Friday, May 02, 2025

Sammy Hagar

Thanks to C.I. for "Due Process matters (C.I. filling in for Kat)" last night.  I just didn't feel it.  And then I got surprised with Isaiah's doing a ndew THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS comic --  "The Virgin Baby Hogg"    So I was going to try to blog something so I could note Isaiah's new cartoon.  But C.I. said she'd do it and note the comic because she needed to do something on immigration and kept running out of space and time in the snapshots so she'd fill in for me.  

Now here's a great song from the eighties and listen to that vocal, fall in love with it. 





Sammy Hagar and his Best of All Worlds band kicked off their 2025 Las Vegas residency Wednesday night with an 18-song set peppered with Van Halen songs he hadn’t played in decades.

You can see the complete set list and fan-shot videos from the show below.

It was the first of nine shows Hagar’s performing at Dolby Live at Park MGM, using the same band he assembled last summer to celebrate his time in Van Halen: bassist and fellow Van Halen alumni Michael Anthony, guitarist Joe Satriani, drummer Kenny Aronoff and keyboardist Rai Thistlethwayte.


I don't mind disagreeing with conventional wisdom so let me note right at the start, Van Halen was better for me with Sammy.

David Lee Roth was ridiculous -- as his solo career especially demonstrated.  Sammy I Can't Drive 55 Hagar was rock before he joined the band and after he left it.  

Sammy also has a beautiful voice.  I don't think he's ever gotten the credit he deserves for his range, breath control and vocal shadings.  There aren't a lot of really great rock singers when you break down vocal elements and go beyond just 'are they serving the material?' type standards.  Sammy can sing.  If he were doing another genre, it would probably be more obvious.  

5150 is the best Van Halen album of all time.  It's when Sammy joined the band and it's where you get classics like "Best Of Both Worlds" -- nine solid tracks with no filler.  It and the other three studio albums that the band made with Hagar?  They all hit number one on BILLBOARD's album chart.  They are also the only four Van Halen studio albums that ever hit number one. 




Closing with C.I.'s "The Snapshot:"


Thursday, May 1, 2025.  This snapshot is a think piece on the state of our country and the state of the Democratic Party.  Non-thinkers should surf the net to find something else to read.


Let's start with this.



That's tonight.  It's going to be must-see TV.

Last night, Kamala Harris addressed Donald Chump's first 100 days.




If you're not a grown up stop reading right now.  I do not have the time to waste on you.  Emily Prescott (KANSAS CITY STAR) notes:  

A recent Gallup poll has revealed that confidence in Democratic congressional leadership has fallen to a record low of 25%. Meanwhile, confidence in Republican leadership stands at 39%, well above their past low of 24%. The shift comes amid growing dissatisfaction with Democratic leaders amid challenges in resisting President Donald Trump's agenda.
Gallup stated, "Democratic congressional leaders’ rating among their own party faithful has fallen 41 points since last year to their lowest point ever."


Of course it has.  I'm not a journalist for KANSAS CITY STAR so I lack the stupidity required to gas bag over a serious topic.  

In early 2024, I did not talk here about Kamala Harris and Gaza.  I'd already found out that she was calling for a cease-fire within the administration.  She made some public statements around that time.  We did note those.  I could have put what people were telling me was taking place in discussions and who was advocating for what.  And maybe I should have.  But I did take the issue to the community newsletters.  This one?  This serious topic that we're getting into?  I've hinted mainly but that's really been it


How stupid are some of you?  Not talking about community members but am talking about idiots who claim to be Democrats.  I get it, the loudest of you aren't really Democrats.  You're the trash that's always trying to take over our party and always damaging us as a result.  In fact, take your bow for having put Chump back in the White House.

You idiots -- and liars -- that's who I'm talking to right now.

I've stayed silent on a topic, the one we're getting into now, because I honestly don't want to deal with it.  Just like the rest of you, I have to get up every day and fight for this country.  There's no reason I should have to except for the fact that the DSA and SA and Rashida (who is DSA) knew so much better than the rest of us what should happen.  They just knew that it was time to campaign against Kamala.  And how has that worked out for the country?

