Jones: 'I'm overwhelmed'2:57

(Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Post; photo: Getty Images)

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VOTE		%
Jones (D)	670,551	49.9%
Moore (R)	649,240	48.4%
Total Write-Ins	22,777	1.7%

100.0% reporting

2016 win:

 

Trump (R)

Jones wins in Democratic upset, but Moore refuses to concede

In a surprising flip of a solidly Republican state, Doug Jones became the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama since 1992 in a victory that showed the increasing power of sexual misconduct allegations and the limits of President Trump’s political influence. Roy Moore told his supporters “it’s not over” and suggested that the race might go to a recount, but the Alabama Republican Party said it would not support his push for one.

• The race captivated the nation, not only for its debates over party loyalty and morality, but also for its immense implications for both parties and the Trump presidency.

Democrats are jubilant — and newly confident about 2018 — as they win on Trump’s turf

After more than a year of partywide bickering in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, Democrats found solace in a stunning feat — beating a Trump-style Republican in one of the most ruby-red states in the nation.

Jones’s victory scrambles the GOP congressional agenda

The Democrat’s surprising victory gives Senate Republicans an even thinner margin entering the second year of Trump’s presidency.

Moore’s loss is a devastating blow for Republicans and a humiliating defeat for Trump

This race seemed to bring together much of what is in the forefront of the political debates, from the influence of the president to the fractured Republican Party to the issue of sexual harassment. For Republicans, it was a bad night, no matter how it was measured. The question is where do they go now.

Trump attack on Gillibrand criticized as sexually suggestive and demeaning

The White House disputed the characterization of the president’s tweet as sexually demeaning. But Democratic calls increased for congressional investigations or Trump’s resignation.

After what seems like years, the Alabama special election is over. The race to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Senate featured votes spanning nearly four full months, with one bizarre turn after another, and ended Tuesday night with Democrat Doug Jones pulling off the upset over Republican Roy Moore, who faced allegations that he had sexually harassed and assaulted teenage girls while he was in his 30s.

Leigh Corfman, left, in a photo from 1979, when she was about 14. At right, from top, Wendy Miller around age 16, Debbie Wesson Gibson around age 17 and Gloria Thacker Deason around age 18. (Family photos)

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Let's break down the whole thing via winners and losers.

WINNERS

Democrats’ Senate majority hopes

At the start of the cycle, the math for Democrats winning the Senate majority in 2018 — even in a very good environment — appeared prohibitive. They had only two bona fide pickup opportunities, they needed three pickups, and they had to defend 10 swing and red states that President Trump won. The map was just brutal.

But since then, they’ve gotten the news they need to at least put the Senate in play. Potential takeovers in Arizona and Nevada look increasingly promising. An open seat has popped up in Tennessee, where last week Democrats landed popular former governor Phil Bredesen as a candidate, and now they've nabbed one of the three pickups they needed a year early in Alabama. The math is still tough, but it’s clearly within the realm of possibility now. And with Democrats claiming a double-digit lead on the generic ballot, things are very much looking up.

A Suburban Shellacking

Voters in Alabama’s cities and most affluent suburbs overwhelmingly rejected Mr. Moore’s candidacy, an ominous sign for Republicans on the ballot next year in upscale districts. In Jefferson County, which includes Birmingham and some of the state’s wealthiest enclaves, Mr. Jones, the Democratic candidate, captured more than 68 percent of the vote. And in Madison County, home to Huntsville and a large NASA facility, Mr. Jones won 57 percent of the vote.

While these Alabamians, many of them women, may have been appalled by the claims of sexual misconduct against Mr. Moore, results like these were not isolated to this race. They mirrored returns in last month’s statewide and legislative races in Virginia, a state filled with well-heeled suburbanites.

The #MeToo movement

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Jones’s win has to be a shot in the arm for the #MeToo movement. A year after sexual harassment accusations failed to bring down Trump, they were able to stop a Republican in a dark-red state. Moore certainly had other problems, but this has to embolden other women who might be considering sharing their stories. At the very least, it shows they can have a real impact.

