Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

Talk about your high-grade bovine fecal material…

Walgreen Co. engaged in religious discrimination by “effectively firing” three Illinois pharmacists who refused to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception, a public-interest group alleged Wednesday.

The American Center for Law and Justice, founded by evangelist Pat Robertson, said it had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Click here for link.

Mary Bourdukofsky, an Alaska Native, was at home on rugged St. Paul Island one Sunday in the summer of 1942 when her husband rushed breathlessly through the door from his weekly baseball game.

The federal government was in the process of forcing 881 Aleuts to move from their homes on the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea to dank wartime internment camps in the rain forest of Southeast Alaska 1,500 miles away.
*
*
*
Aleuts were not suspected of spying or sabotage, as were tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans interned after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

However, they were not allowed to leave the camps unless they were drafted into the military or coerced into working the Pribilof fur seal hunt, which brought millions of dollars to the U.S. government.
*
*
*
“There was a lot of sickness at the camp,” said Jake Lestenkof, 73, who was 11 years old when his mother died of pneumonia at a camp at Funter Bay. “There was a lot of pneumonia and tuberculosis … . There were certainly no medical facilities or personnel.”

Sanitation and pipe systems were never installed. Residents drank water tainted with sewage and _ at one camp _ runoff from the expanding cemetery. One in 10 people died in the camps from 1942 to 1945, according to federal estimates cited in the film.

“It was terrible,” said Maria Turnpaugh, 78. “We lived in little shacks full of holes and no running water. People got sick all the time.”

Click here for link.

A day after Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan called for a hard look at the management of the county’s planning department and ordered work halted on another project, some county officials said his remarks did little to resolve the controversy over construction irregularities in northern Montgomery.

Some council members, as well as planning staff, said that in his state of the county address, Duncan tried to take undue credit for attempts to resolve problems at Clarksburg Town Center. Others said he was using his speech to boost his political fortunes.

Click here for link.

Move Follows Boycott By a Religious Group

Ford Motor Co. said it will stop running ads for its Jaguar and Land Rover brands in the gay press, helping to avoid a confrontation with conservative Christians but setting up a fight with gays and lesbians.

The American Family Association, a conservative religious group, launched a boycott of Ford this year for extending marriage benefits to same-sex couples and giving “thousands of dollars to support homosexual groups and their agenda,” the group said in written statement. The group criticized Ford for supporting gay commitment ceremonies and gay pride parades.

Click here for link.