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Voters yesterday rejected right-wing overreach with an unbroken string of Democratic and progressive victories: HAROLD MEYERSON comments on the defeat, 61-39, of the Ohio law stripping public employees of collective-bargaining rights, and the defeat in Mississippi, 57-43, of a sweeping antiabortion initiative. Harold writes for the Washington Post and The American Prospect.
Also: TOM WAITS has an amazing new CD out, “Bad as Me” – SASHA FRERE-JONES of The New Yorker will comment. SEE the “Visibile Tom Waits” HERE.
And FRANCES FOX PIVEN says Occupy Wall Street “has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.” Piven, “the professor Glenn Beck loves to hate,” wrote about it for TomDispatch.com; her latest book is Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?
Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
The cancer danger from the new airport security scanners–which look under a traveler’s clothing–is greater than we had feared. “Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 Americans could get cancer each year from the machines,” ProPublica’s Michael Grabell says. “Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as ‘safe.'”. . .
Only in LA: On one side of Pico Blvd., the Rancho Park golf course, with joggers, dog walkers and of course, golfers; on the other, a hundred “Occupy Fox News” demonstrators outside Fox Studios, chanting “We – are – the 99 per cent!”; in between, a hundred LA cops, many with riot gear at the ready, and an entire city block of TV news trucks, bristling with giant satellite dishes, power cables up and down the street, and news reporters under lights talking earnestly into the cameras. . . .
Plus:
After decades in which “hard hats” were described as enemies of the left, and four decades after construction workers in lower Manhattan attacked anti-war demonstrators on Wall Street, the AFL-CIO on Thursday called on its members to defend Occupy Wall Street from the NYPD as the city moved to arrest and evict protestors in Zuccotti Park. Hard hats and hippies, together at last!….
Big Bill Broonzy – he left the Mississippi Delta to become a leading Chicago bluesman of the 1930s, singing about racial injustice alongside Pete Seeger and Studs Terkel; then traveling to Europe to ignite the British blues-rock revival of the 1960s with Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend. 
Also: Whatever happened to the American left? 
When Sarah Palin announced last week that she was not running for president, many wondered, what had she been trying to do during the last three years, when she seemed to be almost a candidate? Now we know: she was trying to make money.
From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic in the Streets, Hollywood was a key arena for the giant U-turn in American politics that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Review of An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman; Dissent, Fall 2011) . . . . continued 
In a move that dramatizes the political differences between Los Angeles and New York, several members of the LA City Council today declared their support for Occupy LA and introduced a resolution that will put the city officially on record as endorsing the demonstrators camped at City Hall. City Council president Eric Garcetti, who is running for mayor, visited the encampment yesterday and said, “Stay as long as you need, we’re here to support you.” . . .
