Roy Moore - Senate Sex Scandal

[MASTERBAKER]

'Saturday Night Live' quickly addresses Roy Moore scandal
BYNICOLE HENSLEY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Sunday, November 12, 2017, 3:51 AM

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accused of pursuing at least four teenage girlswhile in his 30s and working as an assistant district attorney in Alabama. He had sexual contact with the youngest victim, the Washington Post reported.

SEE IT: Tiffany Haddish blasts Louis C.K. while hosting 'SNL'

The GOP nominee slammed the allegations as “politically motivated” and said he only dated “young ladies” before his marriage.

Moore’s flat-out denial failed to persuade faux Pence of his innocence.

Saturday Night Live used Roy Moore's molestation scandal as fodder for its cold open.
(NBC)
“It’s hard to convince people that you are not into young girls when you dress like Woody from ‘Toy Story,’ ” Bennett told Alex Moffat’s Moore.

PAID CONTENT BYHSBC
Did you Remember to Spend on Yourself Today?
Moore is the latest addition to rapidly growing list of men to be accused of sexual harassment or assault, and to be mentioned on the sketch show because of the allegations.

Roy Moore finds timing of assault allegations ‘unbelievable'

He and comedian Louis C.K. were referenced within a week of the news surfacing, a change in pace from the height of the Weinstein saga.

“Saturday Night Live” failed to mention the disgraced Hollywood producer in the episode following the initial report in the New York Times, and even then, the scandal was only discussed on “Weekend Update.”

Moore garnered a second mention at the satiric news desk Saturday, with co-host Colin Jost cracking jokes about his “naughty” cowboy get-up.


A look at Saturday Night Live's most memorable characters
Jost brought Cecily Strong’s “Claire from HR” to the desk for a quiz on when it's appropriate to have a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl.

Louis C.K. admits masturbating in front of female colleagues

“I'm pretty sure the answer is never,” Jost replied.

The “Weekend Update” anchor jokingly conceded that everyone “you've ever heard of is a sex monster.”

“How are we still surprised that someone who puts up the Ten Commandments up everywhere doesn’t actually follow them?” Jost said.

“What’s next? It turns out the guy who always jokes about masturbating wasn’t joking about masturbating?”

Moore, the former Alabama Chief Justice, was accused of molesting a 14-year-old in the 1970s.
(BRYNN ANDERSON/AP)
Jost was referring to Louis C.K. and his fall from fame after confirming he masturbated in front of unwilling women — including fellow comedians — on multiple occasions.

Comedian and host Tiffany Haddish alluded to the “Louis” creatorin her monologue, but not by name.

“If your thing’s out, and she’s got all her clothes on, you’re wrong. You are in the wrong,” the 37-year-old “Girls Trip” star said.

“Wait until she takes her own clothes off, then pull your thing-thing out.”

 

[QueEx]

SNL nailed that one!

 

[MASTERBAKER]

Trevor Noah takes complacent republicans DOWN!

 

[QueEx]

 

[QueEx]

PERSONA NON GRATA

Roy Moore was reportedly banned from Alabama mall for bothering teen girls

November 13, 2017



Wes Frazer/Getty Images

On a weekend trip to Roy Moore's hometown of Gadsden, Alabama, The New Yorker's Charles Bethea spoke with and messaged more than a dozen local residents who said they've heard over the years that Moore, the Republican Senate nominee, was banned from the mall because he pestered teenage girls.

Two women who spoke to The Washington Post last week, detailing how Moore tried to pursue relationships with them when they were teens, said they first met him at the Gadsden Mall, which opened in 1974. Moore was a regular visitor there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, several people told Bethea, and many employees remembered he would show up, usually by himself, wearing nice clothes. Gary Legat, who worked at a record store at the mall from 1981 to 1985, said it was a place where teens went "to see and be seen." He said he thinks Moore was banned from the mall in 1979, and knows "the ban was in place when I got there."

A retired police officer named J.D. Thomas, who worked security at the mall, looked out for the teenage visitors, Legat said, and once told him: "If you see Moore here, tell me. I'll take care of him." When Bethea called Thomas, he said he would not discuss the ban, but two police officers did tell Bethea that at the time, several teens who worked in the mall asked their managers to keep Moore away from them. "The general knowledge of the time when I moved here was that this guy is a lawyer cruising the mall for high school dates," one officer said, and the mall viewed him as a problem. Catherine Garcia


http://theweek.com/speedreads/73723...banned-from-alabama-mall-bothering-teen-girls


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[MASTERBAKER]

Fox News host Neil Cavuto just DESTROYED Donald Trump for his ridiculous weekend spent attacking everyone EXCEPT Roy Moore...

