George Soros recently made a stunning announcement: He would be dissolving all of his non-family aspects of the hedge fund that ultimately made him an authority on all things monetary. Bloomberg News reports: The billionaire, best known for breaking the Bank of England, is returning money to outside investors in his $25.5 billion firm [and is] ending a career as hedge-fund manager that spanned more than four decades.

Some family friends of ours had quite a bit of excitement recently: They adopted a baby boy! Their new boy is the joy of joys for them because, though they desperately wanted children, they had been languishing on adoption waiting lists for years, without much hope of getting a child. They were ideal prospective parents: Both the husband and the wife are college educated; the couple is financially stable; they could produce an almost endless supply of character references; and their marriage vows remain solidly intact after nearly 20 years together. In other words, they could provide a stable, loving, traditional home for a child. But there were no children to be had. Fortunately for them, an adoption agency in Wisconsin recommended that they apply at an agency in Florida where it might be possible to get a child.  

As the debate over the debt ceiling heats up, and as time ticks down, heroes and villains are emerging. Of course, who they are depends on who is asked, but for Tea Party activists, perhaps the greatest disappointment has been House Speaker John Boehner. Fox News reports on the progress of Boehner’s bill: Boehner revised his plan after congressional budget analysts said it would save $850 billion over the next decade instead of the $1.2 trillion advertised. The latest figures put the savings above $900 billion, more than the bill's proposed debt limit increase. The House is expected to vote on the revised plan Thursday.

It’s a few months early, but the ACLU is already beginning its annual attack on America’s beloved Christmas holiday. The Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper reported that the Broward County branch of the ACLU has warned the community of Plantation not to put up its annual display of Christian and Jewish symbols in Liberty Tree Park this holiday season, calling the display “inappropriate.” In a letter to city officials, the ACLU argued that “displaying a Nativity scene and menorah violates the separation of church and state,” reported the paper. “The problem, the rights group said, is that the city is advocating for two religions while ignoring all the others.” The ACLU’s Barry Butin said his group thinks Plantation’s holiday spirit is “a violation of the First Amendment and an endorsement of religion. If they were really neutral and didn’t favor one over the other, they’d have a more inclusive display: Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist.”

The federal government just can’t stay out of agriculture. From subsidy programs that decide winners and losers in the markets by favoring corporate farms over family farms to ethanol rules that sacrifice food for fuel to laws that give undue influence and power to a select few pesticide and seed producers, Washington has maintained a stranglehold over farming that has forever altered the industry’s competitive landscape and doomed consumers to pay ever-higher prices at the grocery store. It wants even more power. Now, another assault comes from the Capitol and the unlikeliest of agencies: the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, an arm of the Department of Transportation. The DOT/FMCSA has new standards currently in the public comment period that, were they to become law, would override states’ rights — and the rights of the individual farmer — and have a detrimental impact on how business is done.

The Traditional Values Coalition has released the second installment of its investigation into grant-making by the National Institutes of Health. This time, TVC reveals that U.S. taxpayers pumped $90 million into “research” that included investigating AIDS in China, Chinese prostitutes, and a treatable parasite that infects one in every 1,000 Chinese. A week ago, TVC exposed grantees who used NIH money to study whether the physical endowment of homosexuals affected their sexual satisfaction. Now taxpayers get this news, as Congress and the President grapple about raising the debt ceiling and a few relatively small cuts in the federal budget that won’t come close to nicking the surface of the nation’s $14.5 trillion debt.

Adorning an article in the Guardian is a picture you might think represented a prototypical family: a handsome couple standing behind three healthy, well-grown children. But according to the British paper, the parents — soccer star David Beckham and his wife, Victoria — are to be condemned. The problem is that, with the birth of a fourth child, the Beckhams have become “bad role models and environmentally irresponsible,” writes Guardian scribbler Tracy McVeigh. In reality, though, the irresponsibility lies with McVeigh. It’s hard to write an 850-word piece in which virtually every sentence serves to deceive, but McVeigh might have birthed just such an illegitimate bit of childishness. She quotes “campaigners,” environmentalists, a Green MP, and others who all bleat the same message: The sky is falling due to overpopulation. And we’ll all end up languishing in a Soylent Green sewer of endless humanity unless, as zoologist David Attenborough says, we eliminate the “absurd taboo” against discussing family size.

Watching DC’s spendthrifts and Keynesians try to resolve the nation’s catastrophic debt is like watching witch doctors try to cure cancer: We know the patient’s gonna die, and painfully, no matter how many goats they sacrifice. Nonetheless, Leviathan’s lackeys in the media keep leading more goats to the altar. Catch this article from the Associated Press, “States eye fee increases as alternative to taxes.” Rather than asking why government at any level should license us to go about our daily lives or charge us an additional fee for using what our taxes supposedly subsidize, AP’s propaganda inquires instead whether jacking those fees is an acceptable substitute for raising taxes.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (i.e., the totalitarian Marxist monarchy on the northern half of the Korean peninsula) has demanded, in a statement issued on the 58th year anniversary of the armistice in the Korean War, that the United States sign a peace treaty. Kim Kye Gwan, Vice Foreign Minister of the slave state, said that a treaty could go a long way toward ending the deadlock in six-power talks, which include our nation, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia. The military intervention against communist aggression in the Korean War was not the action of the United States. The United Nations Security Council determined that this was a self-defense action by the Republic of Korean, and so authorized military force to resist that aggression. This was only possible because the Soviet Union at the time was boycotting the United Nations in protest against the UN's insistence on recognizing government of the Republic of China, instead of the People’s Republic of China (Communist China, which murdered over 70 million people and which, at the time, was beginning its horrific genocide of the Tibetan people, a crime known to anyone who followed world events, but protested only by “crazy” anti-communists like Dr Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.)

“I taught the Constitution for 10 years. I believe in the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress.”          — Barack Obama, May 18, 2008, at a campaign stop in Billings, Montana President Obama began his presidency with great promise, publicly pledging to end many of the Bush administration attacks against the U.S. Constitution. Obama had pledged during his initial election campaign to end signing statements as a back-door method of legislating (usurping the legislative branch’s powers under Article I of the Constitution), warrantless surveillance (violating the Fourth Amendment), detention without habeas corpus (Fifth Amendment) or trial (Sixth Amendment), torture (Eighth Amendment), and excessive executive branch secrecy under the “executive privilege” and “state secrets” claims, and pledged that he would not engage in offensive wars without the approval of Congress (Congress’ power under Article I, Section 8).