The Scary Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s the season for scary things, and nowhere are things more scary for democracy and the planet than here in the nation’s capital.

In case you missed it because the Facebook news feed algorithm is hiding it from you, or none of your friends are sharing it, David Corn with Mother Jones is scaring people here by claiming that West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has a diabolical plan to leave the Democratic Party if he doesn’t get his way to gut the bill under consideration to tackle climate change.

Corn claims Manchin is demanding that President Joe Biden and Democrats on Capitol Hill cut the size of the social infrastructure bill from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion — or else. What he doesn’t tell you is something already reported by The Intercept, that Manchin made his fortune reselling dirty coal and is fighting to keep billions in federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and denying incentives for green alternatives.

If ever there was a classic case of Congressional corruption, this is it.

Some Democrats may just say “good riddance” to Manchin since he’s acting more like a Republican than a Democrat anyway. But keep in mind that if he left the party now, the Democrats would no longer hold a slim majority of 50-50 in the Senate by virtue of the fact that the Vice President is a Democrat and could vote to break any ties.

Keep in mind Manchin allegedly is not threatening to switch parties to become a Republican. The story claims he has told insiders that he would become an “American Independent,” which harkens back to the days of George Wallace when he ran for president and carried five states in the presidential election of 1968.

For all those of us who have been writing about global warming for many years, and sounding the alarm on the need to fight climate change before it’s too late, this is a scary scenario. It means Biden will show up in Scotland on Halloween, Oct. 31, with no new bill in hand to show the United States is all in on the battle to save the planet.

The longer we wait, the worse it will get. Do the voters in West Virginia care? Or do they really like working in dirty coal mines that much? Where are the environmentalists in West Virginia putting pressure on Manchin to get off what he calls his “houseboat” for the folks back home, which is really a yacht, to vote with the president and the Democrats to do the right thing?

Scary at Justice

It’s also a scary time at the U.S. Department of Justice, where many Democrats, including federal judges, are wondering why all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists seem to be getting off with such light sentences?

Readers may recall that U.S. Senator Doug Jones of Alabama was considered for the post of Attorney General after losing his reelection bid in 2020 to “the coach” Tommy Tuberville, who is also spending a fair amount of time hanging out with Manchin drinking beer on his boat, according to a recent puff piece by The Washington Post.

In the end, Biden picked federal judge Merrick Garland who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Obama, but never got a confirmation hearing in the Senate thanks to the blocking purple hand of Mitch McConnell.

Garland finally showed up in public last week to testify before the House Judiciary Committee and deflected questions about whether the Justice Department is investigating legal violations by former President Donald Trump and about the reach of the ongoing probe into the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6.

Garland naively testified that he is laboring to keep the Justice Department out of politics after four years of chaos during the Trump presidency.

“The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy of not commenting on investigations,” Garland said. “I’m going to have to rest on that.”

Tell it to former FBI director James Comey, right?

Democratic lawmakers pushed Garland to defend congressional interests as a criminal contempt of Congress referral for former Trump adviser Steve Bannon makes its way to the Justice Department this week.

Related: Select Committee on Capitol Attack Moves to Hold Trump Adviser Steve Bannon in Criminal Contempt

I’m just wondering where Garland has been for the past few decades, as we watched for years as the Bush Justice Department engaged in a political prosecution of Alabama’s former Governor Don Siegelman.

It’s an admiral goal to keep the Justice Department out of politics, and President Joe Biden has deflected questions about what Garland will do to his independence as AG.

But the historical record shows that the department has been used as a political tool by Democrats and Republicans for decades.

In a book I’m cited in by name in perhaps the key chapter, former New York Times reporter David Burnham put together a detailed analysis of this in Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures
of the U.S. Department of Justice, in which he tells a tale of political woe that will confirm your worst fears about this largest of federal bureaucracies. It’s a definitive account of how politics and chaos has largely dominated this supposedly just department of the federal government for many years.

I’m hearing from a number of Democrats who are questioning the size and strength Garland’s cojones, using a term that rhymes with tushy.

I suppose it would be wrong for the president to invite the AG to the White House for a session in the political woodshed. Maybe he could invite him to the White House Halloween Party and put a bit of a scare into him about the future of democracy.

