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But the proposal would be “dead on arrival” if it’s sent to Congress, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said.

Murray used that blunt terminology when she told Shinseki that the idea would not be acceptable and would be rejected if formally proposed. Her remarks came during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs about the 2010 budget.

No official proposal to create such a program has been announced publicly, but veterans groups wrote a pre-emptive letter last week to President Obama voicing their opposition to the idea after hearing the plan was under consideration.

The groups also cited an increase in “third-party collections” estimated in the 2010 budget proposal — something they said could be achieved only if the Veterans Administration started billing for service-related injuries.

Asked about the proposal, Shinseki said it was under “consideration.”

“A final decision hasn’t been made yet,” he said.

Currently, veterans’ private insurance is charged only when they receive health care from the VA for medical issues that are not related to service injuries, like getting the flu.

Charging for service-related injuries would violate “a sacred trust,” Veterans of Foreign Wars spokesman Joe Davis said. Davis said the move would risk private health care for veterans and their families by potentially maxing out benefits paying for costly war injury treatments.

A second senator, North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, said he agreed that the idea should not go forward.

“I think you will give that up” as a revenue stream if it is included in this April’s budget, Burr said.

Murray said she’d already discussed her concerns with the secretary the previous week.

“I believe that veterans with service-connected injuries have already paid by putting their lives on the line,” Murray said in her remarks. “I don’t think we should nickel and dime them for their care.”

Eleven of the most prominent veterans organizations have been lobbying Congress to oppose the idea. In the letter sent last week to the president, the groups warned that the idea “is wholly unacceptable and a total abrogation of our government’s moral and legal responsibility to the men and women who have sacrificed so much.”

The groups included The American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, Military Order of the Purple Heart, Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Geithner says the Obama administration believes it is essential for other major countries to commit to substantial and sustained efforts to bolster their economies.

The Federal Reserve said Thursday that household net worth dropped by a record 9 percent from the level in the third quarter.

The decline was the sixth straight quarterly drop in net worth and underscored the battering that U.S. families are undergoing in the midst of a steep recession with unemployment surging and the value of their homes and investments plunging.

“On March 10, after a report of an apparent mass murder in Samson, Ala., 22 military police soldiers from Fort Rucker, Ala., along with the provost marshal, were sent to the city of Samson,” Harvey Perritt, spokesman for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Fort Monroe, Va., told CNSNews.com on Monday.

“The purpose for sending the military police, the authority for doing so, and what duties they performed is the subject of an ongoing commander’s inquiry–directed by the commanding general of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Gen. Martin Dempsey.”

TRADOC is the headquarters command for Ft. Rucker.

“In addition to determining the facts, this inquiry will also determine whether law, regulation and policy were followed,” Perritt added. “Until those facts are determined, it would be inappropriate to speculate or comment further.”

Jim Stromenger, a dispatcher at the Samson Police Department, confirmed the MP’s presence in the town, telling CNSNews.com that the troops “came in to help with traffic control and to secure the crime scene”–and the department was glad for the help.

“We’ve been getting a lot of calls,” Stromenger said. “They weren’t here to police, let me make that clear. They were here to help with traffic and to control the crime scene–so people wouldn’t trample all over (it).”

Stromenger said the town needed help–calls had gone out to all police departments in the area.

“We only have a five-man police department,” he told CNSNews.com. “We had officers from all surrounding areas helping out. There were a lot of streets to be blocked off and there had to be someone physically there to block them off. That’s what these MPs were doing. I don’t think they were even armed. The troops helped keep nosy people away.”

But Stromenger said it wasn’t the Samson Police Department that called for the troops.

“I don’t know who called Fort Rucker. But someone did. They wouldn’t have been able to come if someone hadn’t,” he added.

Under Whose Authority?

The troops were apparently not deployed by the request of Alabama Gov. Bob Riley — or by the request of President Obama, as required by law.

When contacted by CNSNews.com, the governor’s office could not confirm that the governor had requested help from the Army, and Gov. Riley’s spokesman, Todd Stacy, expressed surprise when he was told that troops had been sent to the town.

No request from President Obama, meanwhile, was issued by the White House–or the Defense Department.

Wrongful use of federal troops inside U.S. borders is a violation of several federal laws, including one known as the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, Title 18, Section 1385 of the U.S. Code.

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both,” the law states.

David Rittgers, legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said there are other laws barring use of federal troops outside of federal property, as well.

“Title 18, Section 375 of the U.S. Code is a direct restriction on military personnel, and it basically precludes any member of the army in participating in a ‘search, seizure, arrest or other similar activity, unless participation is otherwise authorized by law,’ “ Rittgers told CNSNews.com.

“The security of a crime scene is something I think that would roll up in the category of a ‘search, seizure or other activity,’” Rittgers added.

In addition, there is the Insurrection Act of 1808, as amended in 2007, (Title 10, Section 331 of the U.S. Code) under which the president can authorize troops “to restore order and enforce the laws of the United States” in an insurrection.

“Whenever there is an insurrection in any State against its government, the President may, upon the request of its legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened, call into federal service such of the militia of the other States, in the number requested by that State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to suppress the insurrection,” the law states.

