Supreme Court upholds 'birther' sanction
August 16, 2010 - 10:26am
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court has upheld a $20,000 fine against a leader of the movement challenging President Barack Obama's citizenship.
The high court on Monday refused to block a federal judge's October 2009 ruling that required California lawyer and dentist Orly Taitz to pay the $20,000 fine for filing a "frivolous" litigation. The judge said Taitz attempted to misuse the federal courts to push a political agenda.
Taitz sued in Georgia federal court on behalf of Army Capt. Connie Rhodes. Rhodes sought to avoid deployment to Iraq by claiming Obama wasn't born in the United States.
Justice Samuel Alito on Monday rejected Taitz's second request to block the sanctions. Justice Clarence Thomas had rejected the request earlier.
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=116&sid=2028416
Rising pay, benefits drive growth in military towns
Rapidly rising pay and benefits in the armed forces have lifted many military towns into the ranks of the nation's most affluent communities, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
The hometown of the Marines' Camp Lejeune — Jacksonville, N.C. — soared to the nation's 32nd-highest income per person in 2009 among the 366 U.S. metropolitan areas, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. In 2000, it had ranked 287th.
The Jacksonville metropolitan area, with a population of 173,064, had the top income per person of any North Carolina community in 2009. In 2000, it ranked 13th of 14 metro areas in the state.
The USA TODAY analysis finds that 16 of the 20 metro areas rising the fastest in the per-capita income rankings since 2000 had military bases or one nearby. Other examples:
•Manhattan, Kan., home of the Army's Fort Riley, is the state's most affluent metro area. In 2000, it was the poorest of the state's six metros.
•Killeen, Texas, home of the Army's Fort Hood, is today more affluent than Austin, the state capital and university town 60 miles away.
What's driving the income growth: pay and benefits in the military have grown faster than those in any other part of the economy.
Soldiers, sailors and Marines received average compensation of $122,263 per person in 2009, up from $58,545 in 2000.
Military compensation — an average of $70,168 in pay and $52,095 in benefits — includes the value of housing, medical care, pensions, hazardous-duty incentives, enlistment bonuses and combat pay in war zones. More than 300 U.S. servicemembers have died this year in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"You have to have a good compensation package if you want to recruit and retain the best people," says Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez.
After adjusting for inflation, military compensation rose 84% from 2000 through 2009. By contrast, compensation grew 37% for federal civilian workers and 9% for private sector employees during that time, the BEA reports.
The military has met or exceeded its recruiting goals in 2009 and so far this year, helped by a weak economy and the improved compensation.
"It's booming here," says Mona Patrick, president of the Jacksonville-Onslow (N.C.) Chamber of Commerce. Construction is robust, she says. Extended-stay hotels are full of military contractors.
The Marines have added 10,000 active-duty personnel at Camp Lejeune since 2000 for a total of 48,000, plus 5,000 civilian employees.
Places without links to the military were the decade's biggest losers. Doing poorly:
• High-tech centers. San Jose, the heart of the Silicon Valley, recorded the nation's biggest decline in income per resident since 2000 — a 23% drop after adjusting for inflation.
• College towns. Despite a reputation for economic vibrancy, many well-known college towns — from Boulder, Colo., to Raleigh and Durham, N.C. — registered declining or flat per-capita incomes.
• Industrial cities. Falling hardest: Auto supplier Kokomo, Ind., started the decade ranked 128th in per-capita income and ended ranked 293rd.
<>Metros with top income gains
Metro areas that saw the biggest percentage gains in per-capita income 2000 to 2009
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-08-16-military-towns_N.htm
Md. crime victim sues over denial to renew permit to carry concealed handgun
On a snowy Christmas Eve a few years ago, Raymond E. Woollard was watching television with his family when he heard someone tapping at the windows of his Baltimore County farmhouse.
It was not Santa.
At the sound of breaking glass, Woollard dashed to his bedroom for a shotgun, and the holiday evening quickly became one of the most frightening nights of his life.
There was a hand-to-hand struggle for the weapon, but Woollard, with help from his adult son, eventually subdued the 6-foot-2, 155-pound intruder at gunpoint. Then they waited for more than an hour for police to find their way, on icy back roads, to the home, about 25 miles south of the Pennsylvania border.
That night made Woollard a crime victim for the first time in his life and also one of a select few Maryland residents to receive a license to carry a concealed handgun. But to Woollard's surprise, Maryland State Police denied his request last year to renew the permit, saying they thought the danger to his life had passed.
The agency said it was "because I hadn't been attacked" again, Woollard said in an interview. "They said, 'If you have any problems, you let us know.' "
Instead, Woollard filed a federal lawsuit July 29 to get his permit back, becoming the first person to challenge Maryland's gun control laws in the wake of two landmark Supreme Court decisions that have recalibrated the battle over gun rights and opened the doors to such challenges nationwide. The first, District of Columbia v. Heller, recognized individuals' Second Amendment right to own firearms and struck down the federal city's 32-year-old ban on handguns; the second, McDonald v. Chicago, held that the right also applies to other state and local governments.
Woollard, 62, of the Hampstead area, contends that the right to bear a firearm for self-defense is so paramount that a state agency should not be able to arbitrarily deny it.
"It's up to me. Do you have to show a reason to have a driver's license?" Woollard said. Under current law, the only people likely to carry guns are criminals who do not follow the law anyway, Woollard said. "And the police, as good as they are, show up after the fact."
After the 2002 break-in, Woollard said, he and his family waited 2 1/2 hours for police to arrive. Cpl. Michael Hill, a Baltimore County police spokesman, said records show that the 911 call came in at 9:52 p.m. and that because of icy roads, holiday staffing and the rural location, officers did not arrive until about 11.
The Second Amendment Foundation, a Bellevue, Wash.-based nonprofit group that was a plaintiff in McDonald v. Chicago has joined Woollard's lawsuit against the state police and the Maryland Handgun Permit Review Board. The lawsuit says that people should not have to prove "a good and substantial reason," as required by Maryland law, to exercise a fundamental constitutional right.
"I think that what's going to happen now is, we're going to start to test where these boundaries lie in what is a 'reasonable' and an 'unreasonable' regulation," said Dave Workman, a spokesman for the Second Amendment Foundation, which is challenging similar discretionary regulations in New York and North Carolina.
(read the rest at) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/14/AR2010081402547.html
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