Consider two judicial nominees, both of whom have won bipartisan support and praise for their distinguished service on lower courts.

Nominee No. 1 had been a not-very-active member of his grandfather’s all-male fishing club in Western Pennsylvania. It had a ramshackle old building with bunk beds, wooden tables and benches like a boys’ summer camp. He resigned two years before his nomination.

Nominee No. 2 was a member of a single-sex club described on its Web site as "a constellation of influential… decision makers in the profit, non-profit and social sectors; who build long term mutually beneficial relationships." That club has periodic meetings in New York and other cities and an annual retreat in Latin America, including cocktail parties with U.S. diplomats and host-country officials and panel discussions on public policy and business affairs.

Nominee No. 1 came under attack from the National Organization for Women and Senate Democrats. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, now chairman of the Judiciary Committee, fumed that the fishing club "invidiously discriminates against women," and thus that the nominee had violated the Canon 2 of the official Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges.

But hardly anyone is very concerned about Nominee No. 2’s club, excepting a few conservatives and my friend Michael Kinsley, the liberal columnist, for reasons of his own.

I admire many things about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, especially her deep compassion for underprivileged people. I may well support her confirmation to the Supreme Court if her testimony next month dispels my concern that her decisions may be biased by the grievance-focused mind-set and the "wise Latina woman" superiority complex displayed in some of her speeches.

But close study of her most famous case only enhances my concern. That’s the 2008 decision in which a panel composed of Sotomayor and two Appeals Court colleagues upheld New Haven’s race-based denial of promotions to white (and two Hispanic) fire-fighters because too few African-Americans had done well on the qualifying exams.

The panel’s decision to adopt as its own U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton’s opinion in the case looks much less defensible up close than it does in most media accounts. One reason is that the detailed factual record strongly suggests that — contrary to Sotomayor’s position — the Connecticut city’s decision to kill the promotions was driven less by its purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics.

Whichever way the Supreme Court rules in the case later this month, I will be surprised if a single justice explicitly approves the specific, quota-friendly logic of the Sotomayor-endorsed Arterton opinion.

Judge Jose Cabranes, Sotomayor’s onetime mentor, accurately described the implication of this logic in his dissent from a 7-6 vote in which the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit refused to reconsider the panel’s ruling.

"Municipal employers could reject the results of an employment examination whenever those results failed to yield a desired racial outcome — i.e., failed to satisfy a racial quota," Cabranes wrote.

My quick reaction to the July 13 timetable just announced by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is that Republicans probably don’t have much basis for disputing it. As Leahy’s statement details, the timetable he is using gives the Republicans about as much time as Democrats had to prepare for the hearings of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. My quick reaction to the July 13 timetable just announced by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is that Republicans probably don’t have much basis for disputing it. As Leahy’s statement details, the timetable he is using gives the Republicans about as much time as Democrats had to prepare for the hearings of John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

In addition, in the case of Roberts and to some extent that of Alito, it took time to obtain documents the nominees had authored as Justice Department officials during prior Republican administrations. Since Judge Sonia Sotomayor has never worked for the executive branch, it appears that all or virtually all significant documents written by her as a government official — including her judicial opinions — are already public, with the exception of her time as an assistant DA in New York City. (Internal memoranda Sotomayor has written for her colleagues or clerks while on the bench will presumably be considered confidential, as has been true of past nominees.)

Should the confirmation hearings begin according to Leahy’s schedule, it would put Sotomayor on track to be confirmed by Aug. 7 at the latest — unless Republicans stretch out the debate or filibuster.

I hear that Keith Olbermann declared on MSNBC Tuesday evening that I am "runner-up" for his "hypocrisy award" and also "a fraud."

In case anyone takes Olbermann seriously, I identify below the false and misleading assertions of fact that he packed into his 60-second diatribe.

• Olbermann claimed that I characterized Sonia Sotomayor’s 1974 letter to the editor accusing Princeton University of discrimination as a "decisive" reason to oppose her nomination.

False. I wrote nothing close to that, and I do not see Sotomayor’s letter as disqualifying. I have consistently indicated that debate about this nomination should focus mostly on her judicial decisions and speeches, which I have analyzed at length. My only critical comment in my brief post about her 1974 letter was that "some may see [it] as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities."

Olbermann quoted that sentence, but then falsely implied that I had been far more damning — while omitting my statement in the preceding paragraph that others may see her success at Princeton as proof of her brilliance in overcoming the discrimination of which she complained.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor said in a 1996 speech at Princeton University’s Third World Center (now called the Carl A. Fields Center) that when she arrived at Princeton in 1972 as her high school’s valedictorian, "I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition…. My writing was stilted and overly complicated, my grammar and vocabulary skills weak."

To catch up with her prep school classmates, Sotomayor recalled, "I spent one summer vacation reading children’s classics that I had missed in my prior education — books like Alice In Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice. My parents spoke Spanish; they didn’t know about these books. I spent two other summers teaching myself anew to write."

She taught herself well, graduating summa cum laude and winning the prestigious Pyne Prize in her senior year. The prize was for academic excellence and — Judge Sotomayor said in the 1996 speech — "because of my work with Accion Puertorriquena, the Third World Center and other activities in which I participated, like the university’s Discipline Committee."

These honors reflect, among other things, a high grade on Sotomayor’s 178-page senior thesis, La Historia Ciclica De Puerto Rico. The Impact Of The Life Of Luis Muñoz Marín On The Political And Economic History of Puerto Rico, 1930-1975.

We don’t know what the exact grade was, as far as I’ve seen, but an award-winning history professor — K.C. Johnson of Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center — who read it at my request concluded that "the thesis would probably receive an A/A minus or an A minus." (Johnson and I co-authored a 2007 book on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud.)

Here is Johnson’s detailed assessment: