Being an unabashed racist isn’t always a winning strategy.

According to CNN exit polling, 30 percent of the electorate was African-American, with 96 percent of them voting for Mr. Jones. A remarkable 98 percent of black women voters supported Mr. Jones. The share of black voters Tuesday was higher than the share in 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was on the ballot.

That’s despite the obstacles created since Shelby v Holder.

Michael Nabors, 54, and his wife, Ella, 55, were among the black voters soaking up the Democratic good cheer after news agencies called the race for Mr. Jones.

“We knew the world was looking at us,” he said.

Mr. Nabors said that black voters were paying attention to Mr. Moore’s comments in September, in which he said that America was last “great” during the days when slavery was legal. He said they paid attention when Mr. Moore brought Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, to campaign for him. He said that they paid attention to the allegations brought by the women who said Mr. Moore had consorted with them when they were young.

And he said they paid attention to Mr. Jones’s most famous case as a prosecutor.

And then there was Selma.

When the votes from Selma and surrounding Dallas County came in just a little after 10 pm, Moore’s lead began to evaporate. On CNN, John King announced, “Selma just put Doug Jones back into the race.”

A county where African Americans make up 70 percent of the population gave 75 percent of the vote to Doug Jones. That brought the Democrat 7,000 votes closer to victory. And as more votes from more predominately African-American counties came in, Jones moved into the lead. Within a half hour, the networks were announcing that a Democrat had won an Alabama Senate contest for the first time in almost a quarter-century.

Jones needed all the votes that he got Tuesday. He won by a narrow margin—prevailing by a bit more than 20,000 votes out of roughly 1.3 million cast. But he could not have gotten near the finish line without the overwhelming support that he received from Alabama’s African-American voters in general, and from African-American women voters in particular.

“We have come so far,” Doug Jones said in his victory speech.

Everyone knew what he meant.

Just as everyone knew what it meant when Selma put Doug Jones into the race.

Hold on. Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.

Going back into the archives, the NY Times in April 2001.

With the families of four black girls watching solemnly from the front row, prosecutors opened the long-delayed murder trial of Thomas E. Blanton Jr. today by depicting him as a rabid segregationist who helped dynamite the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 and then insisted for years on driving obsessively past the scene of the crime.

Doug Jones, the United States attorney here, took jurors back in time to a Birmingham where efforts to desegregate schools and lunch counters met with determined and often violent resistance from whites, including Mr. Blanton and other members of his Ku Klux Klan cell who plotted in the darkness under a Cahaba River bridge.

”There were people, and Thomas E. Blanton was one of them,” Mr. Jones said in his opening statement, ”who saw their segregated way of life dissolving and couldn’t stand it.”

Doug Jones carried Birmingham by a wide margin yesterday.

That was fun.

Doug Jones, a Democratic former prosecutor who mounted a seemingly quixotic Senate campaign in the face of Republican dominance here, defeated his scandal-scarred opponent, Roy S. Moore, after a brutal campaign marked by accusations of sexual abuse and child molestation against the Republican.

The upset delivered an unimagined victory for Democrats and shaved Republicans’ unstable Senate majority to a single seat.

But better than that, it’s a smack in the face to President Pussygrabber and Steve Wifebeater Bannon.

The abandonment of Mr. Moore by affluent white voters, along with strong support from black voters, proved decisive, allowing Mr. Jones to transcend Alabama’s rigid racial polarization and assemble a winning coalition.

Despite all those closed voting precincts and DMV offices in mostly-black counties.

Bannon helped.

Mr. Moore, instead of facing questions about accusations of sexual abuse, largely vanished from the campaign in the last week. He returned to Alabama for a rally in the rural, southeast corner of the state on Monday with Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.

But the most memorable comments from the event did not come from Mr. Moore. Rather, they emerged from Mr. Bannon, who mocked the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a University of Alabama graduate, for not attending a more prestigious school; Mr. Moore’s wife, Kayla, who angrily denied charges the couple was anti-Semitic by noting “one of our attorneys is a Jew;” and an Army friend of the candidate, who recalled the two of them being uneasy walking into a Vietnam brothel to find “pretty girls” whom Mr. Moore found too young.

Happy Hanukkah.

A thing happening in Oxford:

The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries is set to open a new exhibition looking at some of the earliest examples of English graphic design.

On display at the Weston Library from next month, Designing English: Graphics on the Medieval Page will largely showcase the work of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval scribes, painters and engravers dating from the fifth to the 15th century.

Last time I was at the Bodleian (which was a long time ago) I think I bought just about every postcard they had with medieval graphic design on it.

I just wanted to share the illustration Design Week chose:

Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Ari Berman on Alabama and voting rights:

Alabama is birthplace of Voting Rights Act

This is how hard it was to vote in the state before 1965

We can’t forget about this history

(p17 Give Us the Ballot) pic.twitter.com/iWWCuxLtUz

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 12, 2017

In Feb 1965 Alabama state troopers shot 26-year-old unarmed Jimmie Lee Jackson after civil rights march. He’d tried to register to vote 5 times. His death led to Selma march pic.twitter.com/CeuXBj3pjE

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 12, 2017

.@repjohnlewis was brutally beaten on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 when he marched for the right to vote. That march led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act pic.twitter.com/WuLfrjKph2

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 12, 2017

In Selma, Alabama, only 2% of African-Americans were registered to vote in 1965. In neighboring Lowndes County, which was 80% black, there wasn’t a single black registered voter pic.twitter.com/G9dsqilz0s

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 12, 2017

Lucinda Franks started out as a journalist in the 1970s. It wasn’t easy.

