PUBLIC MARKS with search hearings

Democrats can't not be crazy. They will instantly set to work enacting a national gay-marriage law, impeachment hearings, slavery reparations and a series of new federal felonies for abortion clinic protesters. The only way to get Democrats to focus on terrorists would be to convince them that the terrorists are interfering with a woman's right to choose or that commercial jetliners exploding in midair are a threat to America's wetlands.

Sacramento, CA – When it comes to raising the minimum wage, it seems like no one can agree. The California Labor Federation is sponsoring bills in the Assembly and Senate to boost the $6.75 minimum wage by $1 and make future increases automatic with the

This week, more than two months after President Bush nominated him, the Senate will finally vote on Judge Samuel Alito’s elevation to the Supreme Court. In a final, all-too-typical move, the vote was put off a week at the behest of Alito’s opponents. Why? Nobody seriously expects another week to make a difference. With a few exceptions, senators probably knew how they were going to vote before the hearings. So, why put off the vote?

You heard it here first: Ted Kennedy, the Democrat Party mascot, is a tone-deaf alien from a distant galaxy. How else to explain his impudent inquisition into the integrity of our nation's next Supreme Court justice, the Honorable Samuel Alito? In Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this week, Kennedy actually asserted that the nominee's association with a conservative Princeton alumni group two decades ago should disqualify him from a seat on the High Court.

If there is one thing to be learned from the confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, it’s that liberal Democrats will waste no opportunity to grandstand for their far left-wing even if that means being misleading with the facts, unprofessional with the questioning, and hypocritical with the insinuations. Case in point is liberal moonbat Ted Kennedy who blasted Judge Alito for being a member of an “exclusive” club of Princeton alumni without mentioning that he is a member of an “exclusive” all-male Harvard club.

Congress can't usurp the president's power to spy on America's enemies. In the continuing saga of the surveillance "scandal," with some congressional Democrats denouncing President Bush as a lawbreaker and even suggesting that impeachment hearings may be in order, it is important to step back and put things in historical context. First of all, the Founding Fathers knew from experience that Congress could not keep secrets. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and his four colleagues on the Committee of Secret Correspondence unanimously concluded that they could not tell the Continental Congress about covert assistance being provided by France to the American Revolution, because "we find by fatal experience that Congress consists of too many members to keep secrets."

IN THE LATE 1940s and early 1950s, a distinguished psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric Wertham made a name for himself in the United States by leading a crusade against violent comic books. His 1954 book exposing the comic-book industry, Seduction of the Innocent , is still remembered in American comics fandom as a wildly exaggerated and overwrought polemic and has gone on to become a collector's item in its own right. Even the comic books mentioned in the text or used as source illustrations have also become collector's items because of their association with him and the book. Facing a public relations nightmare and hearings by the US Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, fearful publishers either went out of business or banded together to form a Comics Code Authority that would censor comic books before some outside body did it for them. American comics fans have no cause to love Dr. Wertham. They remember him as the man who attacked comics with his hysterical book, helped kill EC Comics (the one publisher doing anything like adult-level material), and brought on the Comics Code that reduced American comics to a childish mentality. Many fans have associated Dr. Wertham with Senator Joseph McCarthy, well-known for his anti-Communist crusade at about the same time, and legends circulate of Dr. Wertham accusing comic books of being a Communist plot or some such.

IN THE LATE 1940s and early 1950s, a distinguished psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric Wertham made a name for himself in the United States by leading a crusade against violent comic books. His 1954 book exposing the comic-book industry, Seduction of the Innocent , is still remembered in American comics fandom as a wildly exaggerated and overwrought polemic and has gone on to become a collector's item in its own right. Even the comic books mentioned in the text or used as source illustrations have also become collector's items because of their association with him and the book. Facing a public relations nightmare and hearings by the US Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, fearful publishers either went out of business or banded together to form a Comics Code Authority that would censor comic books before some outside body did it for them. American comics fans have no cause to love Dr. Wertham. They remember him as the man who attacked comics with his hysterical book, helped kill EC Comics (the one publisher doing anything like adult-level material), and brought on the Comics Code that reduced American comics to a childish mentality. Many fans have associated Dr. Wertham with Senator Joseph McCarthy, well-known for his anti-Communist crusade at about the same time, and legends circulate of Dr. Wertham accusing comic books of being a Communist plot or some such.

"In a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary subcommittees overseeing intellectual property issues, [NCL] raised concerns about a forthcoming ambitious effort to catalogue the entire collections of four major American libraries".

Harriet Miers is never going to be grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. She is going to withdraw her name from consideration before such hearings ever begin. You can take that to the bank.

Over in the alternative universe of the 9/11 commission hearings watched only by me, Richard Ben-Veniste recently proposed an amazing new standard for investigating Arabs in this country.

Backlogs of untranslated Arabic chatter by suspected terrorists are piling higher at the department, thanks to a post-9-11 increase in wiretaps and a still-chronic shortage of qualified translators,