Early in yesterday's session, with the Dow Industrials off a hundred points but stubbornly refusing to give up any more ground, bears were sounding a despondent note in the Rick's Picks chat room. It was mid-morning, and shares had leveled off for a couple of hours after having fallen in more or less orderly fashion since the opening bell. 'Don't bet that the wondrous [Plunge Protection Team] won't pick a great point to jump in again,' noted one trader, glumly alluding to the Fed's surprise attack on bears two Fridays ago, when the central bank announced a 50-basis-point cut in the discount rate. Came this strychnine reply: 'The bears sound so defeatist today that perhaps the DJIA is on its way to a refreshing 500-point decline. Don't despair, pessimists! Our time will come.' Alas, the Dow Industrials did not fall the implicitly hoped-for 500 points, only a mere 300. That would have been scant comfort to anyone looking for the NYSE to start reflecting reality rather than the increasingly pallid hallucination of a strong U.S. economy. Wasn't it just last week that our hallucinator-in-chief, Treasury Secretary Paulson, pronounced the economy 'very, very healthy'? Yeah, right. Even so, we'd be the first to concede that it is perceptions that matter most, and that the Plunge Protection Team's efforts might therefore be better spent manipulating our awareness of the economy than goosing shares with well-timed forays into the S&P futures pit. A little LSD in the water supply, perhaps, and millions of otherwise clear-headed observers might start to see things Paulson's way. Either that, or, we fear, they'd start seeing '666 ' tattooed on the foreheads of everyone who appears on CNBC. Six-Sigma Event Plunge Protection Team aside, even bulls must be wondering at this point what They will do to prevent
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