Maryland

Annapolis

Mitt Romney is projected to win the Wisconsin Republican presidential primary, according Fox News.

The latest Rasmussen poll of likely Republican voters in Maryland finds Mitt Romney well ahead of his rivals:

Mitt Romney's Maryland chairman, former Republican governor Bob Ehrlich, just appeared on local television to boost his presidential candidate. But, in fact, he might have done the opposite. He was asked by the host, "Is there a scenario in your head where President Obama doesn't win Maryland?"

Maryland governor Martin O’Malley said Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry “seceded” from the National Governors Association (NGA), of which O'Malley is a member. The Democratic governor made the tongue-in-cheek remark to reporters in Washington this morning at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor when asked about the Texas governor.

The first men to die in the American Civil War fell on this day, 150 years ago, on Pratt Street in Baltimore. Troops en route to Washington were confronted downtown by rioters, and the fighting cost four federal soldiers and 12 civilians their lives.

We yield to no one in our admiration for Chris Christie, even though he’s from New Jersey. The candor and plain speaking that have made him a YouTube matinee idol have made him a Scrapbook favorite too. So it’s only with the greatest reluctance that we draw your attention to an incident in which, perhaps for understandable reasons, his gift for voicing uncomfortable truths failed him.

Fred Barnes, with Juan Williams and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

Minnesota, like a lot of states, is facing a major budget shortfall. In order to close the state's $6.2 billion gap, the Wall Street Journal reports that the state's new Democratic governor is considering jacking up the state's taxes on high income earners to unprecedented levels:

Delaware Senate. It wasn’t even close.  Republican Christine O’Donnell jumped out to a lead against Mike Castle right away last night and did not look back.  Final result: O’Donnell 53 percent, Castle 47 percent, with a little more than 3,500 votes separating the two.

Annapolis

My native Virginia does extremely well in the latest Forbes rankings of the nation's wealthiest counties. As the Washington Examiner points out, 12 of Forbes's 25 most prosperous counties are in the Washington Metro area. Who says public service doesn't pay?

Joking aside, the transformation of the DC area over the last several decades is absolutely stunning. As recently as the beginning of the Reagan presidency, outer Fairfax County, where I grew up, was a relative backwater. Now the growth stretches west beyond Loudoun County (the wealthiest county in the nation) and south beyond Prince William County (fourteenth on the Forbes list) and even Stafford County (number twelve). Some people --they may be insane -- commute to work in D.C. from as far away as beautiful Charlottesville. And there's no end in sight. Some folks in Fairfax County want to incorporate the million-person entity as one big city. One day in the future, it will make little sense to distinguish between the Washington metro area and the Richmond metro area. They will have fused.