hostile foreclosure law at Overlawyered here, here, here, here, here, and here]
• Veteran cop once feared concealed carry but testifies how “they schooled me” [The Blaze]
• Sigh: “Maryland Institutes Affirmative Action for Pot Growers” [Roger Clegg]

MoCo: CPS will track parents who let kids walk home from park

Cross-posted from Overlawyered, earlier here:

“The long-awaited decision from Montgomery County Child Protective Services has arrived at the home of Danielle and Alex Meitiv, and it finds them ‘responsible’ for ‘unsubstantiated child neglect’ for letting their kids walk outside, unsupervised. If that decision makes no sense to you, either — how can parents be responsible for something that is unsubstantiated? — welcome to the place where common sense crashes into bureaucratic craziness.” [Lenore Skenazy, Free-Range Kids] The “finding of unsubstantiated child neglect means CPS will keep a file on the family for at least five years and leaves open the question of what would happen if the Meitiv children get reported again for walking without adult supervision.” [Donna St. George, Washington Post] Earlier here and here.

Silver Spring family faces off against CPS — over letting kids walk outside

The Meitiv family of Silver Spring is now under Child Protective Services scrutiny for permitting their children to walk the neighborhood alone a little too freely. Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids has been on the story for a while, and now the Washington Post and columnist Petula Dvorak are covering it too (related). More: Beth Greenfield, Yahoo Parenting (cross-posted at Overlawyered).

More: Welcome listeners from “Frederick’s Forum” on WFMD with Dave Schmidt, Pattee Brown, Darren Wigfield, and Eric Beasley. I’ve amplified the cross-link at Overlawyered with a Google Street View map link for those who want to check out what Georgia Avenue in that section of Silver Spring looks like, and there’s a reader discussion under way. After our Saturday morning talk I saw this new post from Lenore Skenazy about a Maryland mother who now has a misdemeanor conviction for letting her 10-year-old look after her baby sister for ten minutes in the back of the car while she shopped. A lot of these aggressive-CPS cases seem to come from the state of Maryland.