 

[MASTERBAKER]

Fox News host Neil Cavuto just DESTROYED Donald Trump for his ridiculous weekend spent attacking everyone EXCEPT Roy Moore...

 

[thoughtone]

source: Washington Post

An Alabama Senate race conjures the awful 1963 church bombing that killed 4 black girls

From left, Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; Addie Mae Collins, 14, and Cynthia Dianne Wesley, 14, were killed Sept. 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. (AP)


The case haunted Birmingham for years. Four black girls in Alabama had been killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church — a crime that shocked the country and helped fuel the civil rights movement.

Yet the men responsible — members of the Ku Klux Klan who’d boasted about their role — were never tried and convicted. That changed in 1977 when Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, the suspected ringleader of the bombing, was put on trial.

At the time, Doug Jones, now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in a hotly contested race Alabama, was a second-year law student. He skipped classes to sit in on the trial, watching in amazement as William Joseph Baxley II, then U.S. attorney in Alabama, presented evidence against Chambliss.

Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General.

As Jones watched the testimony in the Jefferson County Courthouse, it became clear that Chambliss did not act alone in the bombing. The four girls killed — 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley — had been in the church basement preparing for Sunday service. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah Jean Collins, who was 12 then, lost an eye in the explosion.

“As I gave my undivided attention to Baxley’s powerful closing argument,” Jones told a House crime subcommittee two decades later, “I never in my wildest imagination dreamed that one day this case and my legal career would come full circle, giving me the opportunity, some 24 years later to prosecute the two remaining suspects for a crime that many say changed the course of history.”

More than 20 years after Chambliss was convicted, Jones would become U.S. attorney in Alabama and set out to finish what Baxley started. He brought charges against two more Klan members, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., and Bobby Frank Cherry.

The prosecutions have helped fuel his Senate race against Republican Roy Moore, a controversial former judge under increasing pressure to end his candidacy after being accused of sexually pursuing and, in two cases, assaulting teenage girls 40 years ago. Moore has denied he did anything wrong. On Thursday, a Fox News poll showed Jones leading Moore by eight points among those likely to vote in next month’s election.

Jones, who grew up in the suburbs of Birmingham, was a child when the bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church. He doesn’t remember hearing about it.

Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Alabama, in his campaign headquarters in Birmingham.


“I was 9 years old in 1963, a white kid living out in suburbia, and so my life was a very segregated life, a sheltered life,” Jones told the Los Angeles Times. “Birmingham was two towns, a black town and a white town. It took me getting into junior high to see things changing. My elementary school was all white. But when I went to seventh grade, I, for the first time, went to a school that was integrated.”

In 1963, Birmingham was called Bombingham, because of the number of black homes that were firebombed.

The 16th Street Baptist Church was a prominent meeting place for civil rights leaders. It was apparently targeted by the Klan after a federal court order mandated the integration of public schools in Alabama, which had resisted the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education. Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace (D), who declared in his inaugural address, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” literally stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963, to block two black students from enrolling.

Two months later on Sept. 15, 1963, at 10:21 a.m., dynamite reduced the church to rubble, mangling cars in the parking lot and stopping clocks.

“It sounded like the whole world was shaking,” recalled Rev. John Haywood Cross, according to court documents. The dynamite blew plaster off the walls and peeled the face off the image of Jesus in a stained-glass window.

Firemen and ambulance attendants remove a covered body from 16th Street Baptist Church, where an explosion killed four black girls on Sept. 15, 1963. (AP)

The pastor yelled for churchgoers to get out of the building, then went looking for the children in the basement. The explosion had blown a hole in the side of the church so large that he walked through it to get inside the church basement.

After digging about two feet in the rubble, “they found the body of a young girl,” court documents said, and then three others. “The four bodies were found almost in the same location as if they had been thrown on top of each other.”

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to Gov. Wallace: “The blood of our little children is on your hands.”

King also sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the JFK Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS EVER SEEN….”

More than 8,000 people attended the funeral for the girls at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, where King delivered the eulogy.

Within days, police zeroed in on the key figures suspected of planting the dynamite. All four of them were vehement white supremacists, according to the National Park Service account of the crime at the Birmingham Civil Rights National Historical Monument.