You need to be thinking about that when you're worshiping pubeless grifter David Hogg who's done nothing with his damn life other than grift (see Ava and my "Media: Baby Hogg is no leader").  He's not a leader.  He wasn't a leader at Parkland.  And he hasn't been one since.  Yet somehow he's banked two million dollars.  

In his long long long 25 years he's apparently gotten wisdom.  Or his dumb and lying groupies think so.

Rashida knew best before the 2024 election.  And her best delivered the White House to Donald Chump.

Our country is in serious danger right now.  We don't need to make things worse.  We need as many Democrats as possible in Congress.  We need it for checks and balances, we need it for impeachment.

Rashida didn't care about the country.  Time and again, we were told by her apologists that "her people" were suffering.

She's an American citizen. Her people are fellow Americans.  She voted twice to impeach Chump.  Her priority should have been "her people" the American people.  Instead, she spat on the Democratic party and this country and worked instead to put Chump back in the White House.

I think we can all agree that end result was not good for the country.

Now the same gamblers want to roll the dice on a plan to primary Dems ahead of the midterms.  You are beyond stupid.


B-b-b-but the polling! B-b-b-but the polling tells us this is the time coz people are unhappy with the Dems!


You stupid fool.  


I wake up every morning wondering if today will be the day Chump goes full on dictator.  I am so thankful that we made it through 100 days -- some of us did, those who didn't die and weren't tossed out of the country -- but I'm not willing to gamble that we can survive past the mid-terms.  I don't even know we can survive until the mid-terms.  That concern comes from actually having read Project 2025 which was too much work for the David Hogg brigade.  They can't actually do the work but, hey, they read a Tweet.

Idiots, I'm not giving you permission to gamble on democracy.  I will fight you every step of the way because I know what happens in a primary. 

Let's go to an earlier David Hogg.  Tom Hayden.  Tom was a grifter who latched on to Jane Fonda and bled her dry of every dime he could.  Abby Hoffman rightly called Tom out but Tom fooled a lot of people -- like David does today.  Using Jane's connections and her money, Tom decided to run for the Senate.  YOUTH!  And no experience.  John Tunney was the incumbent.  A Democrat.  It was 1976.  With Henry Fonda, Linda Ronstadt, Jerry Brown and countless others campaigning and fundraising for Tom, he ran a serious challenge.  Didn't get enough votes in the primary to defeat Tunney.

But Tom did his damage.  Tom left Tunney's reputation as torn up as Tom's own pockmarked face.  

And despite having served six years in the House of Representatives and then six years in the Senate and being the incumbent, Tunney lost the general election to Republican S. I. Hayakawa -- a disaster and then some.

Time and again, we see that happen.  That is what history tells us if we listen and teaches us if we hear.

Haywakwa was able to use the smears that Tom and Jane launched against Tunney in the primary.  Tunney was the incumbent.  12 years in Congress.  Considered a potential presidential candidate in the near future before Tom primaried him.  Then in the primary -- that he still won -- his reputation was slashed to pieces with rumors and lies.  And the Republican was able to use those in the general election and build on them.  


We need to have the power to hold Chump in check in order to save our country.  We're not going to get that with David Hogg's 'plan.'

Back to polling.

Dems are doing bad in Gallup?  

Yeah.  And that's only surprising if you're an idiot -- or a journalist apparently.

Americans are scared of losing our country.


In the aftermath of the contentious 2024 U.S. presidential election, large majorities of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents describe their reaction to Donald Trump’s victory as optimistic (86%), relieved (85%), excited (76%) and proud (72%). In contrast, majorities of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents report feeling afraid (76%), angry (68%) and devastated (61%) about the election’s result.


Get it?  We've been destroyed in terms of hope and morale since the election outcome.

Chris Hayes had Senator Chuck Schumer on his MSNBC show right after Chuck voted in a manner that most of us hated.  Chris tried to get at the why.