In 2007, Congress expanded the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” as situations for which the president can authorize troops, provided that “domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.”

Congress has been clear that the use of U.S. troops for civilian police purposes is forbidden.

“One of the statutes explicitly says that military brigs can’t even be used to detain domestic criminals,” Rittgers said. “It really is supposed to be a black and white line.”

The U.S. Department of Justice, meanwhile, would have prosecuting authority, if any violation is deemed to have occurred. The Justice Department did not comment for this story.

No, the Führer’s not in there, but his books are — lots of them. They’ve been there for 30 years. And inside one of them, a book on the occult, is a passage marked for special attention in Hitler’s own hand that is chilling even today.

But few know of this trove, much less look at it.

“We treat this collection the way we do every other collection,” says Samuel Streit, the library’s director of special collections. “We’ve never hidden it. They’re in our online catalog. We don’t have flashing lights saying, ‘Hitler’s library.’ But they’re there like anything else.”

A recent book has brought attention to it, however: Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, by Timothy Ryback. The author reports that Adolf Hitler’s library was vast, more than 16,000 volumes. The whereabouts of most of the books is a mystery, although most scholars believe they’re scattered around Russia. We do know that 1,200 of them are in the Library of Congress in Washington, 81 in the John Hay.

…

Included in the collection is a book by Friederich Nietzsche, the German philosopher whose writings, some say, provided a basis for Hitler’s fervent nationalism and belief in Aryan supremacy. What you don’t find in Brown’s Hitler collection, Streit says, are fresh insights into his mind or character.

“There is nothing in anything that we have here that would contradict what is generally known about Hitler. He doesn’t say anything about, ‘Jews are good people.’ There is no refutation for anything he stood for.”

But there is unsettling substantiation. One notable subject represented in Brown’s Hitler library is the occult. And the most requested book in the collection is Magic: History, Theory and Practice (1923) by Ernst Schertel. This book, as with some others, Hitler had marked.

“Like footprints in the sand,” Ryback writes of those notes in the margin, “they do not necessarily reveal the purpose of the journey, but they do allow us to see where his attention caught and lingered, where it rushed ahead, where a question was raised or an impression formed. In these books one finds Hitler’s pencil repeatedly drawn to passages related to the connection between the scientific and the spiritual, between the material and the immaterial.”

Hitler marked the margins of his books with vertical lines beside paragraphs or sentences he thought important. And one marked sentence in Magic is quite chilling, given Hitler’s history:

South Carolina followed Michigan with an unemployment rate of 10.4 percent. Rhode Island, which had its highest unemployment rate on record, was third at 10.3 percent.

Besides losing more jobs than any other state, California had an unemployment rate of 10.1 percent, compared to the national rate of 7.6 percent that month.

Since January 2008, the Pacific coast state shed nearly a half million jobs — the largest decrease in the country — as a devastated real estate market and government standstill pushed more and more people out of work.

Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said he had invited officials from the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and all the bank regulators to the hearing.

“I’m not morphing into Joe McCarthy, but I am going to have them tell me what they need for criminal prosecutions and the civil recovery of funds,” Frank told a conference of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

New figures indicate that 290,000 properties around the country were hit with foreclosure notices in February, up 6 percent from January and 30 percent from the same time in 2008.

As CBS 2’s Joanie Lum reports, in Cook County alone, there are 277 foreclosure filings a day, an increase of 72 percent in recent weeks. Later Thursday, Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown is holding a news conference to discuss the Chicago area crisis.

Nationwide, nearly 291,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice last month, up 6 percent from January, according to the Irvine, Calif-based company. While foreclosures are highly concentrated in the Western states and Florida, the problem is spreading to states like Idaho, Illinois and Oregon as the U.S. economy worsens.

“It doesn’t bode well,” for the embattled U.S. housing market, said Rick Sharga, vice president for marketing at RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing firm. “At least for the foreseeable future, it’s going to continue to be pretty ugly.”

The rise in foreclosure filings came despite temporary halts to foreclosures by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and major banks JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America. Those companies pledged to do so in advance of President Barack Obama’s plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which was launched last week.

Two states that contributing to the increase were Florida and New York, where temporary bans on foreclosures ended.

But other states are moving to enact similar measures. On Wednesday the Michigan House approved legislation that would give homeowners facing foreclosure a 90-day reprieve. The legislation now goes to Michigan’s Republican-led Senate, where its future is unclear.

While the number of foreclosures continue to soar nationwide, banks have held off listing properties for sale, Sharga said. There were around 700,000 such properties nationwide at the end of last year, making up a “shadow inventory” of unsold homes that could drag the housing crisis out even longer.

“It’s going to take us longer than you might anticipate to burn through he inventory of distressed properties,” he said.

The results highlight the challenge ahead for Obama and his economic advisers. The Obama administration is aiming to help up to 9 million borrowers stay in their homes through refinanced mortgages or loans that are modified to lower monthly payments.

Still, the faltering economy, driven down by the collapse of the housing bubble, is causing the housing crisis to spread. Nearly 12 percent of all Americans with a mortgage — a record 5.4 million homeowners — were at least one month late or in foreclosure at the end of last year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. That’s up from 10 percent at the end of the third quarter, and up from 8 percent at the end of 2007.