“In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing — Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry and Herman Cash,” the Park Service said.

J. Edgar Hoover, then-director of the FBI, blocked the prosecution and overruled the agents in Birmingham. Despite calls from Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson for prosecution, Hoover refused to make arrests.

Baxley reopened the case in 1971. Six years later, Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss was convicted of murder in the death of one of the girls, Denise McNair. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1985 at the age of 81.

In 1993, the case was reopened a second time at the urging of civil rights leaders. Rob Langford, then an FBI agent in Birmingham, and others began sifting through more than 9,000 documents and wire taps that had been collected in the 1960s by the FBI office in Birmingham.

Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. was convicted in the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. (Alabama Department of Corrections via AP)


The investigation led to the arrests of Blanton and Cherry. (Cash, the fourth suspect, died in 1994 without being charged.)

Jones, who was appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997 by President Clinton, connected Blanton to Cherry.

Jones urged the FBI to release more than 9,000 files with evidence and wiretaps, including the “Kitchen-Sink Tape” wiretap of Blanton’s kitchen. An FBI agent had rented an apartment in the Blanton’s house, where the agent installed a listening device in the kitchen wall, according to court documents.

On June 28, 1964, the FBI recorded Blanton telling his wife about making a bomb.

In a packed courtroom in 2001, the jury heard the 37-year-old surveillance tape of Blanton telling his then-wife, Jeanne Blanton, that he’d planned the bombing under a bridge at the Cahaba River, where the Klan’s violent cell met, according to a 2001 Washington Post story.

“What do you need a meeting for?” Jeanne Blanton asked.

“You have to have a meeting to make a bomb,” Thomas Blanton replied.

Blanton was convicted in 2001. Cherry was convicted a year later, in 2002.

A judge had initially ruled that Cherry was not mentally competent to stand trial but reversed himself after doctors concluded Cherry was faking a mental illness.

Jones built the case against Cherry on circumstantial evidence and testimony from family members. He brought in a granddaughter who testified that Cherry once said, “He helped blow up a bunch of n—–s back in Birmingham.”

He also brought in one of Cherry’s ex-wives, who testified against him.

“He bragged about it. Bob told me he didn’t put the bomb together. He said, ‘I lit it,”‘ Willadean Brogdon told reporters on the steps of a Birmingham court in 1999.

After Cherry’s conviction, Jones told reporters: “The people of the state of Alabama proved for the second time in about a year that justice delayed does not have to be justice denied.”

In a tweet last week, Jones called prosecuting the Klansmen “the most important thing I have done.

Cherry died in prison in 2004. He was 74.

In August 2016, an Alabama parole board refused an early release for Blanton, who was sentenced to life in prison. Now 79, Blanton is the last surviving Klansman responsible for the 16th Street Church bombing.

 

[thoughtone]

Even thought the Democratic candidate Doug Jones was the prosecuting attorney for the trial of the racist terrorists that bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church and killed 4 African American church girls in 1964.

source: Afro

Meet the Black Evangelicals Supporting Roy Moore

Alabama Senate Race


Several Black evangelical leaders and supporters are offering their support to the controversial candidacy of Roy Moore, Republican nominee for the Alabama Senate seat vacated earlier this year by Trump administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Pastor Stephen Broden, who is Black, of Fair Park Bible Fellowship in Dallas, defended Moore at a Nov. 16 press conference attended by Moore, his wife and other spiritual leaders.

Pastor Stephen Broden and Alan Keyes spoke at a news conference in Alabama in support of controversial Senate candidate Roy Moore. (Facebook Photo)

We stand with Judge Roy Moore, I stand with Judge Roy Moore,” said Broden. “These accusations are unproven and are designed to derail an extraordinary and successful candidate who has done extraordinarily well in spite of the opposition that he has gotten.”

Moore, running in a state that President Trump won by 28 points, had a dominating lead in the polls until allegations of sexual assault and impropriety with underage girls were aired in early November. Now Moore, who has denied all allegations, and his opponent, Democrat Doug Jones, are in a dead heat as of Monday polling. On Nov. 21, Trump said, “If you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours. He totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen. And look, you have to look at him also.”

“Forty years of public service, proves the integrity and character of Judge Moore,” said Broden. “It is clear to most fair-minded Americans that these are evil wicked tactics to destroy a good man and we will not quietly stand while this evil lot runs roughshod over a Christian man and Christian women across this nation.”