Maybe Chuck didn't want to be honest about himself maybe he just didn't want to address the topic like I don't want to.

The first 100 days are over.  They were bad and no one knew how bad they were going to be.  One of our biggest concerns was the Supreme Court would just rubber stamp Chump.  They've shown a small indication that this might not be the case.  What issue do we carry to the Court?

That was a serious concern among leadership in Congress.  

I wouldn't have voted how Chuck voted.  But Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski was not the only one who was nervous.  

The reality is that the Democrats in Congress had very little power unless they wanted to revisit the days of the late Senator Mike Gravel.  For some, Cory Booker's recent filibuster on the Senate floor did revisit that past.  

The protests were over after the election or did you miss that?  And the Dems had no power in Congress.  It was a very dark time and I'm not screaming at Republican Lisa for what she did and how she voted.  I'm certainly not going to attack my own party for fear in the first months.  

And this isn't a justification.  This is a serious look at what was going on and the time we were in.

Each day, we have to get up and fight -- those of us who are fighting.

I'm fortunate, I know.  I've got people offline who will protect me.  That just means I have to hit all the harder when calling out Chump.  But, at the same time, keep things as calm as possible so I'm not creating a panic.

If Chuck had been honest in the interview with Chris Hayes, he would've explained his fears, he would have spoken of them.  And how many in leadership were arguing over whether they pushed right back immediately or waited for the issues that would go beyond partisanship and be more likely to have support among We The People and within the legal system.

Rachel Maddow got honest this week about what she fears is still around the corner and due to emerge.  Thanks to pushback -- a huge pushback -- from people around the country, there are reasons to hope.  And those of us participating in those actions should stiffen the spines of all Democrats (and hopefully some Republicans) in Congress.  We The People are not going to roll over.  We're also not going to 'protest' via BLUESKY or Twitter.  We're out there in the streets and our numbers will only increase.

And if Chump tries to assault us?  That's a valid fear.  The reason I'm participating is I know if he assaults us, he immediately loses everything.  The American people will not put up with that.  It will only increase the protests and the volume of people participating in the protests.

In a functioning country, that would mean we could all breathe.

But we're not in a functioning country.  Chump Land, by its very nature, is dysfunctional.  

Every now and then, an e-mail comes in (I've noted this here twice already this year) about how I need to get "your people" in line and get them out at protests.

No, I don't.

I'm not good with people telling me what to do to begin with.  As any director who's ever tried to give me line readings can tell you.  But, more to the point, I am tempted to sit on the sidelines myself.  I have the least to risk so I can't sit on the sidelines.  But I'm not telling any other Black woman or any Black man, "You go to protests!"  Our skin makes us the target at any protest.  We know that.  It's one of the reasons that, as a people, we don't care for the DSA.  We've long grasped how they use us at protests.  We have the wounds and bruises that document how they use us.  

There's also the issue of disrespect.

"Vote like a Black woman!"  Laura Flanders was the first Socialist liar I heard mouth that one.  And then it spread and spread and it was a slogan.  But it was just words.  Mere words.  For White people in the Democratic Party or pretending to be in the Democratic Party (Norman Solomon and his fake ass Uncommitted that Rashida fronted for him), it was just words.

Black women voted for Kamala. 

We supported her.

And we were attacked for it.

Let's note three videos about that.








And the one below.  A note of caution, when we first posted this, the title and the woman speaking at the top led some to not stream all the way through and complain that the video is an attack on Black people.  No, it's not.  You need to get past that hateful woman because she's being called out for her lies and for her attacks on Black people.  The content creator chose to show you her attacks before commenting on her and others. 






To this day, while White leftists (not Democrats) whine that Black women are not at the protests in large numbers like we have been in the past, these same White leftists don't want to deal with the racism that targeted us for months and months in the lead up to the election.  We were attacked.  We were disrespected.  We were the targets of racism.


So, no, I'm not going to say to any Black woman, "Oh, get over it!"  

