Best description of it – and its not even meant as such:

U.S. stocks rose, while Treasuries and the dollar slipped, after a rebound in oil and natural gas spurred investors who pushed the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index up 52 percent since March into more bets on riskier assets.

The S&P 500 erased its steepest drop in two weeks to add 0.3 percent, rising for a third day. Crude for October delivery jumped 1.5 percent, reversing a 2.2 percent loss, as speculators bought the contract after it held above $70. Natural gas surged 4 percent in less than 30 minutes, erasing most of a 7.5 percent drop as front-month futures expired.

“This whole rally since the March lows has been extraordinarily highly correlated,” said Liam Dalton, who oversees about $1.1 billion as the New York-based chief executive officer of Axiom Capital Management. “When the commodities go up, it encourages people to think the growth factor is returning globally and they invest in stocks. One feeds into the other.”

One feeds into the other, indeed – that is what is happening here. News gets out there which, at a glance, might indicate a change for the better, and people who want to get back to where they were before September’s crash jump on it…forgetting, for instance, that the recent rise in durable goods orders was fueled by “cash for clunkers” car sales. It won’t happen, again, because people are not buying. Not too long ago, the market jumped on the news that oil stocks are lower than expected – without anyone noticing that stocks are low because refiners stopped buying because there’s less demand for the end-products of the oil.

Stupid really is as stupid does – and investors pushing this market up are being exceptionally stupid. I’m out – and I won’t get back in until I actually see something which indicates an economic recovery. You know, such as something like less than hundreds of banks on an FDIC watch list…or, maybe, when I stop seeing houses like mine going for less and less on the market. Call me screwy, but I’m just not buying what the stock boosters are selling.

UPDATE: Perhaps this Blind Rally is coming to an end? I hope so – the more it goes up, the worse people will get burned.

UPDATE II: Who is propping up the zombie banks? This post talks about it and wonders if the government isn’t, in some way, pumping banks like Freddie and Citi with new funds to prevent complete collapse. Could this rally be no more than central banks – here and around the world – trying to sustain the unsustainable?

At least on the “let those who ride, decide” issue.

And yet he’s in charge of deciding how we pay for things:

When normal people happen to “find” their own money, it might mean a twenty left in a winter coat, or discovering change beneath the sofa cushions. But if you’re Charlie Rangel, it means doubling your net worth.

Earlier this month the Chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee “amended” his 2007 financial disclosure form—to the tune of more than a half-million dollars in previously unreported assets and income. That number may be as high as $780,000, because Congress’s ethics rules only require the Members to report their finances within broad ranges. This voyage of personal financial discovery brings Mr. Rangel’s net worth for 2007 to somewhere between $1.028 million and $2.495 million, while his previous statement came in at $516,015 and $1.316 million.

When you’re a powerful Congressman and working diligently to increase tax rates to pay for President Obama’s health-care plan, we suppose it’s easy to lose track of one of your checking accounts. That would be the one at the federal credit union with a balance somewhere between $250,001 and maybe as high as $500,000. And when you’re crunched for time and pulling together bills to pass in a rush, we guess, too, that you might overlook several other investment accounts, even if some of them are sizable, such as the ones Mr. Rangel missed at JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Oppenheimer and BlackRock.

Oh, and those vacant properties in Glassboro, in southern Jersey? Everybody in Manhattan tries not to think much about New Jersey, so those lots and their as-much-as-$15,000 value must also have slipped down the memory hole. (The New York Post reported yesterday that Mr. Rangel failed to pay property taxes for two of the lots, according to the county clerk’s office.)

He’s a liberal hero – and they won’t demand investigations, nor his resignation. Why? Because he votes the right way. That is all that matters – as long as Rangel is devoted to liberalism, the liberals will pass on all his malfeasance.

Its from Steyn, naturally. We’re a dying civilization – fortunately, there are still a lot of us Christians around to rebuild it. Once we do, we’ll have to be extra careful about how we go about things – we never, ever, want to have a situation where, once again, there’s a shortage of sperm available for lesbians to get pregnant with.

Very sad:

Whirlpool Corp. announced Friday it will close its Evansville, Ind., factory next year, moving the plant’s production of top-freezer refrigerators to a facility in Mexico.

Citing the need to trim manufacturing capacity, Whirlpool said the mid-2010 plant closure will eliminate 1,100 full-time jobs.

Whirlpool’s stock gained 2.4% on the news – because the money men are not interested in anything other than quarterly balance sheets, and this switch to Mexico will improve same. Meanwhile, Obama’s plan has been to bail out failed banks and failed corporations…anyone see something wrong here?

Now, you can go all lefty on this and try to place punitive taxes on Whirlpool for moving jobs to Mexico…as if that would do anything worthwhile. Such actions would just place Whirlpool in a position to fail, completely. At which time Obama would step in with bail out money. Or, you can stop being stupid.

