Top News

• "President Obama told senators at a White House meeting" Wednesday "that he would review names of potential Supreme Court nominees over the weekend, leading participants to believe an announcement could come within days, according to senior Senate aides who were briefed on the gathering," the Washington Post reports.

• "The six names confirmed as being under review by Obama include" Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, U.S. Appeals Court judges Sonia Sotomayor and Diane Pamela Wood, and California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno, AP reports.

• "White House officials said the list of potential nominees is longer than the six to eight names circulating in public," the Wall Street Journal reports. "An office has been set up in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, with White House Counsel Greg Craig taking the lead and Cynthia Hogan, Vice President Joe Biden's counsel, heading the vetting process."

• The president is "demanding no leaks and high discipline in the search to replace" Justice David Souter, the New York Times reports.

• "James B. Comey Jr., the top Bush administration official who rebelled against plans for domestic eavesdropping, is being pushed by some White House officials for inclusion on the short list of candidates... Democratic sources said," Politico reports.

• During Kagan's "career in academia and in the Clinton White House, she has worked with nearly everyone who counts inside" Obama's "legal circle, including then-professor Obama at the University of Chicago Law School," the Los Angeles Times reports.

• "Why the emphasis on gender? After all, there are no Asians, Hispanics or Muslims, male or female, on the court. But the lack of women is widely perceived as the gap that most needs to be addressed," the Wall Street Journal reports.

• Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, "announced Wednesday that he'd filled senior positions on the committee with lawyers with nearly 40 years combined of Washington experience," Politico reports.

• "An aggressive fundraising group that targeted moderate GOP lawmakers earlier this year has issued a stern warning to Senate Republicans who might vote for" Obama's nominee, CongressDailyAM (subscription) reports.

Top Commentary after the jump

Top Commentary

• E. J. Dionne Jr. explains why he believes Obama will nominate Kagan.

• "If proceedings for Obama's nominee resemble recent Supreme Court confirmations, the nominee and the nation will be subjected to a spectacle in which self-obsessed senators, cribbing from playbooks prepared by others, will harp on trivialities, suck up time with soliloquies and throw either softballs or screwballs at the nominee," the Los Angeles Times says in offering some alternatives.

• Eric Posner evaluates Sotomayor's judicial performance through the methodology used in a recent study of appellate judges.

• Ann Woolner dissects Obama's remark that he wants a nominee with "empathy" and concludes that "there are already plenty of judges on the bench who need no power of empathy to understand" individuals.

• Sam Stein examines the "touchy subject" of medical records, focusing on the debate surrounding Sotomayor's type 1 diabetes.