Alan Keyes, perennial Republican presidential candidate, also spoke in support of Moore at the news conference. “I want every American and every voter in Alabama to understand that they’re trying to tell you this is about Roy Moore,” said Keyes. “But, in fact, it is about stripping you of the presumption of innocence.”

Moore, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, finished his last term under a suspension that finally ended in April of this year. While linked previously to neo-Confederate and White nationalist figures and movements, and a theorizer that former President Barack Obama was both a non-U.S. citizen and a secret Muslim, several Black evangelicals continue to support him, even after the recent allegations of criminal and improper sexual conduct with underage and of-age girls. Eight women told the {Washington Post} that Moore had behaved inappropriately with them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.

Moore has been suspended from the Alabama Judiciary twice, first when he refused a superior court order to remove a two-and-a-half ton monument to the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme courthouse. He was suspended a second time when he defied the ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage.

Moore has denied criminal sexual contact with underage girls and stated he “generally” has had appropriate contact young women.

“We have seen this tactic before,” said Broden. “The alt-left has employed these tactics against Herman Cain, and against the President in recent elections. The power elite, the fake news lackeys, the political establishment and the globalists are running scared and are using every dirty trick in the book to stop the will of the people of Alabama and of America.”

Not all Black Evangelicals support Moore. Tijuanna Adetunji, whose name originally appeared on a list of 50 pastors supporting Moore, asked that her name, along with that of her husband, Bishop Fred Adetunji, be removed from the list after the allegations came out.

The Alabama special election is scheduled for Dec. 12.

 

[QueEx]

Pastor Stephen Broden, who is Black, of Fair Park Bible Fellowship in Dallas,

Alan Keyes, [of New York City, New York], perennial Republican presidential candidate

Man, where they digging up these Alt-N- - - ers from ???


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[thoughtone]

Man, where they digging up these Alt-N- - - ers from ???
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These are the same refried porch monkeys that they dig up during during the presidential elections.

You never hear from them when a republican politician exposes their racist underpinnings.

 

[QueEx]

You never hear from them when a republican politician exposes their racist underpinnings.

You mean like in the case where the . . . ”CBS News reporter noted that Trump has called the allegations from at least 16 women “fake news”, and asked: “Is the official White House position that all of these women are lying?”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.th...ual-harassment-claims-women-lying-white-house
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[QueEx]

Exclusive: Accuser to Roy Moore, 'Where does your immorality end?'


Nov 28, 8:46 PM; Posted Nov 28, 6:37 PM

AL.com
By Paul Gattis
pgattis@al.com


In an impassioned letter released exclusively today to AL.com, Leigh Corfman, who accused Roy Moore of undressing her when she was 14 and he was 32, demanded the Republican Senate candidate stop calling her a liar, and attacking her character and end his "smears and false denials."

AL.com received a copy of the letter in person from Corfman. She declined to comment beyond what was contained in the letter.

"I am not getting paid for speaking up. I am not getting rewarded from your political opponents. What I am getting is stronger by refusing to blame myself and speaking the truth out loud," the letter states.

"The initial barrage of attacks against me voiced by your campaign spokespersons and others seemed petty so I did not respond."

However, Corfman decided to write the open letter after hearing Moore's own remarks last night at a rally in Henagar, his first public appearance in nearly two weeks.

Moore on Monday gave no new insight on the allegations that have hounded his campaign for the past 21/2 weeks, saying again the accusations he made unwanted romantic or sexual advances on teenage girls almost 40 years ago are "completely false."

"I don't know any of (the women)," he said.

Corfman has said that when she was 14 Moore, who was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, took her to his home where he removed her clothes and touched her over her bra and underwear. He was wearing his underwear at the time, Corfman said.

"I felt like I was the one to blame," she told The Today Show . "I was a 14-year-old child trying to play in an adult's world and he was 32-years-old."

Here is the letter in its entirety:

Mr. Moore,

When the Washington Post approached me about what you did to me as a child, I told them what happened, just as I had told family and friends years before. I stand by every word.

You responded by denying the truth. You told the world that you didn't even know me. Others in recent days have had the decency to acknowledge their hurtful actions and apologize for similar behavior, but not you.

So I gave an interview on television so that people could judge for themselves whether I was telling the truth.

You sent out your spokesmen to call me a liar. Day after day.

Finally, last night, you did the dirty work yourself. You called me malicious, and you questioned my motivation in going public.