How can we get over what White YOUTUBERS refuse to acknowledge took place?

You David Hogg fools are idiots.

That's why you glom on him -- a White boy who has accomplished nothing.  

Well, he was born White and that seems to be enough for you.

You misread what happened, you misread the response.

As I skip through BLUESKY blocking and muting the idiots backing Baby Hogg, I come across so many lies.

Like the fool who took the time to type how great it was that David Hogg was in charge of the DNC due to being elected to head it.

David Hogg is not the head of the DNC.  He is one of five vice chairs.  That's all he is.  And he might not even be that since his White skin appears to have allowed him to jump over rules in place.

But one lie they especially love to tell is that David can bring young men back to the party.

What?

David is an anti-gun freak.  That's not where the Democratic Party stands on guns -- not where the membership is.  That's especially not where young male members are.  

Let's also note that Chump's turning away young men all on his own.  Andrew Stanton (NEWSWEEK) reports:

President Donald Trump's approval rating with Republican college students has plummeted during the first 100 days of his second term in office, a Newsweek/CollegePulse poll found.

[. . .]

His approval rating among college students has particularly dropped, according to the poll. Trump made some inroads with younger Americans in last year's presidential race, and some polls suggest the youth is more Republican than in the past. Others show his support crumbling among the youngest voters.

Why did he have the support?

Again, reporters apparently don't do context.

9/11.

No, I'm not joking.  Susan Faludi -- and only Susan -- tried to address this seriously in real time with her book   The media that can't do context can sell narrative.  And they did so following 9/11.  Read Susan's THE TERROR DREAM: FEAR AND FANTASY IN POST-9/11 AMERICA and grasp that this is the first election many of those born in the never-ending revisionary media following 9/11 which created a backlash.  These are the boys that were produced from that.  Born in anger and feeling scared.  Those boys poisoned by the same media revisionary nonsense that allowed the Iraq War to be sold.

Will they work their way over to the Democratic Party?  Maybe, maybe not.

But David Hogg is not going to pull them over.  He can't speak to them.  They don't relate to him.  First off, they are predisposed to believe in gun ownership.  Secondly, they have real concerns about masculinity and David's rather fey, if you haven't noticed.  Third, they are most disgusted by fakes.  And David's got that reputation.  They turned to Chump because he was so ridiculous they saw him as genuine. This can all be traced -- write the book, I don't care to -- to what the media sold the country -- and not even after 9/11, it really started on the day of 9/11.  

Women were disappeared.  Women who were police officers and fire fighters and EMTs and so many other jobs.  It was instead, from the cowed and weakened media, nothing but man, man, MAN!

And man wasn't enough as we quickly found out as the media ran to enforce strict gender roles.  Mark Bingham?

A hero on 9/11.  At the start.  And then that receded because, horror!, it was learned he was gay.  So Mark got disappeared in the narrative.  (Credit to John McCain for acknowledging Mark as a hero when the media had already moved to forget him.  I'm not joking.  That's the one nice thing I can say about McCain.) 

9/11 was a national tragedy that cost so many lives.  It was a media tragedy that provided a revisionary take on our country.  Children raised in fear have a limited number of predictable outcomes but we don't talk about that.  We couldn't even talk seriously about Susan Faludi's very important book, THE TERROR DREAM.  Go read those reviews and grasp how hostile they were to Susan, to her book, to the subject she was addressing and the questions she was raising.

A fey poof isn't really going to appeal to them so stop thinking David's your in with those conservative boys.  He's not.  He's not talking about what they tune into podcasts for.  He is not of that group and he cannot speak to that group.

On BLUESKY, it is so hilarious to see all these White people insisting David Hogg is an answer and to notice that these same White people ignore the attacks on Black women that took place -- some ignore those attacks because they were part of the group that attacked Black women.

It's really interesting to watch these people insist that we must have David Hogg to get young voters but these people have no concern that Black women might walk.  And we might.  Every day I think I'm at my breaking point as we get insulted, attacked, lied to, gaslighted, etc etc.

