The Politico headline:

Right demands tougher fight on Sonia Sotomayor

The article itself is what the Beltway press adores: process. It's about how movement conservatives are demanding GOP senators filibuster Sotomayor's nomination, but that appears very unlikely to happen, and how two prominent conservative activists got into a tiff at a closed door meeting last week about their Sotomayor strategy, etc.

What's telling is that news outlets like Politico don't seem to think it's odd that there's a conservative movement afoot to stop Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination and the movement has virtually nothing to do with the law or her rulings from the bench. Conservatives aren't even talking about Sotomayor and the law, yet the press treats their opposition as being very important and newsworthy. Because when conservatives play hardball, it's news.

It's hard to believe that if liberals opposed Bush's SCOTUS nominees Samuel Alito and John Roberts with attacks that had nothing to do with their legal opinions, that the press would have taken that opposition seriously. But today conservatives don't even pretend to be interested in Sotomayor's legal record, and the press acts like that's completely normal for a confirmation battle.