I explained my motivation on the Today show. I said that this is not political for me, this is personal. As a 14-year old, I did not deserve to have you, a 32-year old, prey on me. I sat quietly for too long, out of concern for my family. No more.

I am not getting paid for speaking up. I am not getting rewarded from your political opponents. What I am getting is stronger by refusing to blame myself and speaking the truth out loud.

The initial barrage of attacks against me voiced by your campaign spokespersons and others seemed petty so I did not respond.

But when you personally denounced me last night and called me slanderous names, I decided that I am done being silent. What you did to me when I was 14-years old should be revolting to every person of good morals. But now you are attacking my honesty and integrity. Where does your immorality end?

I demand that you stop calling me a liar and attacking my character. Your smears and false denials, and those of others who repeat and embellish them, are defamatory and damaging to me and my family.

I am telling the truth, and you should have the decency to admit it and apologize.

Leigh Corfman​

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/11/roy_moore_leigh_corfman_accuse.html#incart_big-photo


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[QueEx]

 

[QueEx]

ELECTIONS


‘We’ve already lost’ — GOP takes stock of the nightmare unfolding in Alabama


BY KATIE GLUECK AND ALEX ROARTY
McClatchy
DECEMBER 04, 2017



WASHINGTON - The Alabama Senate race is days away, but already, top Republicans are admitting defeat.

Whether their candidate, Roy Moore, overcomes multiple on-the-record accusations of child molestation and sexual misconduct to win on Dec. 12 or not, top party officials concede that Alabama has been a disaster for the national brand — and either result will put the Republican congressional majorities in jeopardy.

“There’s no outcome here in which the Republican Party can say, ‘Well, that turned out OK,’ no outcome where we can sit back and breathe a sigh of relief,” said Scott Jennings, a GOP strategist who is close to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “Both outcomes are bad for the overall health and brand of the Republican Party.”

If Moore wins, Republicans fear that candidates up and down the ballot will be forced to answer for his every alleged action and confirmed comment, as the Senate grapples with whether to seat him.

If he loses to Democrat Doug Jones, then the Republican hold on the Senate majority will grow even more tenuous, threatening to grind congressional action to a halt and fueling progressives on the left.

“If [Republicans] lose, the lesson is, you nominate a far-right wing nutcase candidate, you’re going to lose the seat,” said veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “If he wins, then the lesson is, you nominate a far-right wing nutcase candidate, then it puts the party in an impossible situation where you’ve got someone deemed not fit to serve in the body to which he’s been elected.”

Certainly, the Alabama special election is unique, and operatives warn against extrapolating too much from the unusual circumstances unfolding in one of the reddest states in the country. And Moore’s team puts all of the blame for any tarnishing of the Republican brand on the GOP itself: “Those who have tarred the party brand are the self-dealing, establishment Republicans who were also quick to pile on the judge because they saw it as a way of bullying a conservative outsider to get out of the race,” said senior Moore campaign adviser Brett Doster.

But as the race hurtles to a close, this is how top Republicans say they got here—and what both sides say they can learn for the next race, according to interviews with a dozen senior Republican and Democratic campaign operatives


Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article187429913.html#storylink=cpy

 

[MASTERBAKER]

Randy Rainbow SLAYS again, this time coming for the serial pedophile Senate candidate Roy Moore -- this burn is going to STING!

 

[MASTERBAKER]

Randy Rainbow SLAYS again, this time coming for the serial pedophile Senate candidate Roy Moore -- this burn is going to STING!

 

[MASTERBAKER]

 

[MASTERBAKER]

bye bitch!

 

[MASTERBAKER]

This is absolutely hysterical!!

 

[QueEx]

African American Voters Made Doug Jones a U.S. Senator in Alabama

The state’s Black Belt made big turnout gains in support of the Democratic candidate, providing his margin of victory in the Senate special election in a deep-red state.

Marvin Gentry / Reuters

• The Atlantic
• VANN R. NEWKIRK II
• DEC 12, 2017

Ahead of Alabama’s special U.S. Senate election, there was a clear narrative about the state’s black voters: They weren’t mobilizing.

Six in 10 black voters who were stopped by a New York Times reporter in a shopping center last week didn’t know an election was even going on, a result the reporter took to mean that overall interest was low. The Washington Post determined that black voters weren’t “energized.” HuffPostconcluded that black voters weren’t “inspired.”

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.