African American turnout

Perhaps the biggest story line heading into Election Day was whether enough black voters would turn out to vote for Jones. Given how racially polarized Alabama is, Jones could only count on so many votes from white Alabamians, who usually go about 4 to 1 or more for the GOP....Well, black voters turned out — in about the same numbers they did for Obama in 2008 and 2012, in fact. ... The big question is whether this was because conservative-leaning white voters were turned off by the allegations against Moore and stayed home, or because efforts to turn out black voters were just that successful. Even if it was a mix, though, black voters gave Jones the shot he needed.

Roy Moore, who has staunchly denied claims of sexual misconduct, has long been a popular figure in Alabama, and a divisive one. CreditBrynn Anderson/Associated Press

Roy Moore's spokesman Ted Crockett (right) went on CNN Tuesday night and told Jake Tapper (left) that the candidate 'probably' thought homosexual conduct was a crime

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5172839/Alabama-Senate-race-close-call.html#ixzz518Q3cqDc
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LOSERS

Trump

Trump stuck his neck out by backing Moore even when other members of the GOP establishment wouldn’t, apparently believing that Moore had regained momentum.

Bannon and Moore during a campaign rally, Dec. 5.

Photographer: Nicole Craine/Bloomberg

Stephen Bannon

The former Trump adviser backed Moore even when Trump was behind Strange, and he carefully guided Moore through the accusations. As Bannon biographer Joshua Green wrote for Bloomberg News, Bannon was instrumental in avoiding a conservative-media backlash against Moore, which might have been fatal.

In the end, though, Bannon was just prolonging the inevitable. And for a man who fashions himself a kingmaker for insurgent GOP candidates, having your chosen candidate lose in Alabama is pretty darn bad. Establishment Republicans were only too happy Tuesday night to blame Bannon for the loss of a really important Senate seat.

But Mr. Moore’s allies placed the blame for the loss on Mr. McConnell, who withdrew his support after the allegations first emerged that Mr. Moore had pursued teenage girls sexually or romantically.

“They colluded with the Democrats to undermine a pro-Trump candidate like Judge Moore just like they are going to try to do that in 2018 to myself and other pro-Trump candidates,” said Corey Stewart, who is challenging Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia... Mr. Moore’s loss will only exacerbate tensions between Senate leaders and the party’s grass-roots and will probably play out in a series of House and Senate primaries in 2018. And if Republicans continue to nominate candidates who are too controversial to win general elections, the party’s internal divisions may cost them control of Congress.

Senate Republicans

As The Post’s Paul Kane astutely pointed out Tuesday morning, either result in the election would be difficult to call a victory for Senate Republicans. Losing the seat would mean their majority was narrowed by half and more imperiled come 2018, but winning it would mean they had to deal with Moore. And even before the sexual allegations, that was something Senate Republicans really preferred not to do, given Moore's uniquely extreme politics and penchant for fashioning himself a martyr. Layer on top of that the fact that Republicans said they'd call for an ethics investigation and even, in some cases, Moore's expulsion, and having Moore in the Senate might have been a bigger headache than adding a Democrat.

[But] next year, they may have an even tougher time passing party-line legislation. And maverick members of their fragile majority — like Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Bob Corker of Tennessee — could have a far stronger hand in the chamber.

Mr. Jones in 2002, when he was the United States attorney in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case.CreditDave Martin/Associated Press

Doug Jones: A Lawyer in the Thick of Alabama’s Big Moment.

Before the special election on Tuesday, the largest of Mr. Jones’s historical moments, and perhaps still the most consequential, were the successful prosecutions of two of the Klansmen involved in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, nearly 40 years after the crime. Mr. Jones served as lead prosecutor.

THE GREAT HOAX OF 2016 (IF ONLY)

NY TIMES, JONATHAN LETHEM

BUNK 

The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News 

By Kevin Young 

Illustrated. 560 pp. Graywolf Press. $30.

In Mr. Schiff’s social studies classroom, at LaGuardia High School in 1978, certain striking terms seemed quarantined firmly in a benighted American past. “Yellow journalism,” for instance, was the story of how William Randolph Hearst tricked us into the Spanish-American War. “Trusts” were something Teddy Roosevelt heroically Trust-Busted, from that time before the need for regulation of monopolies had been recognized. We pitied those earlier Americans unworldly enough to be at the mercy of unscrupulous barons of print and commerce; by the time we’d come along those quaint evils had been decanted into nothing more harmful than boring multiple-choice quizzes on sublimely scented mimeograph paper.

Thank goodness we got all that cleared up.

Kevin Young, the author of the National Book Award finalist “Jelly Roll: A Blues,” among many other works, is a poet of extraordinary dynamism and erudition, whose flair for intricate cultural reference is tempered by his distrust of postmodernism’s risk of blurring provenances and voiding ethical obligations. He also works as the director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and his scrupulous feel for archival traces — for the urgent materiality of memory — is one of the superpowers he brings to both his poems and nonfiction. The newest example is “Bunk,” Young’s enthralling and essential new study of our collective American love affair with pernicious and intractable moonshine.

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Kevin Young at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. CreditBrad Ogbonna for The New York Times

Though, it may raise an eyebrow or two. In the age of global warming and election-hacking, do we really need a deep-dive rehash of hoaxes as thin and appalling as JT Leroy, the faked Hitler diaries and Stephen Glass? In a looping, free-associative style, Young revisits these rubbernecking scandals, as well as others as forgotten or unknown to many younger readers as Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird,” Frederic Prokosch’s “butterfly books” and Clifford Irving’s bogus Howard Hughes as-told-to autobiography.

In Young’s thesis,...“The hoax is almost always a trick disguised as a wish. … The real revelation may be just whose wish it is.”

It was Young’s deployment of the old-fashioned terms “bunk,” “humbug,” “charlatan,” “malarkey” and “balderdash” that drew me back to the complacencies of Mr. Schiff’s social studies classroom. Yet Young’s project is the opposite of an attempt to flatter the contemporary reader on her comfortable superiority. It represents instead a deliberate and even violent confrontation with our determination to locate a susceptibility to bunk elsewhere, whether in the deplorable past or merely in the deplorable other. “Bunk” is a brief against what Young calls “cultural Alzheimer’s”: “We quickly erase hoaxes once exposed, excising the monstrous palimpsest, because as with any witch hunt or obvious fake, afterward we can’t quite explain why we ever believed the outrageous thing in the first place. The resulting de-hoaxing leads to outrage. For the hoax reminds us, uncomfortably, that the stories we tell don’t just express the society of the self, they construct it.”

In other words, our eye-rolling ... at James Frey and Pizzagate is itself a blind to our need to understand what they have to do not only with each other, but with ourselves: “Hoaxes are both overexposed and underexplored.” What Young finds unsatisfying isn’t that we fall for bunk, but that we’re so ready to congratulate ourselves for seeing through it afterward, leaving the deeper implications on the table, like the unbearable continuities between P.T. Barnum’s “racial grotesques” and the phony black inmate conjured up in James Frey’s imaginary jail experience: “He calls himself Porterhouse because he says he’s big and juicy like a fine ass steak.”

Young takes his lead from James Baldwin (“It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”). Though Young’s argument is winding, his tone at times eccentric or amused, by the time Young brings in Susan Smith (the South Carolina woman who in 1994 blamed the disappearance of her children, whom she’d murdered, on an imaginary black carjacker), Rachel Dolezal and our own Age of Euphemism (Young’s term for our dog-whistling disjunctions from the facts), his indictment is overwhelming. Again and again, Young plumbs the undercurrents of a hoax to discover lurking inside the figure of a mischaracterized racial other. Sympathy stolen on behalf of imaginary sufferers is stolen from real ones; phony monsters divert us from real ones. The hoax is like an art that dulls our sense of reality, rather than sharpening it. For Young, these aren’t victimless crimes: “There is of course no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.”

Young also writes as an appalled citizen-witness to the November 2016 election, in which 63 million pulled the lever for a con man. A less jubilant Barnum, Donald Trump is also himself a fictional character: a television billionaire and tabloid playboy, a tissue-thin confabulation of theatricalized cultural resentments, like “All in the Family”’s so-wrong-you-can’t-deny-I’m-right Archie Bunker.

The delight with which Archie Bunker was sentimentally enshrined in our culture made it clear the bigotry he parroted still thrived, in a twilight realm where untruths not only live on past exposure, but develop an uncanny power stronger than mere facts. If Bunker was a Frankenstein creature, who arose from his liberal creator’s writing desk to engulf his context, so Trump is a nightmare uprising of an unstable and potent vein of American unreality, called forth by more than a century’s indulgence of dreams of exceptionalism, privilege and demonizing nativism. These delusions are buoyed up not only by cultivated fear (paging Fox News) but also by yearning for revenge against implicit calls for social justice and historical reparations. Like the greatest of hoaxes, so-called fake news does better than resist shaming by logic and moral reasoning. It engulfs and devours the very expertise it rejects, partly through a mocking air....In Kevin Young’s implacable formulation, then, “the Trump era” is a hoax, the ultimate howler, one we’re fated to live (or die) inside.

The Silence Breakers’ Named Time’s Person of the Year for 2017

The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, made the announcement on NBC’s Today show on Wednesday, citing "the galvanizing actions of the women on our cover.” Those women featured on the cover include actress Ashley Judd, singer Taylor Swift, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, Visa lobbyist Adama Iwu, Mexican agricultural worker Isabel Pascual, and one woman whose face cannot be seen.

The anonymous woman featured on the cover ... is a young hospital worker from “the middle of the country” who fears the repercussions if she comes forward with her story of sexual harassment, its editor in chief said. Dedicated to “the silence-breakers", the magazine decided to champion the women and men who have come forward to accuse powerful figures, including former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, of sexual misconduct.

TIME

Over the course of six weeks, TIME interviewed dozens of people representing at least as many industries, all of whom had summoned extraordinary personal courage to speak out about sexual harassment at their jobs. They often had eerily similar stories to share.

In almost every case, they described not only the vulgarity of the harassment itself—years of lewd comments, forced kisses, opportunistic gropes—but also the emotional and psychological fallout from those advances. Almost everybody described wrestling with a palpable sense of shame. Had she somehow asked for it? Could she have deflected it? Was she making a big deal out of nothing?

"I thought, What just happened? Why didn't I react?" says the anonymous hospital worker who fears for her family's livelihood should her story come out in her small community. "I kept thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.?" It's a poisonous, useless thought, she adds, but how do you avoid it? She remembers the shirt she was wearing that day. She can still feel the heat of her harasser's hands on her body.

Nearly all of the people TIME interviewed about their experiences expressed a crushing fear of what would happen to them personally, to their families or to their jobs if they spoke up.

For some, the fear was born of a threat of physical violence. Pascual felt trapped and terrified when her harasser began to stalk her at home, but felt she was powerless to stop him. If she told anyone, the abuser warned her, he would come after her or her children.

Those who are often most vulnerable in society—immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income workers and LGBTQ people—described many types of dread. If they raised their voices, would they be fired? Would their communities turn against them? Would they be killed? According to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 47% of transgender people report being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, both in and out of the workplace.

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Other women, like the actor Selma Blair, weathered excruciating threats. Blair says she arrived at a hotel restaurant for a meeting with the independent film director James Toback in 1999 only to be told that he would like to see her in his room. There, she says, Toback told her that she had to learn to be more vulnerable in her craft and asked her to strip down. She took her top off. She says he then propositioned her for sex, and when she refused, he blocked the door and forced her to watch him masturbate against her leg. Afterward, she recalls him telling her that if she said anything, he would stab her eyes out with a Bic pen and throw her in the Hudson River.

Blair says Toback lorded the encounter over her for decades. "I had heard from others that he was slandering me, saying these sexual things about me, and it just made me even more afraid of him," Blair says in an interview with TIME. "I genuinely thought for almost 20 years, He's going to kill me." ( Toback has denied the allegations, saying he never met his accusers or doesn't remember them.)

Many of the people who have come forward also mentioned a different fear, one less visceral but no less real, as a reason for not speaking out: if you do, your complaint becomes your identity. "'Susan Fowler, the famous victim of sexual harassment,'" says the woman whose blog post ultimately led Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign and the multibillion-dollar startup to oust at least 20 other employees. "Nobody wants to be the buzzkill," adds Lindsey Reynolds, one of the women who blew the whistle on a culture of harassment at the restaurant group run by the celebrity chef John Besh. (The Besh Group says it is implementing new policies to create a culture of respect. Besh apologized for "unacceptable behavior" and "moral failings," and resigned from the company. )

Iwu, the lobbyist, says she considered the same risks after she was groped in front of several colleagues at an event. She was shocked when none of her male co-workers stepped in to stop the assault. The next week, she organized 147 women to sign an open letter exposing harassment in California government. When she told people about the campaign, she says they were wary. "Are you sure you want to do this?" they warned her. "Remember Anita Hill."

Taylor Swift says she was made to feel bad about the consequences that her harasser faced. After she complained about a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who reached under her skirt and grabbed her rear end, Mueller was fired. He sued Swift for millions in damages. She countersued for a symbolic $1 and then testified about the incident in August. Mueller's lawyer asked her, on the witness stand, whether she felt bad that she'd gotten him fired.

"I'm not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault," she told the lawyer. "I'm being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions. Not mine." (Mueller said he would appeal.)

In an interview with TIME, Swift says that moment on the stand fueled her indignation. "I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances," she says, "imagine what he might do to a vulnerable, young artist if given the chance." Like the five women gathered at that echoing soundstage in San Francisco, and like all of the dozens, then hundreds, then millions of women who came forward with their own stories of harassment, she was done feeling intimidated. Actors and writers and journalists and dishwashers and fruit pickers alike: they'd had enough. What had manifested as shame exploded into outrage. Fear became fury.

Read more at TIME

Tarana Burke, the woman who realized the power of the simple words “Me Too,” marched with others in Los Angeles in November. CreditLucy Nicholson/Reuters

NY TIMES

First it was a story. Then a moment. Now, two months after women began to come forward in droves to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment and assault, it is a movement.

Time magazine has named “the silence breakers” its person of the year for 2017, referring to those women, and the global conversation they have started.

The magazine’s editor in chief, Edward Felsenthal, said in an interview on the “Today” show on Wednesday that the #MeToo movement represented the “fastest-moving social change we’ve seen in decades, and it began with individual acts of courage by women and some men too.”

Investigations published in October by The New York Times and The New Yorker, [detailed] multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein.

It is a testament to the size of the movement that the set of “Today” itself, where the announcement was made, had recently been the site of such a reckoning. Matt Lauer, one of NBC’s most well-known personalities for decades, was fired only last week after an allegation of sexual harassment from a subordinate. Other complaints soon followed.

And of course, Time’s 2017 runner-up for person of the year, Donald J. Trump, was accused during his presidential campaign by more than 10 women of sexual misconduct, from unwanted touching to sexual assault.

Those accusations did not stop Mr. Trump from being named person of the year in 2016. And Mr. Trump inadvertently promoted this year’s announcement, tweeting that he had been told he would “probably” be chosen again and claiming to have turned down the honor. Time quickly released a statement saying that the president was incorrect.

Senate GOP tax bill passes in major victory for Trump, Republicans.

All but 1 Republican backed the bill that bestows massive benefits on corporate America.

The GOP succeeded where it failed earlier this year, when efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed. The most recent review of the bill by Congress’s nonpartisan tax analysts found that only 44 percent of taxpayers would see their burden reduced by more than $500 in 2019 but that high earners would fare much better than the poor.

Senate Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax bill early Saturday morning that bestows massive benefits on corporate America and the wealthy while delivering mixed blessings to everybody else.

After a frantic round of negotiations, Republicans came together in near unanimity behind the landmark legislation. The final vote was 51 to 49, with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) the lone GOP holdout. No Democrats voted for the bill.

The measure still has to be reconciled with an earlier House-passed version before being sent to President Trump. Yet in getting the bill through the Senate, Republicans succeeded where they failed earlier this year, when their efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed in mortifying fashion.

• Lawmakers received a nearly 500-page bill containing significant changes just hours before a planned vote, prompting an outcry from Democrats.

The party criticized the growth of the deficit under President Barack Obama, but this tax cut would send it to new heights.

The GOP is trying to pass a super-unpopular agenda — and that's a bad sign for democracy

VOX, JACOB HACKER & PAUL PIERSON

Really Strong Economy’

By BEN CASSELMAN 10:32 AM ET

• The Labor Department released its official hiring and unemployment figures for November, reporting that 228,000 jobs were added.
• The American job market is the strongest it’s been in a decade, and arguably the strongest since 2000.
• NY TIMES