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

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

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

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 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