If Trump and his crowd of violent domestic terrorists are not held accountable, and the tea party-Trump Republicans regain majority power in the House and Senate in 2022, what do you think democracy is going to look like in 2024?

It might be a good idea to keep an eye on what’s going on in DC, and keep working on that exit strategy.

Related: What’s Your Survival Plan if Democrats Can’t Govern and the Trump Republicans Return to Power?

Scary Times at Facebook

With all its scary reach and power, times are scary at Facebook, where the bad publicity just keeps on coming.

In its Saturday email “Playbook,” Politico reports that “A whole bunch of news about Facebook” is about to come out, adding to the trove of documents that revealed the social network’s staffers “repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies before and after the contested November (2020) vote,” but that “the company failed or struggled to address the issues.”

The company has long known that its algorithms push some users to extremist views, according to NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny. In a particularly vivid illustration, a Facebook researcher created an account for a fake person who described herself as a conservative, Christian mother from North Carolina interested in Fox News and DONALD TRUMP. Without expressing any interest in conspiracy theories, within two days of her account’s creation, Facebook’s algorithm recommended she join groups dedicated to QAnon. Within one week, her “feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation.”

The presidential election may have passed without major incident, but in its wake, “angry vitriol and a slew of conspiracy theories” were fomenting, Facebook staff wrote in an internal report on the Stop the Steal movement earlier this year. Supporters perpetuated the lie that the election had been stolen from then-President Donald Trump — a lie that Trump himself had been stoking for months.

NPR: How the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement outwitted Facebook ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection

Recommendation for Democrats

For years I have been trying to educate Democrats on how to use Facebook to counter the lies on Facebook. Some people listen. Most do not.

One Facebook group that had been touting my work recently went south, refusing to share any stories about what’s going on with Steve Bannon, saying those stories just scare people away from voting.

Balderdash!

As I tried to inform an attorney who claims to be interested in winning elections in 2022 in states around the country, who do you think you are up against?

Every Republican running for any significant office around the country, including the current race for governor of Virginia, are on speed dial with Bannon, the brain trust behind this movement to destroy the U.S. government and replace it with a conservative, white, nationalistic authoritarian dictatorship.

Trump’s ravings are mostly incoherent nonsense. But when Trump hired Bannon to join his campaign in August, 2016, Cambridge Analytica was sitting on the largest trove of Facebook data ever collected by an outside group, and they used it to put Trump over the top in November. At that time with Breitbart News, Bannon flooded the zone with anti-Hillary messages, which were also being shared far and wide by Bernie Democrats, even after Bernie Sanders gave in and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.

The more I evaluate what happened back then, the more I’m convinced this made the difference in the campaign and put Trump over the top.

Instead of being careful and limited in what messages Democrats say and share on social media, if they want to win — and save democracy and the planet — they should be sharing the hell out of every real news story they can find to counter Bannon’s negative messages.

Personally, he needs to be cut off at the knees at the very least, locked up in a jail cell for at least a year with no access to a cell phone, email or Twitter. That’s what I told the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection when they asked for tips a few weeks ago, when I shared with them this story about the havoc Bannon is trying to create in states across the country.

Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections

If the Biden administration wants to succeed, they must reconsider how they are using social media. It is past time to flood the zone not just with positive messages about legislation they are trying to pass. They must go after Bannon and Trump with a vengeance, and stop letting them control the message on Facebook.

Look at that NPR story again.

When Garland was trying to deal with Democrats on the committee worried about the Trump insurrection, he was attacked by the Republicans on the right for allegedly sending the FBI into schools and school board meetings to spy on parents and prevent them from having a say in the education of their children. This is the story that is playing out in Virginia right now, and the ads are all over the airwaves about it up here.

Check your Facebook news feed. This is the fake news story that is still dominating the coverage on Facebook. It’s a diversion from the insurrection story, and the prosecution of Bannon and others in collusion with Trump, and it is dominating the news feed.

Clearly Facebook is not going to fix it, worried about more criticism from the right for “censoring” so-called “conservative” points of view.

Only you can fix Facebook — by helping us share the links.

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