My Short List Of SCOTUS Nominees.

If it were my job, the short list (and a very short list it is) would be:

Viet D. Dinh and Douglas W. Kmiec

Both Dinh and Kmiec have the legal gravitas and solid conservative credentials that Miers lacked. Dinh is a con law professor at Georgetown. Kmiec is at Pepperdine but has previously done stints as con law professor at Notre Dame and as dean at Catholic University. Both have served in the executive branch with distinction. Both are easy going and amiable.

Both men appear to have the "soft sell" approach to intellectual persuasion, something that the conservatives on the court sorely need. Their personal styles I know from experience, having met them both on more than one occasion. Dinh has the advantage of being only 37 - talk about a legacy. The Wall Street Journal noted that Dinh has the advantage of being a minority, Vietnamese, and of having been subject to Hillary's lone dissenting vote when he was up for Assistant Attorney General.

From my estimation, neither has the prospect within the realm of reasonable possibility of going Souter on us. This is a quality which cannot be gainsaid.

Will There Be A Housing Market Crash In 2006?

Tom Barrack, arguably the world's best real estate investor is cashing out. He says, "There's too much money chasing too few good deals, with too much debt and too few brains." He says amatuer real estate speculators are going to be trounced and seasoned pros may get hurt, too, if they don't take action to avoid risk. Ken Heebner of CGM Realty Fund recently reported on the boob tube that he expects homes $500k and above to sink 20-50% in 2006. He expects such significant downturns particularly in the ten high-end housing markets.

Church of the Masses on The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe

Barbara Nicolosi has an excellent post on a screening of Disney's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" at her blog, Church of the Masses. For those who are not familiar with her, Barbara is an interesting character in her own right. She is a former nun and film school alum who was the founder of Act One, a program of some note which trains people of faith for careers in film and television.

Hitchens on Supreme Court Nominees Shows His True Colors, Red.

Christopher Hitchens' latest piece on Slate on the nomination for Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement, Miers and Brimstone - Let's stop pretending there's no religious test for nominees, is "a sad performance" accoring to Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner on National Review Online. Hitchens had previously essentially argued (also in Slate) after the Roberts nomination that Roberts should not be confirmed because he is Catholic. It is due to people such as Hitchens that the Constitution contains the prohibition on religious tests for public office.

Despite Hitchens' vehemence and venom on the subject of Miers, his arguments are not too well thought out. He notes that Miers' purported faith has been offered as an assurance to those in the GOP who doubt her conservative credentials and contends that such an offering is a religous test. No doubt students the world over would love to be subjected to a test in which they, themselves, are asked no questions on the subject.

What Hitchens' verbal gymnastics in his recent pieces on the high court nominees come down to is this - despite Hitchens' recently donned appellation of "neocon", when you pull away the mask, he is still what Tom Piatak in the The American Conservative revealed him to be, an unreconstructed Trotskyite and an anti-Christian (particularly anti-Catholic) bigot. This half concealed Pinko called the blessed Mother Theresa a con artist and John Paul II a "barely sentient" fool, yet he still will not condemn the thousands of murders of Russians clerics - according to Piatak more than 8,000 in 1922 alone - committed by his still beloved Commies.

So how is it that Hitchens finds himself counted among American "neocons"? And this brings us back to his desired religious test, i.e. no religion, for Supreme Court nominees. As Piatak ably observed, Hitchens sees American neoconservatism as a practical way to accomplish some of his still cherished Bolshevik aims - after all, the Russians certainly aren't going to get it done:

Hitchens still wants world revolution; the only difference is that now he sees us Americans as perfectly placed to do the fighting and the dying needed to achieve his Trotskyist dream.
...Hitchens was able to overcome his past squeamishness about American military force not because America is threatened, but because the threat now comes from men who believe in Allah rather than Marx. ... Hitchens also wrote—in the same column in which he extolled the priest-killing potency of the French and Russian Revolutions—that “George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the US armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled.” Hitchens’s entire politics is motivated by his hatred of religion and tradition; he’d be just as happy bombing St. Peter’s as the Taliban.

Dictatorship of the proletariat is a tough sell to Americans, but dialectical materialism and scientific socialism...Hitchens is still hawking those concepts, albeit under a new brand. For Hitchens, putting a practicing Catholic from Indiana and a Texas evangelical into robes doesn't help him and his fellow travelers go a long way toward selling their junk.

Housing Bubble is Deflating.

Via the The Kirk Report's mention of notable declines in the housing market is this story from the Dallas Morning News reporting that housing prices in Manhattan are down 13% for the third quarter and 36% for homes with four bedrooms or more. Inflated San Francisco is down 10% and San Diego is down 4%. The story didn't comment on bloated markets in Orange County, Vegas and Florida, but anyone with sense knows if the needle hasn't hit those bubbles yet it will soon.

Jim Cramer of TheStreet.com in his CNBC tv show Mad Money has been saying that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan "is on a jihad against your home and mine." Cramer doesn't mention that Greenspan, loose with the money supply, was largely responsible for the housing bubble to begin with, again playing cheerleader for the bubble as he did for the 90s tech bubble.

But just as Greenspan spoke of "irrational exuberance" before the tech bubble burst, he began speaking of "froth" in the housing market not long ago ("froth" meaning it was not a nationwide bubble but a sort of housing bubble bath where some regions of the tub - rural Kansas, parts of upstate NY, and suburban Michigan for example - were not inflated). The share prices of Home Builders have, of course been, affected. Folks such as Cramer, who no doubt know the history of the Dutch Tulip Bubble, should not be surprised. It's called a truism because it's true - TREES DON'T GROW TO THE SKY.