Last Call For The War Of Republican Aggression

Meanwhile, in genteel Georgia...

A Georgia Republican lawmaker warned a Democratic former colleague who criticized his support for Civil War monuments on Facebook that she won’t be “met with torches but something a lot more definitive” if she continues to call for the removal of statues in south Georgia.

State Rep. Jason Spencer, a Woodbine Republican, also wrote former state Rep. LaDawn Jones that “people in South Georgia are people of action, not drama” and suggested some who don’t understand that “will go missing in the Okefenokee.”

“Too many necks they are red around here,” he wrote. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you about ’em.”

Jones, who represented an Atlanta-based district from 2012 to 2016, responded that she saw his remarks as a “threat of physical violence” but said she was confident that future generations will abandon a “we are better than them” mentality.

“Enjoy but know … WINTER IS COMING,” wrote Jones, who is black. “You know it too … otherwise you wouldn’t have found a need to even make this post or those hollow threats of not coming to south GA.”

Spencer said in a text message that his words were not meant as a threat, but instead a “warning to her of how people can behave about this issue.”

“She is from Atlanta – and the rest of Georgia sees this issue very differently,” said Spencer, who was elected in 2010 to represent the southeast Georgia district. “Just trying to keep her safe if she decided to come down and raise hell about the memorial in the back yards of folks who will see this as an unwelcome aggression from the left.”

Spencer also asked that we include a picture he provided of him standing in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. monument that was unveiled Monday on the Georgia Capitol grounds. 

This self-proclaimed redneck asshole (and I'm from NC, I know plenty of rednecks who aren't racist assholes and who are damn good to have in a bar fight) has to rely on a statue of Dr. King for his "But I can't be racist, I have a black friend!" defense.

That's...sad.  Especially by Georgia standards.

But yeah, in the age of Trump?  Jagoffs like this are spoiling for a damn fight.  They want it so badly they can taste it, or rather, they dream of wanting liberals to make the first move so they can cut us down where we stand.

They can try, at least.

The Trumpman Show

As Donald Trump's careening disaster of a regime blunders through the days and weeks, with his approval ratings dropping into the 30's headed for irrelevance, his campaign rallies aren't drawing the kinds of crowds he's used to.  Nobody's angrier about that than the Donald himself, who has already fired his chief rally organizer for failure to find enough people to fill the Phoenix Convention Center last week and sate his boundless ego.

Donald Trump was in a bad mood before he emerged for a confrontational speech in Arizona last week.

TV and social media coverage showed that the site of his campaign rally, the Phoenix Convention Center, was less than full. Backstage, waiting in a room with a television monitor, Trump was displeased, one person familiar with the incident said: TV optics and crowd sizes are extremely important to the president.

As his surrogates warmed up the audience, the expanse of shiny concrete eventually filled in with cheering Trump fans. But it was too late for a longtime Trump aide, George Gigicos, the former White House director of advance who had organized the event as a contractor to the Republican National Committee. Trump later had his top security aide, Keith Schiller, inform Gigicos that he’d never manage a Trump rally again, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Gigicos, one of the four longest-serving political aides to the president, declined to comment.

Even by his standards, Trump was remarkably strident in Phoenix. After introductory speakers, including Vice President Mike Pence, lauded him for his commitment to racial harmony, the president came on stage and lambasted the media for what he called inaccurate reporting on his remarks about violence between hate groups and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He threatened to shut down the federal government unless Congress funds construction of the Mexican border wall he promised in his campaign. He telegraphed that he’d pardon former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted of defying a court order to stop racial profiling by his deputies. And in their home state, he assailed Arizona Senator John McCain for the failure of Obamacare repeal and Senator Jeff Flake for being "weak" on illegal immigration, without mentioning their names. Both are fellow Republicans.

Gigicos had staged the event in a large multipurpose room. The main floor space was bisected by a dividing wall, leaving part of the space empty. There were some bleachers off to the side, but otherwise the audience was standing -- and the scene appeared flat, lacking the energy and enthusiasm of other rallies.

If you had any doubt about the fragility of Trump's ego, his clinical narcissism, his constant need for approval and adoration, and above all his lack of fitness for the Oval Office, well those doubts should have been buried months ago.  This is just the latest example of such clear malfeasance that it's head-spinning, we've seen case after case of this and we have for 18 months.