Americans Don't Really Understand Gun Violence

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

Exit polls showed that black voters made a big splash. The Washington Post’s exit polls indicated that black voters would make up 28 percent of the voters, greater than their 26 percent share of the population, which would be a dramatic turnaround from previous statewide special elections in the South, including a special election for the Sixth District in Georgia, which saw black support for Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff dissipate on Election Day.


As the Cook Political Report editor Dave Wasserman noted on Twitter, turnout was particularly high in the counties with the largest black populations. In Greene County, a small area that is 80 percent black and that Martin Luther King Jr. frequented in his Poor People’s Campaign, the turnout reached 78 percent of that of 2016, an incredible mark given that special elections and midterms usually fall far short of general-election marks. Perry County, also an important mostly black site of voting-rights battles of old, turned out at 75 percent of 2016 levels. Dallas County, whose seat is the city of Selma, hit the 74 percent mark. And while the exact numbers aren’t in for all of the majority-black or heavily black counties, black voters appear to have favored Jones at rates close to or more than 90 percent.

Meanwhile, Moore’s support sagged in mostly white counties. The race was probably over for the former state chief justice when Cullman County, which is virtually all white and heavily supported Trump in 2016, turned out only at 56 percent of its 2016 level. It really does seem that although many white voters weren’t convinced to vote for Jones, the allegations against Moore persuaded many of them to stay home.

These results demolish the preestablished media narrative about black voters in the state and defy conventional wisdom. Black voters were informed and mobilized to go vote, and did so even in the face of significant barriers.

The grassroots organizing in black communities by groups such as local NAACP chapters was more muscular than it had even been in the 2016 general election. In the lead-up to Tuesday’s contest, voting-rights groups registered people with felonies, targeted awareness campaigns at people who might not have had proper identification, and focused specifically on knocking down the structures in place that keep black voters away from the polls. Their efforts immediately become a case study in a region that has, since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision curtailing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, become a bastion of new voter-suppression laws, including new voter-identification laws.

The prospects of those laws and the efforts to circumvent them will be further tested in the 2018 elections. But for now, Jones is the man in Alabama, and even as white voters by and large stuck with Moore, Democrats were saved by a community already fighting against the grain to be heard in the din of democracy.


https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...ck-voters-make-a-statement-in-alabama/548237/

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[MASTERBAKER]

Dulce Sloan breaks down why African-American women are responsible for helping Roy Moore lose the Alabama Senate race.

 

[QueEx]

David Horsey Copyright 2017 Tribune Content Agency

 

[muckraker10021]

1963 White Terrorism Killing Black Girls fuels 2017 Democratic US Senate Victory In Alabama

Watch the entire film
Download

  https://mega.nz/#!qxdQzDSa!4OTMN4eXMeVFqQ2o_I9SGHrZqw1QnOWWJlo2CHEAIe8

Doug Jones triumphs in an Alabama Senate race that conjured a deadly church bombing

By DeNeen L. Brown | December 12 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...963-church-bombing-that-killed-4-black-girls/

From left, Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; Addie Mae Collins, 14, and Cynthia Dianne Wesley, 14, were killed Sept. 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. (AP)

Doug Jones, who claimed an upset victory Tuesday in an Alabama special election for a U.S. Senate seat, was a second-year law student. He skipped classes to sit in on the trial, watching in amazement as William Joseph Baxley II, then Alabama’s attorney general, presented evidence against Chambliss.

Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General.”

As Jones watched the testimony in the Jefferson County Courthouse, it became clear that Chambliss did not act alone in the bombing. The four girls killed — 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley — had been in the church basement preparing for Sunday service. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah Jean Collins, who was 12 then, lost an eye in the explosion.

“As I gave my undivided attention to Baxley’s powerful closing argument,” Jones told a House crime subcommittee two decades later, “I never in my wildest imagination dreamed that one day this case and my legal career would come full circle, giving me the opportunity, some 24 years later to prosecute the two remaining suspects for a crime that many say changed the course of history.”

More than 20 years after Chambliss was convicted, Jones would become U.S. attorney in Alabama and set out to finish what Baxley started. He brought charges against two more Klan members, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., and Bobby Frank Cherry.

The prosecutions helped fuel his Senate race against Republican Roy Moore, a controversial former judge accused of sexually pursuing and, in two cases, assaulting teenage girls 40 years ago. Moore denied he did anything wrong.

