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• Lindsey Graham's protestations aside, it seems clear that there's neither the will nor the numbers to filibuster the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I'm sure that won't stop Newt and Rush from alienating the rest of the country from the GOP, however.
  


• The president sent a letter to Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy reiterating his support for a public option for what feels like the inevitable health care reform bill that's slowly working its way through Congress. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein helpfully explains the relevance of MedPAC and why it might finally get some teeth, and Greg Sargent documents the Canadian influence.


• It's hard to disagree with the thesis of this Politico piece, that Obama is deliberately poaching GOP moderates for his administration in order to reduce the Republican party down to its core base of Southern supporters.
  


• The right has predictably been freaking out over a New York Times piece that asserts President Obama believes the United States could be "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." As usual, it helps to read the official transcript in these situations. The jury's still out on whether this is sillier than the latest mutterings coming from Michael Goldfarb.


• Mark Levin, last seen screaming at and berating a woman on the air, has a list of "The World's Most Deranged Bloggers." You'd think it would be a roll call of the Left's most pugnacious but actually it's four conservative pundits who tend to point out that people like Levin are nuts. It's odd to think that Levin, author of a book called "Liberty and Tyranny," apparently knows nothing about either subject, but we'll just call this Jonah Goldberg Syndrome from now on.


• Remainders: Tim Pawlenty suggests he'll do what the Minnesota Supreme Court tells him to do; Dave Weigel watches PajamasTV so you don't have to; and Stephen Colbert edits Newsweek?

--Mori Dinauer

A new FDU PublicMind poll in New Jersey confirms how most other polls see tomorrow's Republican gubernatorial primary: Chris Christie (R) leads Steve Lonegan (R) by a healthy 54% to 30% margin. Another 11% are still undecided.

"If anyone has an urge to kill someone at an abortion clinic, they should shoot me. ... It's madness. It discredits the right-to-life movement. Murder is murder. It's madness. You cannot prevent killing by killing." - John Cardinal O'Connor.

So John Cole has pretty much addressed this, but last week Jonathan Chait criticized me and others for referring to Jeffrey Rosen's piece on Sonia Sotomayor as "gossip".

"Gossip" is an effective label for those who wish to denigrate Rosen's reporting or the reputation of TNR, but it's an inaccurate one. Gossip is unverified information. Gossip is something you hear all the time--say, Senator X mistreats his staff. No serious publication can pass off gossip as reporting. However, if you actually speak with the principals firsthand--you interview staffers for Senator X who report that he mistreats them--then what you have is reporting. That's what Jeff did. He spoke first-hand with several of Sotomayor's former clerks, who provided a mixed picture. Unsurprisingly, they declined to put their names on the record, but that's utterly standard for people who are speaking in unflattering terms about people they worked with or for.

Chait is one of my favorite writers on the interwebs, but this is less than persuasive. A big publication printing gossip doesn't change the definition of gossip. The issue isn't that the information was "unverified" as in, no one told Rosen these things, it's that it was objectively unverifiable, as in, assertions about Sotomayor's intelligence are unprovable. Rosen, as a well-respected legal expert, could have made that argument himself in some form, but he didn't, possibly because he wanted to present it as an "unbiased" observation. But since the source is anonymous, there's no way to judge the individual's motivations or perspective. There's reason to give people anonymity under certain circumstances to relay unpleasant information about a colleague or a superior, but not when that information can't be verified. Anonymous, unverifiable information is gossip.

Most oddly, Chait suggests I, along with others have some sort of agenda against the New Republic. I can only speak for myself, but in my many posts on Sotomayor and Rosen, I didn't say anything about the New Republic except that to identify the publication Rosen had been writing in.?

-- A. Serwer