Gina Haspel Wanted To Withdraw-- Guess Which Imbecile Didn't Want Her To

Looks like Trumpanzee wants even more chaos and anguish. Sunday afternoon, a team of Washington Post reporters claimed that torture queen Gina Haspel tried to withdraw her nomination to head the CIA. Sensible, considering what's gone on in the past and what's coming in her confirmation hearing. But the fascist regime-- likely either Trumpanzee or Bolton, since no one remotely sane would have-- told Bloody Gina to keep fighting. She's not just a hands on torturer but was also caught destroying evidence of illegal torture for the CIA.

Haspel told the White House she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing on Wednesday and potential damage to the CIA’s reputation and her own, the officials said. She was summoned to the White House on Friday for a meeting on her history in the CIA’s controversial interrogation program-- which employed techniques such as waterboarding that are widely seen as torture-- and signaled that she was going to withdraw her nomination. She then returned to CIA headquarters, the officials said.

Taken aback at her stance, senior White House aides, including legislative affairs head Marc Short and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, rushed to Langley, Va., to meet with Haspel at her office late Friday afternoon. Discussions stretched several hours, officials said, and the White House was not entirely sure she would stick with her nomination until Saturday afternoon, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Trump learned of the drama Friday, calling officials from his trip to Dallas. He decided to push for Haspel to remain as the nominee after initially signaling he would support whatever decision was taken, administration officials said.

...Haspel’s nomination to become the first woman to lead the CIA came close to being scuttled Friday ahead of any hearings-- and largely at her own hand, the U.S. officials said. The problem came to a head Friday afternoon when she was summoned to the White House for some urgent questions, particularly on her role in the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.

She had been in a meeting with her staff at CIA headquarters in Langley, fielding mock questions to prepare for her confirmation hearing, when the summons arrived.

Some White House officials were concerned by material being raised in questions from Congress, information they were just learning about, according to the U.S. officials. Those officials said the material was not revelations that have been unearthed in recent months, but the White House wanted to hear Haspel’s explanation of it.

...Haspel’s chances of winning Senate confirmation are considered uncertain... with some Trump advisers telling the president in recent weeks she was unlikely to be confirmed.

Not really "high respected" and Trumpanzee doesn't need a single Democrat to confirm her

So why would Trump make such a goofy move as to keep her front and center? He loves playing the victim. He lives anything taking his own criminal behavior out of the spotlight. He loves a fight. Do you think he's verifiably insane? Just asking for a friend.

Tuli Kupferberg Died

Tuli, front and center

Roland dragged me to the Nixon Library one time; to him it's like going to see a Pyramid, a Great Wall or a sequoia tree. He's uh... about half my age. And for me it was a tad more emotional. He was mortified and fled unceremoniously when, after waiting patiently on line with the other fine burghers, I very ceremoniously spat on Nixon's grave. (Digby and John reminded me-- and our guests-- the other day that I'm like that. They're still mortified that I screamed out some epithet about Blue Dogs being Wall Street whores at the screen when Michael Moore interviewed Baron Hill, probably because it was the world premiere and we were sitting a few rows behind Moore and Arianna.) Anyway, I have nothing bad to say about George Steinbrenner. I don't follow sports and I have no idea what position he played or how many goals he scored. I just remember he had something to do with the Yankees-- the owner I think-- and that people used to refer to him as the Evil Empire for driving up player salaries into the stratosphere. Oh, yeah-- and that he was indicted on 14 criminal counts in 1974, at the height of the Vietnam War and Nixonian dirty tricks, for illegally funneling a great deal of cash into Richard Nixon's campaign coffers. (Within a day or two of Reagan becoming president, he pardoned him.) Tuesday Steinbrenner died in Tampa of a heart attack, about a week shy of his 80th birthday. Sorry to hear it; rest in peace. Ken did the official-- and appropriate-- DWT obituary last night. Aside from Ken, Matt Taibbi had the best commentary of any I've heard on the passing of Steinbrenner. Hit that link and read his Slobituary, comparing Steinbrenner's passing to Stalin's and Reagan's. Hint: it ends in "Whatever happened to Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead?"

What saddened me was not the wall-to-wall coverage by the mass media. It could have been Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, Michael Jackson, Charlie Manson or Kim Jong-il. But in my little corner of the universe-- among political lefty tweeters-- there was an awful lot about Steinbrenner, a trending topic, and not a word about Tuli Kupferberg.


Tuli died too, Monday night, actually. He wasn't like a celebrity in our celebrity-mad culture. But he did do a lot for our culture. An anti-war poet, a rock musician, a missing link between beatniks and hippies, Tuli and the band he co-founded with Ed Sanders, The Fugs, was the first band I remember writing and performing powerful songs critiquing the Vietnam War and the inevitable corruption of a war-based ruling elite. I saw his band 100 times; I hired them to play the freshman class dance at my college; I got arrested, went to jail, and shared a cell with them in the first big '60s anti-war demonstration. Maybe if more people had listened to him and learned from him instead of wasting their time of tabloid creations of the mass media, we wouldn't be in the catastrophic Afghan War now. Not maybe-- for sure.

