It’s not so much about sex as it is about work, Rebecca Traister points out.

[I]n the midst of our great national calculus, in which we are determining what punishments fit which sexual crimes, it’s possible that we’re missing the bigger picture altogether: that this is not, at its heart, about sex at all — or at least not wholly. What it’s really about is work, and women’s equality in the workplace, and more broadly, about the rot at the core of our power structures that makes it harder for women to do work because the whole thing is tipped toward men.

It’s like dogs pissing on the shrubbery. “This is ours.” You can leave the house if you … Read the rest

Say goodbye to net neutrality in the US.

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle landmark rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences.

The agency scrapped so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone services.

The action reversed the agency’s 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to better protect Americans as they have migrated to the internet for most communications.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the commission, said the rollback of the

Dahlia Lithwick on being both victim and accomplice of one of those men.

She first met Judge Alex Kozinski in 1996, when she was clerking for another judge. She doesn’t remember what they talked about but she does remember “feeling quite small and very dirty.”

Without my prompting, my former co-clerk described this interaction in an email to me this week. “He completely ignored me and appeared to be undressing you with his eyes,” he wrote. “I had never seen anyone ogle another person like that and still have not seen anything like it. Was so uncomfortable to watch, and I wasn’t even the subject of the stare.”

Later she had occasion to talk to him on the phone … Read the rest

The liars at Fox News are trying to provide cover for Trump to fire Mueller.

[I]n Fox’s alternate universe, the investigation is “illegitimate and corrupt,” or so says Gregg Jarrett, a legal analyst who appears regularly on Mr. Hannity’s nightly exercise in presidential ego-stroking. “Mueller’s stooges literally are doing everything within their power, and then some, to try and remove President Trump from office,” Mr. Hannity said last Wednesday.

“What a total travesty! They should all step aside,” Ms. Ingraham said last week, almost gleefully, about the supposed conflicts of interest permeating the special counsel’s highly experienced team of investigators. “Including Bob Mueller.”

How do they manage to convince themselves that of the two parties involved, Mueller is the corrupt … Read the rest

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

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

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 … Read the rest

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… Read the rest

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

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

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

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