First step in the process – figure out a way to make it more profitable for Whirlpool to keep the jobs in the US. Best guess, right off the cuff, would be to lower business taxes to whatever level is necessary to make moving the jobs out un-necessary. If you can’t do that, award grants for those willing to start up new appliance factories in the US, even if its foreign-owned companies. Whirlpool is a grand, old American company…but if they are giving us the finger no matter what we do, then we’d be worse than fools to not seek alternatives. Main thing – do something to keep the manufacturing capacity in the US.

Until we learn the lesson, we won’t get out of this. We have to learn – from Obama through corporate board room to American living room – that we must make it, mine it and grow it, here; in the United States. With our own hands, using our own resources. If we don’t learn this lesson, then we’ll just see more and more of America out-sourced while more and more debt piles up until it completely collapses (which almost happened in September – and will happen, soon, if we don’t change course). The choice is ours – I hope we choose wisely.

But, remember, dissent was only the highest form of patriotism until 1/20/09:

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

“I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness,” said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”

Now, most of the time the real reason people want privacy on the internet – other than protecting financial affairs – is to prevent the neighbors from finding out how many times a day they go to “bigjugs.com”. But this ability of the President to essentially disconnect private users from the internet goes far beyond snooping – it destroys the ability of the citizenry to communicate via the most modern means. To put it in perspective – this would be akin to George III asserting the right to stop the transmission of private mail in the American colonies. This is a bill which must not be passed.

That aside, where are our liberals on this? They went ballistic at the mere thought that the NSA might listen in to a conversation between a US citizen and someone in Waziristan – and now we’re getting a lot of silence about the prospect of people being cut off from one another?

If you can make it, you should be in Washington, DC with the March on Washington. It’s a Saturday, end of Summer…should be nice.

HAT TIP: An Alert Reader.

Easy to scare corporate fat cats (many of whom are liberals, anyway); less easy to scare regular folks:

An advertising boycott against Fox News host Glenn Beck has succeeded in keeping most major sponsors from running commercials on his show even as the controversial commentator’s viewership has grown.

Beck attracted 2.81 million viewers Monday, his third-largest audience since his show launched on Fox News in January, according to Nielsen Media Research data provided by the network. On Tuesday, nearly 2.7 million viewers tuned in, his fifth-largest viewership to date…

…few major businesses remain as sponsors of Beck’s eponymous 2 p.m. PDT program. On Wednesday, the only big companies with a presence during his show were Bank of America and the Wall Street Journal, whose parent company News Corp. also owns Fox News. The rest of the commercials included spots for gold seller Rosland Capital; Ashley Furniture Home Store; Empire Carpet; Liberty Medical, a diabetes medical supplier; Johnson Law Group, an asbestos litigation firm; “Shadow Government,” a new book critical of Obama published by the National Republican Trust; and the anti-tax group TeaPartyExpress.org.

Fox News insists that the boycott has not affected its revenue, because advertisers have just moved their commercials to different time periods. And for his part, Beck appears invigorated by the challenge. “Even if the powers to be right now succeed in making me poor, drum me out … I will only be stronger for it,” he said on the air Wednesday.

And the advertisers will come back – because for television, its all about how many eyeballs are watching the screen. Advertisers can’t resist a lot of eye balls. Many corporations have already folded to leftist pressure and more will likely do so…but those advertisers who don’t care about the left will make up the slack.

More and more, the presumption must always be that when the MSM is reporting about the GOP and/or conservatism, it is lying until confirmed by two other sources:

Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue: the legitimacy of the documents – a very important issue, indeed. But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about – and one that has gone virtually unnoticed. This is it: Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Who says? The outside panel CBS brought into to get to the bottom of the so-called “Rathergate” mess says. I recently re-examined the panel’s report after a source, Deep Throat style, told me to “Go to page 130.” When I did, here’s the startling piece of information I found:

Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.

This information, despite the fact that it has been available since the CBS report came out four years ago, has remained a secret to almost everybody both in and out of the media — one lonely fact in a 234- page report loaded with thousands of facts, and overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the documents.

Now, why didn’t President Bush counter with this bit of information? Because to do so would be unseemly and appear like pleading – and President Bush is a gentleman first and last, and never pleads with those who attack him. He knew, in his own mind, that his honor was intact – if others choose to slander him, then they would have to explain it to God, in the by and by. Also, veterans don’t talk much about their service like that – I’ve been thanked for my service, and I never feel more bashful than when being so thanked. I didn’t do anything special – I just did my bit. So did President Bush. He’s the last person who would advertise his service – these days, only big mouth, show offs talk up their military service (ie, like John Kerry with his absurd “reporting for duty” at the DNC in 2004). And real war heroes, by my experience, always say that the real heroes were those who didn’t make it back.

The whole leftwing story about President Bush was slander from start to finish – and, really, liberals; you should be ashamed of yourselves. A good and decent man like that, even if you disagree with him, doesn’t deserve to be lied about in order to score political points. Of course, the only people hurt were those who did the slandering – I doubt that President Bush even thinks about those who attacked him…though I wouldn’t be surprised to find that he prays for them.

Ed Note: This entry is What Media Bias? Part 158

What a liberal “grass roots” activist gets paid per year.