On Tuesday night, voters handed Jones an upset victory over Moore amid a furious burst of last-minute campaigning. President Trump urged Alabama to send Moore to the Senate, while Republican Sen. Richard Shelby declared it impossible to support him. “I think Alabama deserves better,” Shelby said.

Jones appealed to African American voters, who turned out in large numbers on his behalf.

Jones, who grew up in the suburbs of Birmingham, was a child when the bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church. He doesn’t remember hearing about it.

the Los Angeles Times. “Birmingham was two towns, a black town and a white town. It took me getting into junior high to see things changing. My elementary school was all white. But when I went to seventh grade, I, for the first time, went to a school that was integrated.”

In 1963, Birmingham was called Bombingham, because of the number of black homes that were firebombed.

[Unsolved and overlooked murders: Investigating cold cases of the civil rights era]

The 16th Street Baptist Church was a prominent meeting place for civil rights leaders. It was apparently targeted by the Klan after a federal court order mandated the integration of public schools in Alabama, which had resisted the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education. Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace (D), who declared in his inaugural address, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” literally stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963, to block two black students from enrolling.

Two months later on Sept. 15, 1963, at 10:21 a.m., dynamite reduced the church to rubble, mangling cars in the parking lot and stopping clocks.

“It sounded like the whole world was shaking,” recalled the Rev. John Haywood Cross, according to court documents. The dynamite blew plaster off the walls and peeled the face off the image of Jesus in a stained-glass window.

Firemen and ambulance attendants remove a covered body from 16th Street Baptist Church, where an explosion killed four black girls on Sept. 15, 1963. (AP)

The pastor yelled for churchgoers to get out of the building, then went looking for the children in the basement. The explosion had blown a hole in the side of the church so large that he walked through it to get inside the church basement.

After digging about two feet in the rubble, “they found the body of a young girl,” court documents said, and then three others. “The four bodies were found almost in the same location as if they had been thrown on top of each other.”

Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to Wallace: “The blood of our little children is on your hands.”

King also sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS EVER SEEN….”

More than 8,000 people attended the funeral for the girls at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, where King delivered the eulogy.

Within days, police zeroed in on the key figures suspected of planting the dynamite. All four of them were vehement white supremacists, according to the National Park Service account of the crime at the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.

“In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing — Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry and Herman Cash,” the Park Service said.

J. Edgar Hoover, then the director of the FBI, blocked the prosecution and overruled the agents in Birmingham. Despite calls from Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson for prosecution, Hoover refused to make arrests.

Baxley reopened the case in 1971. Six years later, Chambliss was convicted of murder in the death of one of the girls, Denise McNair. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1985 at the age of 81.

In 1993, the case was reopened a second time at the urging of civil rights leaders. Rob Langford, then an FBI agent in Birmingham, and others began sifting through more than 9,000 documents and wiretaps that had been collected in the 1960s by the FBI office in Birmingham.

The investigation led to the arrests of Blanton and Cherry. (Cash, the fourth suspect, died in 1994 without being charged.)

Jones, who was appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997 by President Bill Clinton, connected Blanton to Cherry.

Jones urged the FBI to release more than 9,000 files with evidence and wiretaps, including the “Kitchen-Sink Tape” wiretap of Blanton’s kitchen. An FBI agent had rented an apartment in the Blanton’s house, where the agent installed a listening device in the kitchen wall, according to court documents.

On June 28, 1964, the FBI recorded Blanton telling his wife about making a bomb.

In a packed courtroom in 2001, the jury heard the 37-year-old surveillance tape of Blanton telling his then-wife, Jeanne Blanton, that he’d planned the bombing under a bridge at the Cahaba River, where the Klan’s violent cell met, according to a 2001 Washington Post story.

“What do you need a meeting for?” Jeanne Blanton asked.

“You have to have a meeting to make a bomb,” Thomas Blanton replied.

Blanton was convicted in 2001. Cherry was convicted a year later, in 2002.

A judge had initially ruled that Cherry was not mentally competent to stand trial but reversed himself after doctors concluded Cherry was faking a mental illness.

Jones built the case against Cherry on circumstantial evidence and testimony from family members. He brought in a granddaughter who testified that Cherry once said, “He helped blow up a bunch of n—–s back in Birmingham.”

He also brought in one of Cherry’s ex-wives, who testified against him.

“He bragged about it. Bob told me he didn’t put the bomb together. He said, ‘I lit it,’ ” Willadean Brogdon told reporters on the steps of a Birmingham court in 1999.