Everything's On Hold-- Except Horsing Around

The Senate just wants to put healthcare reform on hold-- sad they can't put people dying for want of healthcare on hold while they ponder their political fates-- instead of just following E.J. Dionne's simple and straight forward, common sense advice:

The notion that they would just shelve health care after all they have put into it -- the message they have gotten across, even if that’s not exactly what they have all been saying-- paints a portrait of a party that, to say the least, lacks persistence and conviction.

...The House would pass a version of the reconciliation bill containing the various amendments and send it to the Senate. The Senate would change it slightly (in ways that the House agreed to), which would require the House to vote on it again. Only after it got the revised reconciliation bill would the House take up the Senate bill. The House could then pass both bills and send both to the president. Problem solved, health-care passes, and we move on.

Simple and straight forward-- and better: expand Medicare and then give the American people what they really want: the 21st Century equivalent of a bread-and-circus gladiatorial heyday against Wall Street, starting with a sacking of their worst agents inside the Administration-- Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. But Obama may have decided to go in the other direction-- just screw the poor people so bad that if Reagan or Bush had done it, there would have been a revolution.

OK, beyond that, I'm putting politics on hold for the rest of the day. Unlike the Senate, I don't do that by passively presiding over the deaths of thousands of struggling Americans who can't afford the extravagence of the Insurance Industry, the Medical Industrial Complex and the banksters. I just lapse into revelry about the glorious past, my own. The funny thing is, I'm reading Seth Jones' excellent first-person book on Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires and it's brought me right back to the late 60s/early 70s and my own sojourns through that more foreign and fascinating of countries. But we're going to save yet another re-telling of "Howie Takes The Hippie Trail To Kabul" for another time and go back a few years earlier. With my first break with shy, I ran for president of the freshman class at college.

When the campaign started I was a shoo-in. Everyone loved me and I was probably promising pizza delivery access to the dorms and popcorn makers in the common areas. But during the campaign I fell in with a bunch of beatnik types who thoroughly radicalized me. By the close of my campaign I was demanding an end to segregation in Alabama, an end to the war in Vietnam, an end to laws against drugs, and an end to any other injustice that came up. I still won... but by about one vote. Part of my radicalization was musical. I booked The Fugs for the freshman class dance.

Most people just loved The Fugs; they had never seen anything like them-- but it was what their parents had warned them about. Bob O'Connor was an upper classman, the captain of some sports team, a frat guy and the de facto leader of the conservative students on campus. He threatened to beat me up for subjecting his girlfriend to "that trash." That interact with O'Connor changed my life, although it wasn't for decades that I got fired from a radio station in San Jose for having the Sex Pistols on live. Face to face with a snotty little two-bit fascist I embarked on a crusade against fraternities and everything else that O'Connor and his people liked. The next year I was elected Chairman of the Student Activities Board and I controlled a budget-- for over two years-- that made frat rats and O'Connor types want to transfer to other schools. The Fugs were only the barest of beginnings for a concert series that brought band after band after band that did nothing if not make frat rocks and jocks cringe: Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, the Dead, Otis Redding, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, The Who, Muddy Waters, Pink Floyd, The Byrds... They wanted "adult" music so they could buy their girlfriends a corsage and get dressed up to see. I once even excised moleskins out of the student budget (which I think was supposed to prevent jocks who played some sport from getting blisters on their feet).

Frats weren't a big thing when I got to our campus-- and they were an even smaller thing after 4 years of yours truly. The kind of elitism they represented and perpetuated wasn't part of my world vision. Even before I realized Republicans were the enemy of Man, I knew fraternities and sororities were. Or at least I sensed they were; I didn't really know anything about them, other than that Bob O'Connor was their version of a BMOC, something I was determined to supplant (and did). But then, yesterday, I read an unlinkable story in Out magazine, "Brotherly Love," about the secret gay history of American fraternities.

It's the story of Stewart Howe, one of the country's most energetic proponents of fraternities, which he used the way Republican Congressman Mark Foley used the congressional pages dormitory. By the time he graduated from college, Howe had been a member of Kappa Sigma, helped to found Sigma Delta Chi, Phi Eta Sigma and the Skull and Crescent.

And after graduation, he hardly left brotherhood behind, creating several organizations that modernized the fraternity system: the Fraternity Management Company, College Fraternities Magazines Associated, and the Stewart Howe Alumni Service, which is still in existence today. Going from house to house, town to town, he helped fraternities with their fundraising, newsletters, alumni records, and estate planning-- his efforts largely created a framework for the web of Greek houses that own and manage about $3 billion in student housing.

Personally, Howe used that network as a kind of "procurement agency for his sexual appetite and masterminding one of the earliest, most extensive, most sophisticated gay networks in the country... what is fraternity life-- having together, bunking together, showering together, wrestling and horsing around-- other than a kind of ironic homosexuality?" Howe specialized in white boys in the Midwest and had a special fondness for military types and ROTC boys.

Howe was so much of a flagrant racist that, when one of his friends suggests a trip to Trinidad, he warned Howe to tone down his bigotry. Howe was also a cheapskate who loathed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies... Howe died in 1973, the same year the American Psychological Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Stewart Howe was the Patrick McHenry of his day, although there is no indication that Howe, unlike McHenry, was ever involved in a triple murder. See, didn't I say politics would be on hold?