‘I can see a possibility of supporting this nomination if I can be convinced that she does have a sensibility toward life in a legal sense,’ Limbaugh said on his radio program.

Limbaugh’s statement comes the same day former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who himself derided Sotomayor as a ‘racist’ last week, wrote in an op-ed that he regretted his choice of words.”

“Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don’t. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.

The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He’s the guy who nominates a “racist” to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America’s defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama’s economic policies to those of Juan Peron’s Argentina.”

“When asked later on MSNBC about Gingrich’s change of heart, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said his fellow Republicans ‘shouldn’t jump to conclusions, particularly with, you know, overheated rhetoric.’

‘Judge Sotomayor has got a compelling life story. She’s been accomplished in her legal career, in her career as a judge and as a jurist,’ Pawlenty said. ‘And we need to get the rest of the story in terms of her testimony before the Congress and vet her.’”

“Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist, backed away from those comments Wednesday but continued to question whether her philosophy qualified her to become the first Latino on the high court.”