After Cherry’s conviction, Jones told reporters: “The people of the state of Alabama proved for the second time in about a year that justice delayed does not have to be justice denied.”

In a tweet last week, Jones called prosecuting the Klansmen “the most important thing I have done.”

Cherry died in prison in 2004. He was 74.

In August 2016, an Alabama parole board refused an early release for Blanton, who was sentenced to life in prison. Now 79, Blanton is the last surviving Klansman responsible for the 16th Street Church bombing.

 

[MASTERBAKER]

Andrew J Cannon To this day, he still doesn't understand that "No," means "No."

Alabama to officially end its scandal-tinged US Senate race

• By The Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Dec 22, 2017, 2:42 PM ET

The Associated Press
FILE- In this Dec. 11, 2017, file photo, U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore speaks at a campaign rally in Midland City, Ala. Moore on Thursday, Dec. 21, pleaded for donations to help him investigate potential election fraud, the same day Alabama officials said they investigated but found nothing improper regarding a TV interview that had raised suspicions. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)more +

• 
  
• Email

Alabama election officials say they will certify Democratic candidate Doug Jones' upset victory over Republican rival Roy Moore next week.

The Alabama Secretary of State announced in a statement Friday that the election results would be finalized next Thursday.

Jones defeated Moore on Dec. 12 to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama in a quarter-century. Moore was besieged by decades-old accusations of sexual misconduct involving teenage girls when he was in his 30s. He has denied the allegations.

Moore has not conceded the race. In a Thursday fundraising letter to his supporters, Moore said he needs donations to investigate what he calls reports of fraud and irregularities in the election.

 

[QueEx]

Footnote:

Jewish attorney for Roy Moore's son says he campaigned for Jones

By Eli Watkins, CNN


Roy Moore entered Election Day trying to bat away allegations of anti-Semitism, with his wife Kayla Moore telling the public, "One of our attorneys is a Jew."

That closing message was not enough to swing the race for the Republican Alabama Senate hopeful, and a day before his Democratic opponent Doug Jones was due to be sworn in, reports said a Jewish attorney who represented Moore's son in a 2016 case had backed Jones, raised money for him and has been friends with him going back for years.

Richard Jaffe told CNN on Tuesday evening he did not know who Kayla Moore was talking about when she mentioned a Jewish attorney. He described a Washington Post story about his friendship with Jones as "very accurate" and said he had arrived in Washington Tuesday night and planned to go to the Jones' swearing-in ceremony scheduled for Wednesday.


"I've never represented either Judge Moore or Kayla and do not know if the campaign has a Jewish lawyer," Jaffe told CNN. "I don't know who she was referring to."


https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/01/03/politics/roy-moore-doug-jones/index.html

.​

 

[playahaitian]

good riddence

 

[QueEx]

good riddence

Ya think . . .

Roy Moore files lawsuit claiming 'political conspiracy' in Senate race

Roy Moore, the former judge who lost his Senate bid in Alabama late last year after several women accused him of sexual misconduct when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers, filed a lawsuit on Monday against three of those women.

The suit claims he was the target of a political conspiracy meant to derail his campaign, with additional counts of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and outrage. Moore has denied the allegations and said during a press conference he "never knew" his accusers. The attorney for one of the defendants, Leigh Corfman, dismissed Moore's claims and said his client is "no longer a teenager and is not going to let Mr. Moore victimize her again."

Source: AL.com

.

 

[playahaitian]

Ya think . . .

Roy Moore files lawsuit claiming 'political conspiracy' in Senate race

Roy Moore, the former judge who lost his Senate bid in Alabama late last year after several women accused him of sexual misconduct when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers, filed a lawsuit on Monday against three of those women.

The suit claims he was the target of a political conspiracy meant to derail his campaign, with additional counts of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and outrage. Moore has denied the allegations and said during a press conference he "never knew" his accusers. The attorney for one of the defendants, Leigh Corfman, dismissed Moore's claims and said his client is "no longer a teenager and is not going to let Mr. Moore victimize her again."

Source: AL.com

.

It never freaking ends

 

[Politic Negro]

Jury: Democratic PAC defamed Roy Moore, awards him $8.2M

Republican Roy Moore of Alabama has won a defamation lawsuit against a Democratic-aligned super PAC over campaign ads dating to his failed 2017 Senate bid.

apnews.com