The No. 1 rule inside the Politico newsroom? Whatever topic partisan Republicans are chattering about instantly becomes news and must be hyped as such.

Check out Politico's latest headline [emphasis added]:

Brown win could spark legal battle

And the lede:

A victory by Republican Scott Brown Tuesday in Massachusetts could quickly turn into a legal battle over the man he would replace – Sen. Paul Kirk – with the future of health reform in the Senate hanging in the balance.

Conservative commentator Fred Barnes is arguing that Kirk will lose his vote in the Senate after Tuesday's special election, no matter who wins, signaling a possible GOP line of attack against health reform if it passes with Kirk's vote.

GOP elected officials haven't embraced that argument, and two academic election law experts contacted by POLITICO refuted the notion that Kirk will no longer be a senator after Tuesday's election.

Got that? The Weekly Standard's Barnes floated some semi-nutty partisan claim that even Republican officials aren't embracing. And it's a claim that independent election experts say is bogus. But that doesn't matter. The GOP Noise Machine is abuzz about it, so Politico types it up as news.

UPDATED: Love the double hypothetical that Politico so eagerly pushes in the article: Brown could win the election. And then his win could spark a legal battle.

Gee Politico, please report on what else could/could happen.

UPDATED: In his piece, Barnes didn't bother to quote any attorneys and election expert by name to back up his dubious claim. But because a single Weekly Standard columnist posted his hypothetical, sourced to anonymous “Republicans attorneys,” Politico embraced that as breaking news.

I'm sure that if the roles were reversed and a single Nation writer floated a sketchy what-if based on nothing more than spin coming from anonymous “Democratic attorneys,” Politico would rush that into print, right?