Lest it get lost in the other news: "Blagojevich, a Democrat, yesterday said the biggest U.S. retail bank won't get any more state business unless it restores credit to Republic Windows & Doors, whose workers are staging a sit-in." (David Mildenberg and Brian Louis, "Illinois Threat to Bank of America Is Dangerous, Critics Say", Bloomberg, Dec. 9). More on the sit-in and its highly placed political friends from Ron Coleman. The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union, which organized the action, is a leftist union outside the AFL-CIO which represents the shrunken remains of what was at the time the biggest of a number of unions to be kicked out of the then-Congress of Industrial Organizations for leftist extremism; the AFL-CIO assisted in the rise of the politically more mainstream IUE as a replacement. An account of the schism written from the UE's perspective is at Wikipedia, and the union is often romanticized by academics who regret the labor movement's 1940s and 1950s campaign to purge its ultra-Left elements.