Reuters has run their annual news story about the hardship some Americans will face heating their homes this winter.

In this year’s installment, a 61-year-old Massachusetts woman laments how her winter will be spent huddled around her gas oven — with her husband and 88-year-old mother — because she cannot afford heating oil.

Now, only 7 percent of households in America rely on heating oil, but in the Northeast over 30 percent of homes are oil dependent, so they will bear the brunt of the pain. Their heating costs are expected to run close to $2,000 this year, on average. According to Reuters, for many Northeasterners it will be a “heat-or-eat” decision. Well, isn’t everything for people these days?

At least in the media.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that every bit of this is accurate: These folks will experience a horrible winter, especially since — despite the global warming hype — the forecast is for a colder-than-usual season.

Since the inception of the New Deal, we have spent trillions on food programs, home heating programs, health-care programs, Social Security — all government sponsored. And on top of federal programs, there are redundant state programs to make sure no American suffers.

And yet, like clockwork, when winter draws near, we get horror stories: “We’re all… We’re all gonna freeeeeze to death!”

The Northeast is the bedrock of liberal electoral success!

Yet, despite 80 years of costly government intervention, their own voters suffer. When will you cold, hungry liberals finally admit: The liberalism you voted for has failed you miserably — and that’s why you’re going to freeze?

All right, folks.

I know you’ve got a lot to deal with out there. The Media is doing its damnedest to create an economic depression; your obese, fat-slob kids can’t learn squat in school; everything you like to eat is bad for you; there are two Americas, and one of them is full of illegal aliens who can get driver’s licenses and benefits easier than you can; gas prices are blowing your budget; ATM fees are too high; the boys are picking on Hillary; Bill’s out attacking the black guy; and global warming is destroying the planet while you’re freezing to death with home heating bills up the wazoo!

But there’s another crisis — sure to cause a painful, miserable, premature death:

“The planet is getting skinned.”

That’s the news from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Mother Earth used to be covered with about three feet of topsoil. But greedy farmers — who selfishly refuse to stop tilling the land — are tearing up the top layer of earth so fast that they’re putting the entire planet at risk. It’s yet another environmental nightmare: We’re losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year. So in 100 years, it’ll all be gone.

We’re running out of dirt, folks. No more dirt, no more farms. No more farms, no more food. No more food, no more mankind.

It’s just downright depressing.

No more damn dirt… What are we going to do? Oh, no.

Harry Reid, says the economy is or could be heading towards a recession.

That’s the best news of the week… the absolute best news of the week.

The politician who said we lost the war is now saying that we have lost or are losing the economy.

What I know is this: When Harry makes a call, the opposite is almost a sure thing.

We live here in a dynamic economy.

We live in the most robust economy in the history of human civilization.

A lot of us are not aware of that because we’ve only lived here so we have expectations based on relative strength and prosperity and affluence and the expectation that all that’s going to increase, and when there are moments and it appears that we’re going to take a downward cycle, people panic, refusing to keep things in proper perspective.

But in a dynamic economy, such as ours, in a capitalist economy, such as ours, markets correct.

Remember that word, “correct.”

That is short for correct mistakes.

You leave the market alone, it will fix itself. It may take some time, but it will. Businesses, out of necessity, correct their mistakes. Lenders, banks, correct their mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are big; sometimes they’re huge; sometimes they are hurtful; sometimes they are devastating.

But, they correct their mistakes.

Can I give you an example of something that does not correct its mistakes very often, if ever?

Bureaucracies.

Bureaucracies do not correct their mistakes. They pile on them. That’s why a free economy will get more productive and bloated bureaucracies will get more bloated. And when I say bureaucracy here, think of the federal government.

It’s safe to say that what’s going on right now is that the markets are correcting, and if the politicians — and I mean politicians on both sides here — in an election year would follow the Hippocratic Oath, first, do no harm, the correction could not be so deep and not so long.

On the other hand, if a bunch of lawyers decide to fix it, we could be in a fix.

I make no predictions here. But this is reminder for those of you who don’t know your history, and this is key, especially if the privatization of Social Security ever comes up again, this little statistic is going to come in so handy.

In 1987, 20 years ago, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than one third in two weeks. On October 5th of ’87, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 2658. On October 19th, 1987, just two weeks later, the Dow Jones Industrial Average low was 1677. So in two weeks it went from 2658 to 1677 on October 19th of ’87. That was the best buying opportunity in the last 20 years, because since 1987 we have gone from 1677 on the Dow to 14,200.

Don’t you wish your retirement fund had started in 1987 at 1677 on the Dow? Even today, we’re flirting with 12,000. What a growth opportunity, what a buying opportunity that was.

Now, some of the things we might want to correct, I said bureaucracies never correct their mistakes, they only add to them. Governments never correct their mistakes. How about this business of jobs Americans won’t do. That’s Crap, we could correct it.

We’re too proud and we are too guilty to produce our own energy. We encourage citizens to go out and buy a muffler, and doing that is not as productive as encouraging business to expand and business to hire. Of course, the Great Society, the war on poverty, everything else, miserable failures.

What do we do? Compound the failure by adding to the failure with the same plans, redundant, over and over again. We don’t correct our mistakes in government. We never admit them. Well, the people in government don’t and they don’t have to correct, and they should.

Not everybody is ignoring the expected Democrat tax increases. Voters might ignore reality, but businesses won’t.

So this is going to be very interesting to watch to see what happens with this rate cut, with the Media doing everything they can to drive down the perception of the economy today, and they’re failing.

