Courtesy of the Washington Post:

New Worker Outrages Frederick Official

A worker's refusal to remove his hat during a Frederick County Board of County Commissioners meeting made one board member so angry he moved to have the man fired.

The motion failed, but Commissioner Michael L. Cady prevailed in getting $35,000 -- the approximate value of the groundskeeper's wages and benefits -- removed from the Department of Parks and Recreation budget.

"I want that position eliminated, and with it, he goes," Cady said yesterday, a day after he confronted Westley B. Etters at a public meeting.

Etters didn't return telephone calls to the parks department and his home. Department head Paul Dial said the matter was under review, and he declined to comment further.

Etters, who is in his late twenties, according to the LexisNexis information service, was hired recently for the full-time job. He was at the morning meeting to be introduced to the commissioners, a custom with new employees.

Cady, 61, an Olympic weightlifting coach and former Marine, said he noticed during the Pledge of Allegiance that Etters was wearing a knit stocking cap and "basically going through the motions rather than showing the proper respect to the flag."

Somebody who grew up in that part of Maryland has written a suitably waspish demolition of this sort of megalomaniacal nonsense here.