On the landscape of happenings suggesting the direction of things these days, maybe you missed...

That Democrats supposedly are "vexed" (in the words of at least one headline) -- vexed -- that the wacky group Acorn is receiving hefty infusions of cash from Big Labor, specifically from the Service Employees International Union. The connection -- apparently a stunning revelation for leftists everywhere -- currently is an issue in states such as Illinois, Kansas, and Virginia.

That, at the urging of Big Labor, lofty congressional Democrats are weighing a national tax on financial transactions to help defray the costs of a move to socialized medicine.

And, in connection with the role of Big Labor in the incumbent regime, maybe you missed this -- from a Wall Street Journal editorial: No trucks from Mexico, no new trade agreements, a sweet deal for the United Auto Workers at GM and Chrysler, tariffs on Chinese tires, and now Big Labor has another demand of the Obama administration: Overturn 75 years of labor policy to sandbag Delta Airlines and unionize transportation workers. Will it get that, too?

THEN, just in case you missed it, as measures of the depression in the newspaper industry, wherein at least six publishers have filed bankruptcy in the past year: (a) Philadelphia's Inquirer and Daily News soon will be sold at auction, with lenders holding $300 million in debt the prospective winners. (b) Similarly, the Chicago Sun-Times likely will be sold for $5 million plus the assumption of about $20 million in liabilities.

California has revised its rules for the teaching of Islamic studies to public school seventh-graders. New guidelines, according to Investor's Business Daily, "whitewash the violence and oppression of women codified in Islamic law, or Shariah. And they're loaded with revisionist history about the faith" -- notably, again, about the treatment of women.

According to the executive director of the Sarcoma Foundation, the federal Food and Drug Administration has "turned its back on 25 years of regulatory precedent and rejected a new cancer drug that by all known standards had passed muster for approval." Rejection of the chemotherapy drug Yondelis thus denies women a potentially powerful new option for fighting ovarian cancer. Continued...