Congrats to Rusty Shackleford on two fronts. First, it’s his two year blogoversary. But more importantly, he has helped to capture a terrorist. Seriously.

Drudge is splashing an “exclusive” about the Heimbecker v. 555 Associates case that was not included on question #23 of Alito’s Senate questionaire. It turns out this is not really a new revelation, as back on Jan 11th, Mr. Heimbecker posted on Democrats.org that he had faxed information about this to Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter.

Heimbecker’s letter states, in part:

Dear Senator Specter:

Question 23 from the Senate Judiciary Questionnaire reads, in part, as follows: Please provide a list of any instance during your tenure on the Third Circuit that there has been a request for you to recuse yourself from a case, motion, or matter, or when you have otherwise considered recusing yourself from a case, motion, or matter.

As a litigant, who had filed several motions for Judge Alito’s recusal, I was anxious to review his answer to Question 23. He listed 23 cases, from 1990 to 2005. He failed to include Heimbecker v. 555 Associates, 03-2180 (3rd Cir. 2004). To confirm that 03-2180 is4 a case that should have been on his list but was omitted from his answer, the docket in 03-2180 reflects his order as follows:

2/9/04 ORDER(Alito, Authoring Judge, McKee and Cowen, Circuit Judges)denying motion by Pro Se Appellant H. Gerard Heimbecker to Disqualify the Third Circuit because each judge must decide individually
whether to recuse. Judges Alito, McKee and Cowen do not recuse, filed. (ghb) His list of 23 cases included both serious and frivolous cases. If 03-2180 was a frivolous case, it would have been included. There can be only two possibilities to explain his failure to include 03-2180 in his answer. Either he forgot or he didn’t forget.

The original case in question appears to be here. Michelle Malkin has more, as does Prof Bainbridge. The man is clearly qualified to serve, as anyone who watched the hearings knows. These last gasps of opposition will die out quickly, particularly after the Democrats further eroded their credibility during the hearings.

Strange stuff.

A 74-year-old woman who had been blind for 25 years awoke in a British hospital after suffering a heart attack and could see again.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper reports she told her husband: “You’ve got older.”

Doctors were at a loss to explain how Joyce Urch, who lived in a world of shadows and near darkness since 1979, had recovered her sight after the heart attack 16 months ago.

Debbie Schlussel and Stop the ACLU are teaming up as interested parties to fight the ACLU’s suit challenging the NSA.

Peggy Noonan takes stock after the Alito hearings.

I don’t think Democrats understand that the Alito hearings were, for them, not a defeat but an actual disaster. The snarly tone the senators took with a man most Americans could look at and think, “He’s like me,” and the charges they made–You oppose women and minorities, you only like corporations and not the little guy–went nowhere. Once those charges would have taken flight, would have launched, found their target and knocked down any incoming Republican. Not any more. It’s over.

Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry.

…

But where does this leave us? With our mass media busy with reluctant reformation . . . with the old network monopoly over and done . . . with something new, we know not what, about to take its place . . . with the Democratic Party adjusting to the loss of its megaphone . . . Where does that leave us? I think it leaves us knowing that, more than ever, the Republican Party–the party ultimately helped by the end of the old monopoly and the reformation of news media–must be a good party, a decent one, and help our country.

That it regain a sense of its historic mission. That it stop seeming the friend of the wired and return to being the great friend of Main Street, for Main Street still, in its own way, exists. That it return to basic principles on spending, regulation and state authority. That it question a foreign policy that often seems at once dreamy and aggressive, and question, too, an overreaching on immigration policy that seems composed in equal parts of naiveté and cynicism. That its representatives admit that lunching with lobbyists is not the problem; failing to oppose the growth of government–so huge that no one, really no one, knows what is in its budget–is. That they reduce the size and power of government. That they help our country.