Sotomayor is "very active and well-prepared".

That's a heck of alot more than we can say for hacks like Rosen and Shear. It's one thing to commit the sin of shoddy reporting, that's nothing surprising. But to try and undermine this accomplished woman when you got nothin'!? That's shameful.

Yeah and why the fuck do we let all the articles commentary work like a circular firing squad. After 8 years of Dick Cheney and GWB using editorials from the major newspapers as covers for legitimate reporting to get their message, why do we continue to let these guys self-reference each other. You could simply comment that much of the criticism of Obama's potential (which means it has not happened yet and that there is no official announcement for) comes form anonymous sourcing and from conservative leaning journalist and commentators. While there has been other pieces by more middle to left journalist and commentators much of their commentating has not been directed at Sotomoyor per se but at the inconceivable lack of cite-able references by said journalist.

Basically this is an insult to journalism but this is also how the game is played today. SO why don't we call it like we see and then go out and do the foot-work to expose it for what it is!

The "criticize a judge anonymously" sites are a joke. Every time I've had occaision to look at them, the negative critiques have always seem to have been written by lawyers got their asses handed to them by the judge because they were unprepared or made lousy arguments. And, often, the positive reviews seem to have been written by laywers who won their cases before the judge (which, at the appellate level, usually doesn't happen for at least a couple or three of months) and are thus basking in the rosy glow of having encountered a judge who was smart enough to appreciate the lawyer's superior intelligence and reasoning ability while forgetting anything that bothered them at the time they were doing the argument.

Anonymous comments by people who recently clerked for (or near) the judge also have to be viewed with caution. Although clerks, by definition, are people in the top few percent of their class who've had ample opportunity to observe (and participate) in what happens, they're also people with no actual experience as practicing attorneys and, like all first year attorneys, they often think they know a lot more than they really do.

This is often especially true for the Federalist Society types you'll frequently find clerking for Bush II appointees. Still, if I really wanted to smear a judge anonymously, pretending to be a clerk would give me a lot more cred with other lawyers than than pretending to be someone who appeared before her.

Too bad no one in the MSM has the kahunas to point out to the repuglicans, Obama hasn't named anyone as of yet. So all this posturing shows they have gone beyond the principle of reasonableness - it would be reasonable only when a person making the accusations against Sotomayor did so because she was indeed the nominee for the position.

The fact that Rosen concluded the article with this:

I haven't read enough of Sotomayor's opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor's detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths.

but is described as TNR's "legal analyst" is disgraceful. Couldn't Alessandra Stanley of the NY Times written about Sotomayor's legal abilities just as insightfully?

The fact that an article concludes with the "legal analyst" basically saying "I can't tell you anything based on my own analysis so I'm repeating what anonymous sources said instead" is absurd.