"WASHINGTON - Off camera, the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito offer better entertainment than what makes it to the TV screen.
Witnesses are abruptly uninvited.
Senators, their faces pancaked with makeup, openly yawn.
One, fidgeting, accidentally kicks the backside of a photographer squatting just in front of the senators' dais.
With Democrats and liberal interest groups struggling to land a punch on President Bush's second Supreme Court nominee, Alito appears on a smooth track to confirmation.
But away from the lights, drama unfolds.
(snip)
Meanwhile, off camera, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the committee's highest-ranking Democrat, fidgeted in his seat at the head of the committee table. Dozens of news photographers squatted below him in the "well" between the dais and Alito's table, in position to get their images of the nominee.
"I discovered some obstacle under the table and I tried a few times to move it out of the way with my foot," Leahy, D-Vt., wrote in his blog. "I discovered in mortification that it was a press photographer, wedged in front of the dais."
"God bless 'em all for all they do and for all they endure," Leahy wrote
(snip)
For his part, the nominee was showing a bit of wear on his third day of hearings.
On television Wednesday morning, a five-o'clock shadow and a sheen of perspiration showed through any makeup Alito may have been wearing.((((I DID NOT SEE A TRACE OF MAKEUP ON HIM}}}
And that was after a night of sleep. The evening before, as nearly 10 hours of hearings drew to a close, Alito in person looked notably wan, his eyes red with fatigue." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Gotta give credit to the writer, Laurie Kellman -- she didn't stint on visiting her observations on both sides. Her apt description of Biden's Princeton moments shows him for the bloated hypocrite he is.
Male Senators wear make-up for a hearing??? Ick
You know in the intrest of full disclouser AP really should be required to make the resumes of their writers available so people could understand the bais their "news" is being flitered thru.