CNS News reports that four key Republican leaders in the Senate sent a letter on Friday to Attorney General Eric Holder (left) stating that the Department of Justice had not been forthcoming in requests for information about the extent of the involvement of then-Solicitor General Elena Kagan relating to President Obama's healthcare legislation. The letter — from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Minority Whip Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley (Iowa), and Judiciary Committee member Mike Lee (Utah) — also declared that the testimony given by Holder was "belied by the facts."

When considering what is the “establishment” in America, college students are never told that this group includes powerful labor unions, the news media, or state-supported academia. Hence, why the “Occupy D.C.” encampment, an offspring of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, and other "Occupy" movements are leaning heavily upon big labor to support their protests despite the fact that big unions, in a fashion similar to big finance, buy off politicians in return for government action that is not in the interest of the public at large, but only to the benefit of unions — such as the National Labor Relations Board's attacks on Boeing at the behest of unions for opening a plant in a right-to-work state.

Apple growers in Washington State — who produce about half of the country's apples, about 15 billion — have a bumper crop this year, among the best in the state's history. Yet many of these apples may never make it to market, because growers cannot find enough workers to pick them.

In Washington, D.C. on Nov. 4, Mitt Romney promised attendees at the Defending the American Dream Summit that if elected, he would end funding for several federal programs. Conservative Republicans, however, may not have been comforted by Romney's reasons for denying these programs federal funding. At the event, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, he stated:

The Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York, a state agency which controls the New York Transit Authority, has run the city's subways since 1965. (The two privately owned systems, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation [BMT] and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company [IRT] were bought by the city in 1940.)  The mass of New Yorkers simply cannot get around their city without subways, and government owns the subways. The MTA is facing a budgetary crisis, and its director, Jay Walder, left several months ago after a $10-billion capital shortfall was revealed. 

A July 21, 2010 memo by John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology and Peter Orzag, director of the Office of Management and the Budget, said that $450 billion, or about three percent of the nation’s GDP, would be spent by public and private sources for research and development with a priority on “solar energy, next-generation biofuels, and sustainable green buildings and building retrofit technologies.”

According to Katy Grimes of the Sacramento-based investigative reporting website Cal Watchdog for October 19, "For unions, Governor Jerry Brown is the governor who keeps on giving." Over the weekend, the California Governor signed into law Senate Bill 922, which will prevent cities from banning union-supported “project labor agreements” that force contractors to hire union workers if they want to bid on public projects. The measure, written only one week before it was passed, provides that if even a non-union contractor wins a public project, his workers are required to join a union.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been pressuring the National Park Service to locate sites related to the histories of women and minorities, particularly Latinos, which could be added to the National Register of Historic Places or otherwise preserved as parks or properties.

Democrats in Wisconsin’s State Assembly have asked for the removal of a portrait of Governor Jeremiah Rusk (left), who in 1886 ordered the state militia to keep peace during the Bay View Rolling Mill strike. Seven people were killed during that strike, and labor unions in Wisconsin have gotten their Democrat friends in the legislature to offer a resolution to take down Rusk’s picture down. "He ordered the National Guard to fire on people who were marching for an eight-hour workday, even though some of those marchers were children," Reuters quoted resolution co-sponsor state Rep. Jon Richards as saying. "He is the last person we should be honoring in the state Capitol."

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif., left), Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is not impressed with the explanations given by Attorney General Eric Holder and other Department of Justice spokesmen about Operation Fast and Furious -- the gun-walker scandal in which ATF officials oversaw the transfer of 2,000 weapons across the border to brutal Mexican drug cartels, mainly the Sinaloa group. He is calling for a formal review by someone outside the government: