The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — If special counsel Robert Mueller can issue 14 indictments against Russians who conspired to mess with an election in the United States who he will never actually be able to drag into court and jail, why can’t he indict the top man who obviously is in league with the Russian mob and intelligence services who sometimes resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Putin’s Trump: New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon

Illegitimate President Donald J. Trump should be the key defendant in this case, yet the FBI, the Justice Department (still led by Alabama’s Jeff Sessions who worked fervently on Trump’s presidential campaign), along with the U.S. news media, and yes Facebook and Twitter, are still equivocating on whether Trump himself, his family, his campaign surrogates conspired to fix the election with social media propaganda and so-called “fake news.”

Is this indictment just a pretext to a larger case of collusion and obstruction of justice Mueller is working on making against the president of the United States? Or is it the beginnings of a cover up to show that Russia tried to interfere in the election but maybe failed to alter the outcome and detail how social media was manipulated, leaving the president unscathed?

Would it be such a dramatic constitutional crisis for the president to be indicted, arrested and charged, convicted in a public show trial and removed from office and jailed that we have to tip toe around the obvious? Is this a question of timing? Do we have to endure three more years of Trump’s idiotic tweets and crazy statements in this real world reality show that won’t go away because it is on every channel 24-hours a day, seven days a week?

What is the calculus for democracy? Would it be safer to get this over with as quickly as possible so we could get back to tackling our very real economic, environmental and social problems? Or do we have to tread carefully so as not to tear to shreds our constitutional system by overthrowing a president who was elected, albeit with the help of not just Russian bots, but real people working for the Internet Research Agency, which is being described as a troll farm based in St. Petersburg, Russia. It used bogus social media postings and advertisements fraudulently purchased in the name of Americans to “try to influence” the White House race, according to every news outlet in the land.

Facebook and Twitter both issued statements defending themselves, as did the president, and experts were quoted saying it would be hard to fix the problems of social media, basically because of the intractable problem of a capitalist publicly traded company needing to sell advertising to please its share holders while also trying to protect readers (which of course they call “users” to avoid any responsibility for the problems their platforms cause).

Meanwhile we all remain glued to our computer and TV screens riveted by all the latest news about these things, unable to bring ourselves to logoff and hit the off button. Let me suggest that there are other stories we might pay attention to, and not just the latest mass school shooting.

There are some stories out there suggesting that political activist groups in the U.S. are now studying the Russian tactics to see how they might also influence elections, maybe even in a good way? Now there’s something to write home about.

Boon-Docking in Birmingham

For those of you who follow my writing closely, you might notice that I am boon-docking in a free campsite in my old home town this Sunday morning after making the trip up from Mobile to begin our coverage this year of the political campaigns going on in my native state, Alabama. While we have spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. covering national stories and politics over the past four years, this year we will be spending more time in Alabama and Birmingham for reasons that will become obvious over the next few weeks.

I have noticed a trend developing that I have waited to see for many years. That is, good people deciding it’s time to stop sitting on the sidelines and criticizing all the corruption in politics and making the leap of faith into the fray to get involved by running for public office.

It’s sort of too bad it took the illegitimate election of Trump to get people concerned enough to get off the bench and become involved. But that’s where we are.

Clearly the election of Doug Jones as the first Democrat from Alabama to win a race for a seat in the U.S. Senate in a quarter century has also opened some eyes and helped people see what is possible.

Doug Jones Wins Historic Senate Election Over Defiant Judge Roy Moore

This past week, I had the opportunity to meet one of the candidates running in the statewide race for attorney general in Alabama. You can see my story about that here.

Chris Christie Runs for Attorney General to Make Alabama Great in Government, Not Just Football

We hope to feature more candidates in the weeks ahead as time and resources make it possible. As the experts are all saying, we need more engagement from readers and suggestions for subjects and candidates to cover. But we also need more reader contributions and candidate ads to make this possible.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your support. We can change the world for the better if we all stick together, all those of us who want to make democracy work anyway. This is not necessarily a partisan thing. It’s just that so far only one side is participating in trying to solve problems while the other side just seems content to get elected by bashing government and saying problems can’t be solved by governing.