But America elected him anyway.

We have much lager problems in this country than Trump.  He's the symptom.  The real problem remains the tens of millions of us who thought he was was qualified enough to vote for.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Yesterday we talked about Trump's deal to put a Trump Tower in Moscow during the early stages of his campaign and how Felix Sater, the point man on that project, was definitely under scrutiny by investigators.  Turns out Sater's emails on the project were far, far more incriminating than originally thought.

A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency. 

The business associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin and predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would be a political boon to Mr. Trump’s candidacy. 

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

They're not even good at this.

In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting in Moscow. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote.

Mr. Cohen suggested that Mr. Sater’s comments were puffery. “He has sometimes used colorful language and has been prone to “salesmanship,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement. “I ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.” 

The Times reported earlier this year on the plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow, which never materialized. On Sunday, The Washington Post reported the existence of the correspondence between Mr. Sater and Mr. Cohen but not its content. 

The Trump Organization on Monday turned over emails to the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian meddling in the presidential election and whether anyone in Mr. Trump’s campaign was involved. Some of the emails were obtained by The Times. 

The Trump Organization issued a statement Monday saying: “To be clear, the Trump Organization has never had any real estate holdings or interests in Russia.”

Except that's a lie, we know for a fact Trump did have Russian interests.  I mean at this point they're not even trying anymore.  They're completely busted.  No wonder then that the GOP is now openly calling to end the Trump/Russia investigation.

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) is pushing an amendment to severely curtail special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

DeSantis has put forward a provision that would halt funding for Mueller’s probe six months after the amendment’s passage. It also would prohibit Mueller from investigating matters that occurred before June 2015, when Trump launched his presidential campaign.

The amendment is one of hundreds filed to a government spending package the House is expected to consider when it returns next week from the August recess. The provision is not guaranteed a vote on the House floor; the House Rules Committee has wide leeway to discard amendments it considers out of order.

In a statement, DeSantis said the order appointing Mueller as special counsel "didn't identify a crime to be investigated and practically invites a fishing expedition."

"Congress should use its spending power to clarify the scope and limit the duration of this investigation," he explained. Deputy Attorney General Rod "Rosenstein has said that the DOJ doesn't conduct fishing expeditions; the corollary to this admonition should be that Congress will not fund a fishing expedition."

The clock keeps ticking and the GOP is terrified.  Trump's "presidency" is coming apart at the seams and now we're heading into the phase of the game where the Republicans can't allow Mueller to continue his investigation or Trump brings the entire party down with him.  Why? Because we've reached the point now where Trump himself is under investigation.

Federal investigators working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller are keenly focused on President Donald Trump's role in crafting a response to a published article about a meeting between Russians and his son Donald Jr., three sources familiar with the matter told NBC News. 

The sources told NBC News that prosecutors want to know what Trump knew about the meeting and whether he sought to conceal its purpose. 

The meeting occurred at Trump Tower in June 2016 and was attended by Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. The meeting, which was first reported by The New York Times, also involved Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya and former Soviet intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin. 

At the time, the White House confirmed that Trump had "weighed in" as the response to the Times report was drafted aboard Air Force One on July 8 as the president returned to the U.S. from the G20 meeting in Germany. The Washington Post reported that Trump had "dictated" the response.

Stay tuned.  The end of the beginning is over, but after Sater's emails, and news that Mueller is looking into possible obstruction of justice by Trump himself, things will start to move more quickly. We're going to soon come to the choice where the GOP will either act on Trump's perfidy or not, and it will affect the fate of America for generations.

I see nothing to make me think they will make the right choice.

StupidiNews!

• Another 20 inches of rain could fall on Houston, up to 40 inches have already fallen as Tropical Storm Harvey has drifted back over the Gulf and could make a second landfall today.
• Two are dead and four more injured as a gunman opened fire at a public library in Clovis, New Mexico Monday, police have the suspect in custody but no motive yet.
• North Korea has fired a ballistic missile over Japan into the Pacific Monday, the US, Japan, and South Korea are demanding an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.
• Amazon's purchase of upscale grocery chain Whole Foods has meant big price cuts at the register, some items have seen price cuts by up to 43% from last week.
• Tech investor Peter Thiel is under fire for funding herpes vaccine human trials in the Caribbean that never would have received FDA approval in the US for ethical reasons.