Don't think the Democratic Party could lose Black voters?  Gallup back in February:

Of particular note,

The Democratic Party's wide lead over Republicans in Black Americans’ party preferences has shrunk by nearly 20 points over the past three years.
Democrats' leads among Hispanic adults and adults aged 18 to 29 have slid nearly as much, resulting in Democrats' holding only a modest edge among both groups.
Whereas Democrats were at parity with Republicans among men as recently as 2009, and among non-college-educated adults as recently as 2019, they are now in the red with both groups.
Only partially offsetting these trends, the Democratic Party has gained adherents long term among college-educated Americans -- those with postgraduate education and those with a college degree only.


So how about you David Hogg fools stop obsessing over a 25-year-old kid?  Aren't you embarrassed?  Don't you feel like some 50 year old perv watching RIVERDALE?  You should, you really should.

There are very important issues to address and whether or not David Hogg gave you a nocturnal emission really doesn't qualify -- not as an issue, not as important.

Let me introduce you to a little more reality.  Bob Somerby (THE DAILY HOWLER) used to point it out all the time.  I'd imagine he still does.  I'm lefter than left.  And I used to get so ticked at his defense of this or that centrist Dem and how they were serving their constituents.  But he's correct and it took hitting the road in 2003 to speak out against the Iraq War for me to really get this point.  The centrist to you Dem from Genericville may be, for their community, a flaming liberal.  Not all areas of the country are as liberal as the bubbles some of us live in.  I lived in a bubble.  I don't pretend otherwise now.  I didn't realize it at the time.  It took speaking around the country to drive home how right Bob Somerby was about this.  So the Dem you hate?  If that hate truly translates to a need for them to be primaried?  Do their constituents feel that way?  


In the wake of the 2024 election and Donald Trump’s inauguration for a second term as president, a plurality of Democrats would like their party to become more moderate, while a similar plurality of Republicans favor the status quo for their party.

Both party groups’ preferences have shifted significantly since 2021, at the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, the last time Gallup measured opinions on this question. Support for a more moderate Democratic Party among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents has grown by 11 percentage points, to 45%, since 2021. At the same time, Democrats’ and leaners’ desire for a more liberal party has declined five points, to 29%, and preferences for no change in party ideology have fallen nine points, to 22%.


Doesn't really fit into the David Hogg fan club, does it?

I guess you can scream and yell.  I guess you can say the pollsters are lying!  DSA really is just MAGA (especially the SA branch) anyway so why not act like Donald Chump when you don't like the results of a poll.  Just deny the results, ignore the results and scream that it's a lie.

Let me know how that denial works out for you.


I don't have time for your crazy and the country can't afford it.  We have got to take the House in the midterms.  That has to be the focus.  Our country is at stake, our democracy is at stake.

There are dozens of Dems in Congress that I would like to see out.  Want to primary them with a Dem president in office -- or even a rational Republican -- I'll gladly donate to your organization for that.  I donated big to Ned Lamont when he challenged Joe Lieberman.  Do we remember, though, how that worked out?  Ned won the primary.  He was the Dem nominee.  And Joe Lieberman ran as an independent and kept the Senate seat.  Again, history does not speak well of Hogg's sketch that he's attempting to pass off as a plan.


But where we are now is because so many of you f**ked around.  That's why Chump's in the White House.  Kamala was a god send.  It was clear that Joe couldn't make it through a campaign.  (And we, in fact, saw that in his limited campaigning for Kamala.)  We were given a fresh start, a do over.  And we squandered it.  We let liars like Amy Goodman bring on one Democrat after another for three months, one Democrat after another that trashed Kamala.  That created and continued the narrative that 'even Democrats aren't excited about Kamala.'  Of course, Amy did that by lying to her audience.  These were Socialists from DSA and she didn't identify them as such.  They were also part of Uncommitted, another detail she elected to omit.  Amy can be a liar as we discovered long, long ago.  She pulled that crap in 2008 as well.  If you think she cares as immigrants are being deported now, you're lying to yourself.  The time to show that you cared was in the lead up to the election and immigration really didn't concern Amy except when she could tell everyone that Kamala would be worse on it then Donald.  A functioning left would have run that grifter off of PACIFICA. If you're late to the party on that, see Ava and my "Media: How Amy Goodman harmed immigrants and helped elect Chump" and my "2024: The Year of Betrayal From Inside The Left."