Two years after I joined the news service, I won the Pulitzer Prize. I suffered for it mightily. That I was the first woman to win for national reporting — I had been brought to New York to do a five-part series on the violent antiwar Weatherman group — made it only worse. I could see it in their bowed heads: We’ve been striving for years to win that coveted prize and a 24-year-old walks away with it! The entire bureau of men refused to speak to me that day and the days after.

I was haunted by the creeping conviction that I didn’t deserve the prize — I should give it back. For at least the next 10 years, I was too ashamed to tell people I’d won.

Isn’t that nice?

When you get older, gender discrimination gets easier, somewhat predictable and sometimes even funny. But it doesn’t stop — even if you’ve published four books and had a long journalism career. When my last book came out, I was interviewed by a certain talk show host, before he was stripped of his job because of gross sexual misconduct charges. I had hardly opened my mouth before he fell asleep. During the rest of the interview, he kept nodding off while the camera judiciously avoided him. When I left the studio, he had popped awake for his new guests. I saw him waving his hands enthusiastically while speaking with two high-powered male journalists.

Charlie Rose, no doubt. He’s pretty soporific himself.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders says dang it reporters need to stop making mistakes and be way more careful to tell the truth.

She and Jim Acosta of CNN argued about it.

Sanders: When journalists make honest mistakes, they should own up to them.

Acosta: They do.

Sanders: Sometimes, and a lot of times you don’t.

[Crosstalk]

Sanders: I’m sorry, I’m not finished. There’s a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people. Something that happens regularly —

(Actually she said “purposely,” which is the right word. Erik Wemple either misheard or thought it was the wrong word and silently corrected it.)

[Crosstalk]

Sanders: I’m not done. You cannot say that it’s an honest mistake when you’re purposely putting out information that you know to be false. Or when you’re taking information that hasn’t been validated, that hasn’t been offered any credibility and that has been continually denied by a number of people including people with direct knowledge of an incident.

It’s so…striking that she’s so concerned with truth when the president she works for is such a chronic shameless liar.

Speaking of Alabama, and voting, and voting rights, and Shelby v Holder, and voting rights, and voting rights, and voting rights…

This time last year, Alabama’s chief elections official landed in the national spotlight for delivering a screed against nonvoters that many people interpreted as an attack on African Americans in the state, who have long faced barriers to voting. “If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and to go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to go vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege,” Republican John Merrill said in an interview with documentary filmmaker Brian Jenkins. Jenkins had asked why he opposed automatically registering Alabamians when they reach voting age, and his response sizzled with anger toward people who “think they deserve the right because they’ve turned 18.” So he made a pledge: “As long as I’m secretary of state of Alabama, you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state.”

“If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear”…yeah that’s about as clear a dog whistle as you could ask for. That’s not meant to conjure up a mental image of sorry lazy white people.

And he’s been doing what he promised, too.

When the votes are tallied Tuesday night, what won’t be counted is how many people might have voted if not for the restrictive voting laws in place in the state. In a close election, the actions of Merrill and the GOP could help elect Moore.

Well that’s the point, isn’t it. Exclude as many black people as possible and elect racist shitheads.

In recent years, Alabama Republicans have taken steps to protect their grip on power by making it harder for African Americans and Latinos to vote. They passed a law requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID, a measure that has been found to disproportionately disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos, who are more likely to lack such an ID and face impediments to getting one. The ID law also applied to absentee voting, which is used by many elderly black voters in rural counties, who now must mail in copies of their photo IDs with their ballots. 

In rural counties, where there aren’t shops with copy machines on every corner – where, in fact, the nearest copy machine is probably a long drive away. That’ll block a lot of votes!

They reformed campaign finance laws to weaken the political organizations that mobilize African American voters. They closed 31 DMV offices across the state, disproportionately affecting rural majority-black counties.

Since Shelby v Holder Alabama has closed about 200 voting precincts, making it a bigger pain to vote in the ones that remain.

White supremacy isn’t dead yet.

Guest post by Maureen Brian, originally a comment on a Guardian piece about National Health Service funding problems.

First a bit from the Guardian piece by Bob Kerslake, for context:

I have this weekend decided to stand down from my role as chair of King’s College hospital, London.

This was not a decision that I took lightly. I love King’s and have the highest regard for the people who work there. But in the end I have concluded that the government and its regulator, NHS Improvement, are simply not facing up to the enormous challenges that the NHS is currently facing. This is especially true in London where the demands of a rapidly growing population are not being matched by the extra resources we need.