Watch this. It’s been fascinating to see.

Bill Clinton’s going to get a payout of about $20 million for leaving the Yucaipa Companies, Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies.

Yup:

Clinton getting out of there because Yucaipa has a sensitive partnership with Dubai, and you can’t have that when your wife’s running for president. You can go to Dubai when Bush is president — your wife and you can run the country when you’re in Dubai and Abu Dhabi — but you can’t do a deal with Dubai, so you get paid $20 mil. to get out.

So there’s some money you can take, Mrs. Clinton! Because, I mean, you’re in a high tax bracket, so you don’t need all that money. Besides, Mrs. Clinton needs money for all these programs she’s proposing. Between Bob Iger’s $27 mil. and her husband’s $20 mil., she has $47 mil. right there.

That ain’t chump change, folks — not when it comes to feeding a child.

I mean, do you realize how many children you can feed with $47 million?

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Another thing that really bugs me:

This movement within the Republican Party to claim that the middle class is in great suffering and pain. I understand if you own a house, and your value of your equity in your house is plummeting, that you’re worried, and I understand that totally. What you need to hear is the truth of why it happened, so that you can make plans in the future.

These are cycles, and everybody in every country and every society goes through them, and ours are not nearly as bad as people around the rest of the world are. I know health care is expensive. That’s why I’m focused not on making it more expensive, but on making it cheaper, and how do you do that? You do it with conservatism! If the health care industry were priced like every other industry is on the patient’s ability to pay, then we’d fix the problem, and that’s the direction we have to head in.

But if we’re going to keep this notion that everybody’s entitled to have whatever they want medically paid for by their neighbors, then we are finished.

We are finished as a country; we are finished as a society.

I don’t depend on anybody else for anything, and it was one of my objectives when I grew up. I didn’t want to be obligated. I didn’t want to be dependent. I didn’t want to owe anybody. I owe on my mortgage, car, what have you – that’s my responsibility. I do what I have to to meet those responsibilities. Have you heard much about individual responsibility from primary candidates?

Not in this Primary season, just candidates buying votes with hollow promises.

Now, I know a lot of people don’t have that freedom. I work toward it — and if I can do it, a lot more people can do it than think they can, and that’s conservatism again. People are much better than they know. They have much more potential than they know.

But when you’ve got a Democrat Party and a movement telling them they suck, telling them they can’t get anywhere because the deck is stacked against them and the people stacking the deck are Republicans and so forth, then you are diminishing the country; you’re diminishing the future, and you’re destroying people’s lives.

That’s what today’s liberalism and Democrat Party is doing.

You want to fix health care?

You make it like buying a hotel room. We have all kinds of choices. You can go to a Motel 6 and you can go to a Ritz Carlton. Depends how much you want to pay. Why is health care any different? Health care’s different because the government’s been involved in it for so long. They’re trying to make people dependent on government and people in government for power, and wait ’til they start doing that with other businesses, too — with energy, and everything else.

We’re faced with real challenges here, and the debate over health care is not how “we Republicans” can best make sure everybody gets insured, because that’s just accepting the Democrat proposal and their position.

Our target ought to be: How do we make this reasonable? How do we reduce costs? And there are countless proposals out there. It’s the same thing with public schools. Most people despise ’em. Most people, particularly in urban neighborhoods, would love to get their kids out of these rotten schools — and every time they have a chance to send ’em to a private school, they jump at it.

Who stands in the way? The Democrat Party, the teachers unions, who are interested in maintaining substandard schools with substandard education so they will have jobs.

I’m trying to tell people how to get out of the rut. I’m trying to show them that they can. I’m trying to demonstrate that it’s possible, and it’s possible if you understand certain conservative principles that are indeed rooted in freedom, self-reliance, and achievement.

Not whining, not moaning, and not complaining. Because you can whine, moan, and complain all you want, and then what are you going to do after that? Wait for somebody to come in and tell you that they’re sorry and offer you some solution to it?

The solution to the health care mess is just out there, the same as the solution to public schools: vouchers. People are spending property tax money through the nose to prop up a worthless education system!

Let ’em take the money that’s being taken from them; give them control over how to spend it on their own kids’ education, and you watch how it changes.

Ditto health care. The solutions to the problems that ail this country are found in capitalism and the free market, the true agent of change. Not from Washington with people despising policies rooted in nothing fundamental, policies that are simply designed to make people think Washington cares and Washington is “doing something.”

Well, how many years have you heard politicians run for office whining and moaning and telling you they hear you, on the mess that is health care?

The Clintons in the nineties. “We got 37 million uninsured. We’re going to fix this.” Today it’s 47 million uninsured, they tell us. A lot of that, people are choosing to be uninsured because they’re young, and they want to spend their money on other things. But that’s not good enough for Democrats! They’re going to be mandating coverage for everybody, if they get their way.

Has the problem been solved?

Or is it getting worse?

The health care problem in this country is getting worse, while people are voting for people who are making it worse because they hear these people saying, “I’m going to fix it.” Well, the people in charge of fixing it have no interest in it getting fixed, because, if it gets fixed, you don’t need them.

You can rely on yourself.

This health care debate is one of the most infuriating things I witness every day, because I get so sick and tired of people buying hook, line, and sinker a LIE. “I’m going to get everybody covered. I’m going to make sure everybody gets health insurance in this country. We’re going to make sure it’s not just the rich.”

It doesn’t happen, does it?