Their goal, DSA, was to take over the party.  They withheld their votes and proved their power!  They didn't prove anything except that they can't be trusted.  

Those of us who are people of color or who are LGBTQ+ or are immigrants or children of immigrants or on a fixed income or somehow at risk?  You rolled the dice for us from your comfortable and privileged White lives.  You rolled the dice.  We didn't get to roll the dice.  We didn't even get to blow on the dice before you rolled.  You took it upon yourself to say, "Oh, what's the worst that can happen?"

And for you Karens -- male and female -- life's pretty much the same.  For the rest of us?  You screwed us over.  You didn't know what you were doing.  You put us at risk and you put our country at risk.

You need to stop thinking you're smart or that the 25 year old still getting used to his pubes is a genius.

We can't afford you.  The country can't afford you.  


You attacked Kamala and us.  And then, after the election, you started saying that we all needed to pull together. 

That needed to happen before the election.  But you didn't want to pull together with us.

Now you're again preaching the nonsense of pull together and get behind Hogg!

You tried to divide the party ahead of the 2024 election and didn't care about pulling together then.

Now you're trying to divide the party before the midterm and those that don't want to go along with your change are the bad guys?  

David Hogg is a spoiled brat.  His followers are proving to be exactly the same.

I do not practice situational ethics.  If you are a member of the DNC board, you are not allowed to push for incumbents to be primaried.  That goes against every ethical code in the world.  

But if you had ethics, you would have held Amy Goodman accountable for stealing DEMOCRACY NOW! from the people who actually created it and you would have held her accountable for the sweet heart deal corrupt Communist Leslie Cagan railroaded through for Amy that has given her millions for a program that PACIFICA RADIO doesn't even own despite the millions they've paid Amy.  And PACIFICA created the program and funded it, not Amy.  If you had ethics, you'd be demanding that the contract with Amy be broken immediately and that would provide a huge influx of money to the PACIFICA RADIO network.

But you aren't about helping people.  You're too simple for that and that's why you never, ever get anywhere.  You fall in love with hucksters and follow them blindly while lying to yourself that their actions and your actions are helping the rest of us.

The 2026 midterms are not the time to play or the time to test your ahistorical hypotheses. 

The stakes are far too high.  

And I'm not THE NATION magazine.  I wasn't an idiot like Katrina vanden Heuvel saying this or that election of the '00s was 'the torture election' and the country was going under if a Democrat didn't win.  A Dem didn't win.  The country did not go under.  I don't operate out of fear.  I deal in reality.  And we've never been where we are as a country before in my lifetime.  Chump is a specific threat.   If you want to pull together, this is the time and this is the reason.  

In the video at the top of Kamala speaking last night, she notes, "The one check, the one balance, the one power that must not fail is the voice of the people."


That's all we have between now and the mid-terms.  Right now we're using that power.  Right now it's working.  Right now it's giving us hope and it's giving our leaders hope.  


I don't have faith that it's enough to carry us through four years.  I think we win the House in the midterms or we lose democracy.   The stakes really are that high.  This is not time for a pet issue.  This is time to focus on getting Democrats elected to the House.  20 million dollars spent on primarying Democratic incumbents is not only a waste of money, its built on an ahistorical premise.

I don't have time for your crazy or your petty these days.  Our nation is at risk.  In 2024, our focus should have been getting Kamala into the White House.  Too many of you f**ked around and f**ked us all over  It can't happen during the 2026 midterms.


 Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "The Virgin Baby Hogg" went up last night.  The following sites updated:

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