Stocks, Politics, Beach Sand

* Lets start out with the markets. I'm hoping the pre-options week consolidation/pullback sets up a nice rally for next week. I'm still aggressively long. I'd really like to see us move up and over this trading range. Puh-leez.

* Remember the days when Cisco's John Chambers would come out on earnings day, and do a song and dance about how wonderful everything is? Boy, those days have changed. He said something about weaker sales, and Europe not being as strong as they'd thought. Something like that.

* But then we have Intel. Boosting share buybacks, and boosting their dividend. Say, a side thought here... Many companies are boosting their dividends maybe because of preferential tax treatment of dividend due to President Bush's "tax cuts for the rich." But what happens when those tax cuts expire? Just thinking out loud here.

* If one applied contrarian investing strategies to politics, would President Bush be a buy here? How about the GOP? Load the boat? Liberal blog sites seem to be convinced that Bush's approval ratings are going to 0%, and that the 2006 elections are going to be a Democrat landslide. I haven't seen folks this convinced about anything since January 2005, when folks thought the US dollar was going to $0. Or March 2003 when they thought the Dow was going to 5000. Or August 2005, when folks thought the Minnesota Vikings were going to the Super Bowl.

Bush has seemed to make some "fundamental" moves that are promising. Bernanke and Alito seem to be mostly popular. GDP at 3.8%. Unemployment at 5%. Stock market rallying. Are those the "positive divergences" we're seeing down here at a 36% approval ratings? Or is Bush in a downtrend? Don't fight the trend? Maybe Bush will build a base down here, and then turn up on high volume.

* On the Vikings going to the Super Bowl comment? I got suckered in that last one, and drafted Daunte Culpepper for my fantasy team. Now THAT was buying high... Sheez. Never buy the hype. Never sell the fear.

* Do you watch "Lost?" Well, last night was a good one, huh? Man. They do good TV. Suspenseful. So now, they're going to launch into a story line about the "tailies," or the folks who were in the tail section of the airplane and landed on the other side of the island. We'll find out what happened to them. And we have to wait a whole flippin' week...

* "Lost" kind of cheats you on the hour-long show. The first few minutes are always the last few minutes of the previous week's show. Isn't that cheating?

* Gold looks like it could rally technically, but fundamentally I don't see a long term catalyst. Not for me. Not that I haven't ever traded gold short term, but I prefer stocks right here.

* The Wall Street Journal and Barrons websites are free this week. So you know.

* Lets check out the blogs....

* Andrew Tobias (Can I call you Andy?) has a book recommendation for XMAs on Beating the Market. Aren't there a lot of those out there already? How are they working?

* Bill Cara is a blogging fiend. My RSS aggregator can't keep up with him. I see a story on the top of my feed, and I click his general blog title (instead of the story), and I have to go 5 entries down to find the one I wanted to read. Of course, I read them all. There are some good entries, but this one rang so true: What's up with all these restatements? I hear ya, Bill. (Can I call you William?)

* The folks at Angry Bear agreeing with Larry Kudlow? Somebody send some fleece down to Hell, and might as well include a few crates of ice skates! Kudlow on the New Contract with America. Well, more of a left-handed kind of agreeing. Send a note along with those fleece shipments that "You might want to dress in layers."

* I'm not too happy about the GOP cave-in on ANWR. In case you didn't hear, the Congress threw out ANWR and offshore drilling off the Pacific and Atlantic. Folks, we need more energy. We need to reduce our reliance on oil imports. Sure, with gasoline falling recently, maybe everybody wants to put this on the back burner. But we can't make gasoline out of thin air, and I don't see Toyota developing cars that run on windmill power. I guess we'll open the ANWR discussion up again down the road when oil is $4-5-6 a gallon. Lots of entries up on this over at Michelle Malkin's blog.

* Just in case you're looking for a recipe on Arisi Upma. Any recipe that says to grind something until it has the consistency of beach sand, gets my attention.