King’s is a big teaching hospital that serves a population of more than one million people in south-east London. It provides world-class services such as neurosciences, haematology, liver, diabetes and cardiovascular, where it is a centre of excellence. King’s is also one of four major trauma centres and played a key role in the response to the Westminster and London Bridge attacks and the fire at Grenfell Tower. But most of all, it is the local hospital to a diverse and often deprived community.

Maureen’s informed and informative comment:
No-one seems able to persuade politicians that all change costs money. Properly planned and researched change costs money – collecting data, planning the process, retraining staff, extra management time, etc – before it starts to happen. However good the idea was it is going to take time to implement and even more time to bed in and all that is costing all the time. As any fule no.

With something as vast and complex as the NHS we should be thinking of the whole process taking something like 10 years for a major change in management structures and lines of accountability. We are just about to move onto major change number 4 since the Tories came back in 2010! Drawn up by politicians, of course, on the back of the proverbial fag packet and with little or no consultation with the people doing the actual work.

Those people know that you cannot plan to the date and the hour when there will be black ice on a ten-mile stretch of motorway or a small outbreak of measles in Cardiff. There has to be some slack in the system. There has to be a system which allows the local hospital to call in a recently retired orthopaedic surgeon or to open up an extra ward and staff it within 24 hours.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe the NHS is among the best in the world but it could be better if the medically qualified people did not spend half their lives pushing water up hill against the massed ranks of politicians and accountants.

Bob Kerslake is a good man. He did not do this lightly.

Oddly enough, the women who reported that Trump sexually assaulted them haven’t since then decided it was all a big fuss about nothing. They still wonder why the hell he was elected (sort of elected) anyway.

It was “heartbreaking” for women to go public with their claims against President Trump last year, only to see him ascend to the Oval Office, said Samantha Holvey, a former Miss USA contestant who in October 2016 said Trump inappropriately inspected pageant participants.

“I put myself out there for the entire world, and nobody cared,” Holvey said Monday on NBC’s “Megyn Kelly Today” show.

Not nobody – but for sure not enough to stop the pinchy-hand vulgarian.

During the television appearance and a news conference, Holvey sat alongside Jessica Leeds, a New York woman who said Trump groped her on a plane, and Rachel Crooks, who said he kissed her on the lips at Trump Tower, to renew their allegations against the president.

The women also called for Congress to investigate these allegations amid the dramatic shift happening nationwide in response to charges of sexual misconduct against men from Hollywood to Capitol Hill. Claims have erupted across industry after industry, against lawmakers and movie stars alike, as the country has shown a sudden, newfound willingness to take such accusations seriously.

I’d like to point out that some of us – feminists, mostly – took them seriously all along.

A day before the women spoke, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that women who have accused Trump “should be heard.”

Haley’s comments were a sharp break from the White House’s position, and they were particularly notable coming from one of the most high-profile women serving in Trump’s administration.

“They should be heard, and they should be dealt with,” Haley said when asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about the allegations other women have made against Trump. “And I think we heard from them before the election. And I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on the other hand, simply repeated the White House assertion that they’re all lying.

Evangelicals have some very odd priorities.

Penny Young Nance, CEO of the evangelical group Concerned Women for America, told NPR on Monday that the most important issue in the Alabama Senate race is Democratic candidate Doug Jones’ support of abortion, and not whether Republican candidate Roy Moore is a pedophile.

I realize that evangelicals have decided to pretend to think that a fertilized egg is a thinking feeling planning hoping human being as opposed to a process that will become a thinking feeling planning hoping human being, but still. It seems pretty odd to be that indifferent to the well-being of thinking feeling planning hoping young girls.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Nance on Monday if Moore is “worthy of being in the Senate” after eight women came forward to accuse Moore of sexual misconduct when they were as young as 14.

“That’s a question for the people of Alabama,” Nance opined. “Unfortunately, the Democrats could have won this handily if they had been willing to put forward a pro-life Democrat.”

If only the Democrats had been willing to force women to continue unwanted pregnancies, they could have had that fun trip to Disneyland, but no, they had to go and spoil it.

In Goteborg last night:

Three people have been arrested for allegedly throwing firebombs at a synagogue in the Swedish city of Goteborg, the second anti-Jewish attack in the Nordic nation in two days. Jewish groups condemned the attacks as “unconscionable” and demanded that authorities take action.

…

The attack took place after some 200 people rallied late Friday in the southern city of Malmo, yelling anti-Jewish slogans and waving Palestinian flags to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Nice work, Don.

On Saturday, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom tweeted that those who called for Jews to be killed did something “totally unacceptable.”

The European Jewish Congress said Sunday it was “unconscionable that Jews are under attack on the streets of Europe” and urged Swedish and other European governments to take “strong punitive action” against perpetrators.

Don’t worry, nice Mr Trump will fix everything.

Oh will you look at that now.

Interesting to see the two female journos who actually broke the story being written out of history already pic.twitter.com/06LzCf2Q5Y

— Barbara Speed (@bspeed8) December 10, 2017

The MAN who took down WEINSTEIN the headline shouts.

It’s in the Times, the one in London, the one Murdoch owns.

The one in New York, the one Murdoch does not own, broke the story before Ronan Farrow did. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story, after months of investigation. All three of them took down Weinstein.